Body & Society
Body & Society has from its inception in March 1995 as a companion journal to Theory, Culture & Society, pioneered and shaped the field of body-studies. It has been committed to theoretical openness characterized by the publication of a wide range of critical approaches to the body, alongside the encouragement and development of innovative work that contains a trans-disciplinary focus.
The disciplines reflected in the journal have included anthropology, art history, communications, cultural history, cultural studies, environmental studies, feminism, film studies, health studies, leisure studies, medical history, philosophy, psychology, religious studies, science studies, sociology and sport studies. The journal has also sought to examine a wide range of issues which have arisen from the writings of theorists such as: Baudrillard, Bergson, Bourdieu, Butler, Cixous, Deleuze, Douglas, Elias, Ettinger, Foucault, Haraway, Kristeva, Latour, Mauss, Merleau-Ponty, and Simondon.
Emergent Themes
In recent years studies of the body and embodiment have become increasingly central to discussions of technologies, film, media practices, communication, performance, art, regeneration, architecture, labour, dance, affect and life. These are some of the emergent objects, practices and themes that have been enriched by a turn to the body and embodiment, and which are reflected in the emergence of a huge and growing body-studies literature.
Body & Society has become the key journal for publishing work related to the trans-disciplinary field of body-studies. There is a renewed interest in life and affect across the social sciences and humanities. The paradigms of life and affect break down the distinction between humans and other life forms, and is echoed in debates across the biological and 'environmental' sciences. This is a new post-humanism that examines our communality with other forms of creaturely life and companion species, and the need for a non-anthropocentric ethics. The body that organizes such diverse practices and areas of experience is a body that is open, relational, human and non-human, material, indeterminate, immaterial, multiple, sentient and processual. These issues also relate to a wide array of debates pertinent not only to science and technology, but also to philosophy and social theory. The journal therefore addresses issues such as: body image, the self, ageing, consumer culture, the body as a social agent, the body as a sign and symbol, affectivity and emotions, sport, gender, sexuality, and the history of the body.
Editorial Team
Mike Featherstone
Editor-in-Chief
Mike Featherstone is a Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has been the founding editor of Theory, Culture & Society since its establishment in 1982 at Teesside University, and was founding co-editor of Body & Society in 1995, becoming editor-in chief in 2008. He is also the founding editor of the Theory, Culture & Society Book Series which started in 1990.
He is the author of Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (1991, second edition 2007) and Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity (1995). Co-author of Surviving Middle Age (1982). Editor of Postmodernism (1988), Global Culture (1990), Georg Simmel (1991) Cultural Theory and Cultural Change (1992), Love and Eroticism (1999), Body Modification (2000). Co-editor of The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory (1991), Global Modernities (1995), Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment (1995), Images of Ageing (1995), Simmel on Culture (1997), Spaces of Culture (1999) and Recognition and Difference (2002), Automobilities (2005), Problematizing Global Knowledge (2006).
He is also the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on social and cultural theory, consumer and global culture, ageing and the body. His books and articles have been translated into sixteen languages. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism has been translated into Chinese, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, Spanish and Turkish. Undoing Culture has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian and Portuguese. Other books and articles have been translated into Bulgarian, Croatian, French, German, Hungarian and Ukrainian. He has spent time as a visiting professor in Barcelona, Geneva, Kyoto, Recife, São Paulo, Singapore, Tokyo and Vancouver.
Lisa Blackman
Editor
Lisa Blackman became Editor of Body & Society in 2008, and has been pioneering and developing the area of body-studies at the Department of Media, Communications & Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, since 1994. Her current research is in the area of subjectivity, affect and bodies.
Her work in the area of embodiment and voice-hearing has been recognised and commended for its innovative approach to mental health research and it has been acclaimed by the Hearing Voices Network, Intervoice, and has been taken up in professional psychiatric contexts, as well as making a substantive contribution to the fields of critical psychology and body-studies. Her current research in the area of subjectivity, affect and bodies has been published in Theory, Culture & Society as well as other esteemed journals, and has been consolidated in a book published in the TCS Book Series in 2012, Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation. She has published four other books: Hearing Voices: Embodiment and Experience (2001, Free Association Books); Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies (2001, Palgrave co-authored with Valerie Walkerdine) and The Body: The Key Concepts (2008, Berg); Haunted Data: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science (Bloomsbury, 2019). The second edition of The Body will be published by Routledge in 2021.
Tomoko Tamari
Managing Editor
Dr. Tomoko Tamari is a senior lecturer in the Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths, University of London. She is Managing Editor of Body & Society. Her long-standing research interests focus on consumer culture in Japan and Japanese new women, which will be discussed in her forthcoming book entitled, Women and Consumer Culture: the Department Store, Modernity and Everyday Life in Early Twentieth Century Japan (Routledge). She has recently published ‘Metabolism: Utopian Urbanism and the Japanese Modern Architecture Movement’ in Theory Culture & Society (2016). ‘Body Image and Prosthetic Aesthetics’ in Body & Society (2017). She is currently working in the following areas: Body image and disability; human perception and the moving image; probiotics and immunity; Olympic culture and cities.
Editorial Board
Lisa Blackman (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Roger Burrows (Newcastle University)
Patricia T. Clough (City University of New York)
Nick Crossley (University of Manchester)
Mike Featherstone (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Chris Shilling (University of Kent)
Associate Editors
Gary L. Albrecht (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Rosi Braidotti (State University of Utrecht)
Robin Bunton (University of York)
Pasi Falk (University of Helsinki)
Arthur Frank (University of Calgary)
Sarah Franklin (University of Cambridge)
Ann Game (University of New South Wales, Sydney)
Uta Gerhardt (University of Heidelberg)
Rick Gruneau (Simon Fraser University, British Columbia)
David Le Breton (University of Strasbourg)
Mica Nava (University of East London)
Elspeth Probyn (University of Sydney)
Kevin Robins (Independent Researcher, Istanbul)
Chris Rojek (City, University of London)
Nancy Scheper-Hughes (University of California, Berkeley)
Michael Shapiro (University of Hawaii at Manoa)
Richard Shusterman (Florida Atlantic University)
Meenakshi Thapan (University of Delhi)
Estella Tincknell (University of the West of England)
Loïc Wacquant (University of California, Berkeley)