Product details
- ISBN 9781837426492
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 08 Dec 2026
- Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Over recent decades, politics has shifted from parliaments and parties into the intimate spaces of everyday life. Life, Power, Resistance: A Critical Introduction to Life Politics offers a clear and accessible framework for understanding this transformation, not as abstract theory, but as lived experience shaped by intersecting identities. It shows how political meaning is increasingly forged through personal practices, relationships, and self-expression rather than solely through formal institutions.
Best explores how race, gender, sexuality, disability, and age converge with lifestyle choices to generate new forms of resistance and self‑realisation. Drawing on key thinkers and social movements - from feminist and queer theory to Black Lives Matter and environmental activism - the analysis reveals how personal struggles are embedded within broader structures of power and collective social change.
Through vivid examples and critical analysis, the book demonstrates how ordinary acts - what we eat, how we love, the identities we claim - become political interventions. Examining the decline of class‑based politics and the rise of identity‑driven activism, it highlights how everyday life has become a battleground for inclusion, autonomy, and justice, making the book essential reading for understanding the forces reshaping democracy and social relations in the 21st century.
Shaun Best recently retired from his teaching position at the University of Winchester, UK. He previously taught at the University of Manchester and Nottingham Trent University. In addition to publishing widely on the work of Zygmunt Bauman, he also writes about issues in relation to social inclusion and exclusion within an educational context.
