Departmental news

Edited by Charlotte Spear and Madeleine Sinclair (Warwick) January 2025

The twenty-first century has been deemed the “Age of Crisis”. We are witnessing the catastrophic unfolding of environmental crisis, financial crisis, pandemic and conflict. But are we to understand these crises as new phenomena? Is their seemingly simultaneous existence purely coincidental? Or rather do they instead form part of a singular, historically produced, unfolding crisis, which only today has reached a generalised consciousness? And perhaps most urgently, how far can we separate the crises of human experience from those exacted upon the land?

The chapters collected in Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty-First Century Cultural Production: Territorial Bodies deploy the framework of “Territorial Bodies” to address urgent social, ecological and political challenges. Examining themes such as (inter)national bodily governance, racialised bodies, eco-feminist movements, spatial justice and bodily displacement, this collection provides a deeper analysis of the interconnected forms of violence perpetrated against marginalised human and non-human bodies, taking this combined violence as the defining feature of contemporary crisis.

Read our latest Annual Report 2022/23

Warwick Series in the Humanities - Literature and Event: Twenty-First Century Reformulations edited by Mantra Mukim and Derek Attridge

If "event" is a proper name we reserve for monumental changes, crises, transitions and ruptures that are by their very nature unnameable or unthinkable, then this volume is an attempt to set up an encounter between such eventhood as it comes to have a bearing on literary works and the work of reading literature.

As the event continues to provide a valuable analytical paradigm for work undertaken within the newer subdisciplines of literary and critical theory, including close reading, bio- politics, world literature, and eco- criticism, this volume makes a concerted effort to update the scholarship in this area and foreground the recent resurgence of interest in the concept. The book provides both a retrospective appraisal of the significance of events to literary studies and the literary humanities, as well as contemporary and prospective appraisals of the same, and thus would appeal scholars and instructors in the areas of literary theory, comparative literature and philosophical aesthetics alike.

Along with a specialist focus on thinkers such as Derrida, Badiou, Deleuze and Malabou, the essays in this volume read a wide corpus of literature ranging from Han Kang, Homer, Renee Gladman, Proust and Flaubert to Yoruba ideophones, Browning, Anne Carson, Jenichiro Oyabe and Ben Lerner.

Stella Chatzitheochari's research on barriers to higher education for young people with disabilities in England has been featured in the Guardian newspaper today.

• Read Frances Ryan's Guardian article, 'A few more Oxbridge places for disadvantaged children is just tinkering'
• Hear about the research in more detail in the University's press release, '

  New insights into disabled young people who 'succeed but don't proceed' at school'

• Check out the policy briefing, 'CHILDHOOD DISABILITY & EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT THE IMPACT OF PARENTAL EXPECTATIONS AND BULLYING'
• Read the article by Stella Chatzitheochari and Lucinda Platt in the British Journal of Sociology, 'Disability differentials in educational attainment in England: primary and secondary effects'

We are very pleased to announce that Emeritus Professor Jim Beckford's new book is now available (both in hardback and e-book format):

Sarah Harvey, Silke Steidinger and James A. Beckford (eds) New Religious Movements and Counselling: Academic, Professional and Personal Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2018, xiii + 248pp.

ISBN: 978-1-4724-7271-7

This week Dr Hila Zaban published an article in Haaretz (an Israeli newspaper which is equivalent to The Guardian) following her current research on British Jews.

The article was published in Hebrew first and also in the English edition available below. 

Hila has also been invited to discuss the topic on an Israeli TV show two weeks from now.

• Download the article (PDF)

Our colleague Jim Beckford has been awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. Jim received the Award during a ceremony at its annual meeting in Montréal in August.

Congratulations to Jim. It is good to see his work recognised in such a way

Dr Ana Chamberlen has been awarded the article prize for the Women, Crime and Criminal Justice section of the British Society of Criminology. She will receive the award in person in Sheffield next week at the BSC Annual Conference www.bsc2017.org.uk/

The prize winning article is: Chamberlen, A. (2016) ‘Embodying Prison Pain: Women's' self-injury practices in prison and the emotions of punishment’, Theoretical Criminology 20(2), pp 205-219.

The SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence is awarded annually to one paper in each of the BSA’s four prestigious journals:  Cultural Sociology  Sociological Research Online  Sociology  Work, Employment and Society

Dr Lucy Mayblin's winning article

‘Other’ Posts in ‘Other’ Places: Poland through a Postcolonial Lens? (co-authored with Aneta Piekut and Gill Valentine) available http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0038038514556796

was announced at the BSA conference in Manchester in April.

The SAGE award panel commented: While all of the shortlisted articles exhibited significant levels ...

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