Thomas Thurnell-Read - Drinking Dilemmas: Space, Culture and Identity

Drinking and drunkenness have become a focal point for political and media debates to contest notions of responsibility, discipline and risk; yet, at the same time, academic studies have highlighted the positive aspects of drinking in relation to sociability, belonging and identity. These issues are at the heart of this volume, which brings together the work of academics and researchers exploring social and cultural aspects of contemporary drinking practices. These drinking practices are enormously varied and are spatially and culturally defined. The contributions to the volume draw on research settings from across the UK and beyond to demonstrate both the complexity and diversity of drinking subjectivities and practices. Across these examples, tensions relating to gender, social class, age and the life course are particularly prominent. Rather than align to now long-established moral discourses about what constitutes good and bad drinking, sociological approaches to alcohol foreground, the vivid, lived, nature of alcohol consumption and the associated experiences of drunkenness and intoxication. In doing so, the volume illuminates the controversial yet important social and cultural roles played by drink for individuals and groups across a range of social contexts.

Thomas Thurnell-Read is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Humanities at Coventry University. Through his research and teaching, he uses contemporary leisure and consumption practices, particularly those relating to drinking and drunkenness, to explore a range of sociological issues relating to sociality, identity and diversity. His research on British stag party tourism in Poland has been published in a range of international journals and focuses on the social construction of masculinity through transgressive drinking practices. He is the editor (with Dr Mark Casey, Newcastle University) of Men, Masculinities, Travel and Tourism (2014, Palgrave Macmillan). He is a founder member of the BSA Alcohol Study Group and has been Co-Convenor of the group since July 2012.

Sociological Futures
Series Editors: Eileen Green, John Horne, Caroline Oliver, Louise Ryan

Sociological Futures aims to be a flagship series for new and innovative theories, methods and approaches to sociological issues and debates and the social in the 21st century. This series of monographs and edited collections was inspired by the vibrant wealth of British Sociological Association (BSA) symposia on a wide variety of sociological themes. Edited by a team of experienced sociological researchers, and supported by the BSA, the series covers a wide range of topics related to sociology and sociological research and features contemporary work that is theoretically and methodologically innovative and has local or global reach, as well as work that engages or reengages with classic debates in sociology, bringing new perspectives to important and relevant topics.

The BSA is the professional association for sociologists and sociological research in the United Kingdom. It has an extensive network of members, study groups and forums, and a dynamic programme of events. The Association engages with topics ranging from auto/biography to youth, climate change to violence against women, alcohol to sport, and Bourdieu to Weber. This book series represents the finest fruits of sociological enquiry, for a global audience, and offers a publication outlet for sociologists at all career and publishing stages, from well-established to emerging sociologists, BSA or non-BSA members, from all parts of the world.

An End to the Crisis in Empirical Sociology?
Edited by Linda McKie and Louise Ryan

Bourdieu: The Next Generation
The development of Bourdieus intellectual heritage in contemporary UK sociology
Edited by Jenny Thatcher, Nicola Ingram, Ciaran Burke and Jessica Abrahams

Drinking Dilemmas
Space, culture and identity
Edited by Thomas Thurnell-Read

Drinking Dilemmas is an important and timely collection of papers on the study of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness. Thurnell-Read has brought together a range of distinguished authors to explore how drinking practices and individual identities are both spatially and culturally defined. This book will prove to be a useful resource for both scholars and students at all levels who wish to understand the multiple ways in which individual identities, alcohol consumption, drinking practices and intoxicated behaviors are interwoven.

Geoffrey Hunt, Professor, Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus University, Denmark

This timely collection of recent research on the role of alcohol in cultural life makes an important contribution to contemporary debates about the "demon drink". Contributors challenge the overwhelmingly negative connotations of much public health and policy discourse, examining the diverse symbolic meanings of drinking in a range of social, political and economic contexts. The book has a distinctive focus on place and space, crossing academic disciplines from sociology and geography to criminology, and crossing the globe from the Bigg Market in Newcastle to Mar Mikhael in Beirut, via France, South Africa and the extreme metal music scene in Leeds, UK.

Christine Griffin, Professor, University of Bath, UK

Space, culture and identity

Edited by Thomas Thurnell-Read

First published 2016
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2016 Thomas Thurnell-Read

The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thurnell-Read, Thomas, 1982 editor.
Drinking dilemmas : space, culture and identity / edited by Thomas Thurnell-Read.
1. Drinking of alcoholic beveragesGreat Britain. 2. Drinking of alcoholic beveragesSocial aspectsGreat Britain. 3. Alcoholic beveragesSocial aspectsGreat Britain. 4. Drinking customsGreat Britain. 5. Great BritainSocial life and customs.
HV5446.D75 2015
394.1/30941dc23
2015025836

ISBN: 978-1-138-93114-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-67991-4 (ebk)

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