Daniel Nehring

Swansea University | SWAN · Department of Criminology Sociology and Social Policy

Drawing on affect theory and research on academic capitalism, this book examines the contemporary crisis of universities. Moving through 11 international and comparative case studies, it explores diverse features of contemporary academic life, from the coloniality of academic capitalism to performance management and the experience of being performa...

This book offers an analysis and critical interrogation of the contemporary crisis of higher education. On the one hand, this crisis manifests itself in the partial unmaking of the institutional form of the university that emerged from European medieval centres of scholarship, their globalisation through Western imperialism, and the temporary succe...

Self-optimisation has arguably become a central socio-cultural trend in contemporary Western societies. The imperative to optimise our ways of thinking, feeling and interacting with others features prominently in public discourse, and a range of commercial products and services are available to assist us in our quest to become the best version of o...

In this article, we critically interrogate the relationship between the post-political turn and the psychologisation of social life. It has long been argued that psychologisation, in the form the popularisation of psychotherapeutic discourses and practices and their usage across a range of non-specialist institutional domains, contributes to de-pol...

In this intervention, we discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic has reconfigured transnational mobilities, connections, and solidarities, which reveals the fragility of transnationalism predicated on cosmopolitan ethics but rooted in nation-level politics. We show that as the pandemic severely disrupted transnational (infra)structures predicated on stat...

This article charts the transformation, between 1997 and 2021, of the family visa and immigration permit infrastructure from a public into a commercial service in the United Kingdom (UK). In doing so, it reveals a process of state-market hybridisation underpinning the commercialisation of migration regulation. Drawing on the analysis of legal archi...

This study examines associations between sport/physical activity space, community formation, and social life among Shanghai's highly-skilled migrant demographic. There is limited illustration of roles sports and physical exercise provision and spaces play in this migrant cohort's lives, community formation, and participation in their host societies...

Background Maltreatment is a leading cause of adolescent depression. Economic empowerment and mental health services provision are major policy options to solve this problem in developing countries. However, little is known about how these policy options jointly influence the association between maltreatment and adolescent depression. Objective To...

The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures explores central lines of enquiry and seminal scholarship on therapeutic cultures, popular psychology, and the happiness industry. Bringing together studies of therapeutic cultures from sociology, anthropology, psychology, education, politics, law, history, social work, cultural st...

We analyse the rise of ‘mindfulness’ in English language media discourses and contextualise it in terms of its expression of a persistent underlying ‘psychological imagination’ in contemporary thinking about social problems. An inversion of C. Wright Mills’ much‐cited sociological imagination, the psychological imagination draws on medical‐scientif...

Re-examining C.Wright Mills’s legacy as a jumping off point, this original introduction to sociology illuminates global concepts, themes and practices that are fundamental to the discipline. It makes a case for the importance of developing a sociological imagination and provides the steps for how readers can do that. The unique text has a global fr...

This article examines recent changes in British family migration policy. It explores the reasons for these policy changes. It highlights the fact that these changes have affected the legal, financial, social, and lived experiences of transnational couples. It uses primary research to exemplify these changes. For example, it highlights the fact that...

The migration of Chinese students to the UK has long been the focus of academic and policy‐making attention. However, what happens to their transnational mobility after their education remains understudied. This article unpacks the migration decision‐making process behind graduates' study‐to‐employment transition. We focus on individuals' on‐going...

The introduction explores the cultural dynamics of neoliberalism and anti-neoliberal resistance in Latin America. While Latin American neoliberalisms and the regions transition – perhaps temporary – to post-neoliberalism have been extensively debated (Dávila 2012, Flores-Macias 2012, Goodale and Postero 2013), extant research has largely focused on...

Since the 1970s, academic debates have considered how psychological discourses may legitimize or challenge capitalist forms of social organization. However, these debates have largely focused on the USA and Western Europe. The roles which psychological discourses play in contemporary popular cultures in Latin America remain poorly understood. Here,...

In the mid-1970s, Latin America entered a period of profound social and economic crisis, marked by the rise of brutal military dictatorships across much of the region and the near-collapse of some of Latin America’s largest economies, in Mexico and Brazil. In response to this crisis, governments across the region adopted neoliberal structural adjus...

This book builds a fresh perspective on therapeutic narratives of intimate life. Focusing on the question of how popular psychology organises everyday experiences of intimacy, its argument is grounded in qualitative research in Trinidad in the Anglophone Caribbean. Against the backdrop of Trinidad’s colonial and postcolonial history, the authors m...

This book explores neoliberalism in contemporary Latin America as a set of interrelated cultural forms, offering a transnational and comparative perspective on the ways in which neoliberalism has transformed public discourses of self and social relationships, popular cultures and modes of everyday experience.

This book explores the cultural dynamics of neoliberalism and anti-neoliberal resistance in Latin America. While Latin American neoliberalisms and the region's transition—perhaps temporary—to post-neoliberalism have been extensively debated (Dávila, 2012; Flores-Macias, 2012; Goodale and Postero, 2013), extant research has largely focused on releva...

Ongoing conflicts between neoliberal and post-neoliberal politics have resulted in growing social instability in Latin America. This book explores the cultural dynamics of neoliberalism and anti-neoliberal resistance in Latin America as a complex set of interrelated cultural forms, examining the ways in which neoliberalism has transformed public di...

This article explores popular psychology as a transnational moral grammar. Academic debates have been sharply critical of popular psychology, and they have emphasised its association with neoliberal capitalism’s narratives of social relationships. However, scholarship on popular psychology has focused on the Global Northwest. The transnational diff...

In this study, we explore intergenerational relationships in Chinese-Western transnational families. Our argument draws on 28 life story interviews with Chinese middle-class professionals and their Western partners in Beijing. In the context of their living arrangements in Beijing, many of these couples had close ties with their Chinese parents or...

Self-help books aim to empower their readers and deliver happiness and personal fulfilment but do they really live up to this? This book offers a fresh perspective on self-help culture and popular psychology. Research on this subject matter has generally focused on the USA and other societies in the Global Northwest. In contrast, this book explores...

The preceding chapter situated the sociological analysis of self-help books in broader academic debates about therapeutic culture. In turn, this chapter argues for approaching these debates from a transnational perspective. Research about the role which psychotherapeutic narratives about self and social relationships play in contemporary popular cu...

Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear … and Do it Anyway (1987/2007) is a typical self-help book. It seeks to enable its readers to overcome situations, experiences and practices of which they are afraid: What is it for you? Fear of … public speaking, asserting yourself, making decisions, intimacy, changing jobs, being alone, aging, driving, losing a loved...

A Survival Guide for Life was published in 2012 by Bantam Press in London. Bear Grylls, the book’s author, is a well-known British media personality. On his website, Grylls portrays himself as an outdoorsman, adventurer and survivalist: Bear Grylls has become known around the world as one of the most recognized faces of survival and outdoor adventu...

In this book, we have offered two new insights into self-help and, by extension, therapeutic culture that to date have been significant omissions in the research literature. These are, first, the transnationalisation of self-help culture, and by implication its glocal hybridisation; and, second, the tension between self-help’s discursive heterogene...

Self-help today is a global phenomenon. While the previous chapter mentioned examples of self-help in the Americas, Western Europe and South Asia, we now focus on the rise of self-help in the People’s Republic of China. Self-help enjoys considerable popularity in East and Southeast Asia; reports indicate that self-help books have a broad readership...

In Latin America over the past two decades self-help texts have grown in both production and circulation, making self-help one of the most popular book genres across the region. Self-help texts amount to between 13 and 20 per cent of the books sold in the bigger Latin American countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela and Per...

Paul McKenna is a popular British self-help entrepreneur. Since the early 1990s, he has published self-help books on a wide range of topics, from weight loss in I Can Make You Thin (McKenna, 2009) to happiness in I Can Make You Happy (McKenna, 2011) and enhanced intelligence in I Can Make You Smarter (McKenna, 2012). Alongside his books, McKenna ha...

This book explores the contemporary cultural significance and understandings of self-help books and the narratives they contain. In the following, we introduce a considerable shift of perspective into our argument. In earlier chapters, we have explored the transnational popularisation of self-help books, and we have examined self-help’s narratives...

This article considers cultural hierarchies that may shape practices of dating and partner choice among young women and men in contemporary Beijing. Our research is mainly based on 43 in-depth interviews conducted in Beijing over the past six years. The distinction between Beijingers and waidiren (lit., outsiders) here serves as a framework to exam...

This analysis explores narratives of love, marriage, and couple relationships among young female professionals from Mexico City. It seeks to address a dearth of knowledge about transformations of intimacy among the middle sectors of Mexican society. In this context, it raises questions about possible trends toward an individualization of intimate l...

Exploring cultural transformations of intimacy in contemporary Mexico, Intimacies and Cultural Change examines the ways in which globalization and rapid cultural change have transformed the cultural meanings of couple relationships, sexuality, and personal life in Mexican society. Through a range of contemporary case studies, the book sheds light o...

This qualitative report, Hard Struggles in Times of Change: A Qualitative Study on Masculinities and Gender-Based Violence in Contemporary China, is part of the UN Multi-country Study on Men and Violence in Asia and the Pacific, a regional study on masculinities and gender-based violence coordinated by Partners for Prevention (P4P), a UNDP, UNFPA,...

This groundbreaking new introduction to sociology is an innovative hybrid textbook and reader. Combining seminal scholarly works, contextual narrative and in-text didactic materials, it presents a rich, layered and comprehensive introduction to the discipline. Its unique approach will help inspire a creative, critical, and analytically sophisticate...

The principal focus of this article is exploratory. It provides an initial and largely unprecedented examination of therapeutic discourses of intimate life in Mexico. This respective analysis addresses two complementary questions: First, how do the texts reflect recent socio-cultural changes in Mexican society and their impact on the dynamics of co...

El presente artículo examina la relación entre los patrones de fertilidad en Estados Unidos y la inmigración hispana a dicho país considerando el impacto de la globalización económica, política y cultural en la transformación de las relaciones de pareja, la intimidad y la reproducción. Se argumenta que los patrones de fecundidad en Estados Unidos d...

The expansion of the Internet and the proliferation of information technologies have created new opportunities for the sexual abuse of children. Sex offenders use the Internet to access and distribute indecent images of children and to select victims to groom for the purpose of abuse (Davidson & Gottschalk 2010; Martellozzo, 2010; Martellozzo & Tay...

El presente artículo examina la relación entre los patrones de fertilidad en Estados Unidos y la inmigración hispana a dicho país considerando el impacto de la globalización económica, política y cultural en la transformación de las relaciones de pareja, la intimidad y la reproducción. Se argumenta que los patrones de fecundidad en Estados Unidos d...

In this article, I explore the narrative construction of sexualities and intimate relationships in the self-help novel Youth in Sexual Ecstasy by Mexican writer Carlos Cuauhtémoc Sánchez. Self-help texts may be understood as being indicative of the reconstitution of the cultural logics of intimate life in relation to processes of modernization and...

The present essay explores cultural constructions of gender relationships in Mexico. Social researchers have in recent years increasingly focused on analyzing and explaining the notable transformations of gender relationships since the 1970s. However, the majority of the research has been conducted with a predominantly socio-economic or socio-demog...

Este ensayo explora las construcciones culturales de las relaciones de género en México. La investigación social se ha interesado recientemente en el análisis y en la explicación de las significativas transformaciones de las relaciones de género ocurridas desde la década de 1970. Sin embargo, la mayor parte de estas investigaciones ha estado orient...

This article explores experiences of love and intimate relationships among young, female middle-class professionals in Mexico City. While recently there has been much interest in transformations of intimate life in Mexico and Latin America, the region's urban middle classes have been largely ignored. Through an exploratory qualitative case study, b...