Seasonal Sociology

Seasonal Sociology offers an engrossing and lively introduction to sociology through the seasons, examining the sociality of consumption practices, leisure activities, work, religious traditions, schooling, celebrations and holidays.

Life in Canada is marked, celebrated, enjoyed, and dreaded in ways that respond specifically to the seasons. Sociological thinking allows people to ask questions about things that may otherwise be taken for granted. Thinking about the seasons sociologically opens up a unique perspective for studying and understanding social life. Each chapter in this collection approaches the seasons and the passage of time as a way to explore issues of sociological interest. The authors use seasonality as a device that can bridge, in fascinating ways, small-scale interpersonal interactions and large formal institutional structures. These contemporary, Canadian case studies are wide-ranging and include analyses of pumpkin spice lattes, policing in schools, law and colonialism, summer cottages, seasonal affective disorder, New Year’s resolutions, Vaisakhi celebrations, and more. Seasonal Sociology offers provocative new ways of thinking about the nature of our collective lives.

The second edition of this award-winning introduction to sociology has been substantially revised throughout, including improved connections between the discussion of millennials and Mills s concept of the sociological imagination."

This highly original and compelling book offers an introduction to the art and science of social inquiry, including the theoretical and methodological frameworks that support that inquiry. The new edition offers coverage of post-modernism and Indigenous ways of knowing, as well as a discussion of the research process and how to communicate arguments effectively. The result is a book that blends the best of earlier editions with updates that provide a strong foundation in critical thinking, rooted in the social sciences but relevant across disciplines.

Many of our current social problems have been attributed to the breakdown or loss of community as a place and to the fragmentation of connections due to an extreme value of individualism in the Western world, particularly in the United States. Not all scholars and researchers agree that individualism and technology are the primary culprits in the loss of community as it existed in the middle decade of the 20th century. Nonetheless, people exist in groups, and connections are vital to their existence and in the daily performance of activities. The second edition of the Sociology of Community Connections will identify and help students understand community connectedness in the present and future.

Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo is one of the first books in anthropology to adopt a sociological approach to the analysis of a single society. Mauss links elements of anthropology and human geography, arguing that geographical factors should be considered in relation to a social context in all its complexity. The work is an illuminating source on the Eskimo and a proto-type of what an anthropologist should do with ethnographic data and exerted considerable influence on the development of social anthropology. English translation first published in 1979.

Communities worldwide are critically re-examining their seasonal cultures and calendars. As cultural frameworks, seasons have long patterned community life and provided repertoires for living by annual rhythms. In a chaotic world, the seasons - winter, the monsoon and so on - can feel like stable cultural landmarks for reckoning time and orienting our communities. Seasons are rooted in our pasts and reproduced in our present. They act as schemes for synchronising community activities and professional practices, and as symbol systems for interpreting what happens in the world. But on closer inspection, seasons can be unstable and unreliable. Their meanings can change over time. Seasonal cultures evolve with environments and communities' worldviews, values, technologies and practices, affecting how people perceive seasonal patterns and behave accordingly. Calendars are contested, especially now. Communities today find themselves in a moment of accelerated and intersecting changes - from climate to social, political, and technological - that are destabilizing seasonal cultures. How they reorient themselves to shifting patterns may affect whether seasonal rhythms serve as resources, or lead people down maladaptive pathways. A focus on seasonal cultures builds on multi-disciplinary work. The social sciences, from anthropology to sociology, have long studied how seasons order people's sense of time, social life, relationship to the environment, and politics. In the humanities, seasons play an important role in literature, art, archaeology and history. This book advances scholarship in these fields, and enriches it with extrascientific insights from practice, to open up exiting new directions in climate adaptation.

This collection explores sociological analyses of home in Canada, drawing upon studies of family, urban and rural communities, migration and immigration, and other areas to discuss the idea of “home.” This volume, organized across three parts, moves from the micro-level of personal homemaking, to the meso-level of neighbourhood community, to the macro-level of political ecology. The contributors, both new and established scholars, draw upon a plurality of standpoints, including gendered, class-based, racialized, and Indigenous voices. It is the first Canadian collection of readings on the sociology of home.