What role does 'vanity' play in the lives of 21st century subjects? Exploring a range of fields including public health, information technology, media studies and feminist approaches to the body and beauty, this book offers a broad analysis of how 'vanity' shapes contemporary Western societies and its understandings of selfhood.

With the advent of digital devices and software, self-tracking practices have gained new adherents and have spread into a wide array of social domains. The Quantified Self movement has emerged to promote 'self-knowledge through numbers'. In this groundbreaking book Deborah Lupton critically analyses the social, cultural and political dimensions of contemporary self-tracking and identifies the concepts of selfhood and human embodiment and the value of the data that underpin them. The book incorporates discussion of the consolations and frustrations of self-tracking, as well as about the proliferating ways in which people's personal data are now used beyond their private rationales. Lupton outlines how the information that is generated through self-tracking is taken up and repurposed for commercial, governmental, managerial and research purposes. In the relationship between personal data practices and big data politics, the implications of self-tracking are becoming ever more crucial.

An Entrepreneur Best Book of the Year Facebook makes us lonely. Selfies breed narcissism. On Twitter, hostility reigns. Pundits and psychologists warn that digital technologies substantially alter our emotional states, but in this lively investigation of changing feelings about technology, we learn that the gadgets we use don’t just affect how we feel—they can profoundly change our sense of self. When we say we’re bored, we don’t mean the same thing as a Victorian dandy. Could it be that political punditry has helped shape a new kind of anger? Luke Fernandez and Susan Matt take us back in time to consider how our feelings of loneliness, boredom, vanity, and anger have evolved in tandem with new technologies. “Technologies have been shaping [our] emotional culture for more than a century, argue computer scientist Luke Fernandez and historian Susan Matt in this original study. Marshalling archival sources and interviews, they trace how norms (say, around loneliness) have shifted with technological change.” —Nature “A powerful story of how new forms of technology are continually integrated into the human experience.” —Publishers Weekly

In the age of digital advancement, technology has become an integral part of our lives, significantly influencing our emotions and psychological well-being. "Navigating the Emotional Impact of Technology" delves into the intricate relationship between humans and technology, exploring how our increasing reliance on digital devices and platforms affects our emotional experiences. The book takes readers on a thought-provoking journey, examining the multifaceted ways in which technology shapes our emotions. Drawing on personal anecdotes, expert insights, and extensive research, it unravels the complexities of this digital landscape and offers strategies to navigate its emotional impact effectively.

From the driveway mechanic to the backyard gardener, many diverse people are "doing it themselves" by building or repairing the stuff of their daily lives without the aid of experts. Do It Yourself uses Habermas’s colonization of the lifeworld as a frame and mobilizes Marx’s concepts of alienation and mystification to examine how social behaviors can be a conscious reply to a complex and fast-moving world, a nostalgia for simpler times past, or a just an economic impulse. Each main chapter is anchored by an extended empirical example: back-to-the-land, home-schooling, and self-government.

This book explores the controversial social media practices engaged in by girls and young women, including sexual self-representations on social network sites, sexting, and self-harm vlogs. Informed by feminist media and cultural studies, Dobson delves beyond alarmist accounts to ask what it is we really fear about these practices.

In the West, a specific ideal for female genitalia has emerged: one of absence, a "clean slit," attained through the removal of pubic hair and, increasingly, through female genital cosmetic surgery known as FGCS. In The Perfect Vagina: Cosmetic Surgery in the Twenty-First Century, Lindy McDougall provides an ethnographic account of women who choose FGCS in Australia and the physicians who perform these procedures, both in Australia and globally, while also examining the environment in which surgeons and women come together. Physicians have a vested interest in establishing this surgery as valid medical intervention, despite majority medical opinion explicitly acknowledging that a wide range of genital variation is normal. McDougall offers a nuanced picture of why and how these procedures are performed and draws parallels between FGCS and anthropological discussions of female genital circumcision (cutting). Using the neologism biomagical, she argues that cosmetic surgery functions as both ritual and sacrifice due to its promise of transformation while simultaneously submitting the body to the risks and pain of surgery, thus exposing biomedicine as an increasingly cultural and commercial pursuit. The Perfect Vagina highlights the complexities involved with FGCS, its role in Western beauty culture, and the creation and control of body image in countries where self-care is valorized and medicine is increasingly harnessed for enhancement as well as health.

Diary research methods are distinct in the qualitative canon for their mode of data collection. This book discusses diary research history, design, data collection, data analysis, composing the final report, evaluation, and ethics.

This edited collection addresses intimate partner violence, risk and security as global issues. Although intimate partner violence, risk and security are intimately connected they are rarely considered in tandem in the context of global security. Yet, intimate partner violence causes widespread physical, sexual and/or psychological harm. It is the most common type of violence against women internationally and is estimated to affect 30 per cent of women worldwide. Intimate partner violence has received significant attention in recent years, animating political debate, policy and law reform as well as scholarly attention. In bringing together a range of international experts, this edited collection challenges status quo understandings of risk and questions how we can reposition the risk of IPV, and particularly the risk of IPH, as a critical site of global and national security. It brings together contributions from a range of disciplines and international jurisdictions, including from Australia and New Zealand, United Kingdom, Europe, United States, North America, Brazil and South Africa. The contributions here urge us to think about perpetrators in more nuanced and sophisticated ways with chapters pointing to the structural and social factors that facilitate and sustain violence against women and IPV. Contributors point out that states not only exacerbate the structural conditions producing the risks of violence, but directly coerce and control women as both citizens and non-citizens. States too should be understood as collaborators and facilitators of intimate partner violence. Effective action against intimate partner violence requires sustained responses at the global, state and local levels to end gender inequality. Critical to this end are environmental issues, poverty and the divisions, often along ‘race’ and ethnic lines, underpinning other dimensions of social and economic inequality.

This book presents recent sociological research investigating the intersection of technology, human sexuality, and health. Rapid advances within biomedical, biomechanical, and biodigital domains have prompted scholarly exploration into the ways these technologies are being integrated into, or are reshaping, human sexual and intimate practices and the resulting health implications. Scholarship has also focused on the potential for new technologies to extend the imagined, and real, possibilities for enhancing human sexual experiences. The chapters in this book delve into the interconnected themes of sex, health, bodies, and risk in relation to emerging technologies. They illuminate the intricate interplay between human bodies, sexual practices and technologies, spotlight how novel technologies and human practices collaboratively shape or remodel cultures of sex and intimacy, and critically interrogate the discourses of risk and pleasure that frame our understanding of technology and sex. Researchers within the fields of sociology, technology studies, human sexuality, and health, as well as educators and professionals seeking a comprehensive understanding of how people engage with technologies in their intimate relationships and sex lives, will find this collection engaging and informative. Additionally, individuals interested in the cultural, societal, and ethical implications of emerging technologies in relation to sexual experiences and health will also benefit from the insights presented in this volume. The chapters in this book were originally published in several journals, including Health Sociology Review, Journal of Gender Studies, and Information & Communications Technology Law.