The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology

In recent years there has been a growing interest in cognition within sociology and other social sciences. Within sociology this interest cuts across various topical subfields, including culture, social psychology, religion, race, and identity. Scholars within the new subfield of cognitive sociology, also referred to as the sociology of culture and cognition, are contributing to a rapidly developing body of work on how mental and social phenomena are interrelated and often interdependent. In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, Wayne H. Brekhus and Gabe Igantow have gathered some of the most influential scholars working in cognitive sociology to present an accessible introduction to key research areas in a diverse field. While classical sociological and newer interdisciplinary approaches have been covered separately by scholars in the past, this volume alternatively presents a broad range of cognitive sociological perspectives. The contributors discuss a range of approaches for theorizing and analyzing the "social mind," including macro-cultural approaches, interactionist approaches, and research that draws on Pierre Bourdieu's major concepts. Each chapter further investigates a variety of cognitive processes within these three approaches, such as attention and inattention, perception, automatic and deliberate cognition, cognition and social action, stereotypes, categorization, classification, judgment, symbolic boundaries, meaning-making, metaphor, embodied cognition, morality and religion, identity construction, time sequencing, and memory. A comprehensive look at cognitive sociology's main contributions and the central debates within the field, the Handbook will serve as a primary resource for social researchers, faculty, and students interested in how cognitive sociology can contribute to research within their substantive areas of focus.

Wayne H. Brekhus is Professor of Sociology at the University of Missouri. His research interests include the cultural sociology of cognition, the sociology of identities, social markedness and unmarkedness, and developing sociological theory. He is the author of Culture and Cognition: Patterns in the Social Construction of Reality; Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity; and Sociologia dell'inavvertito (translated into Italian by Lorenzo Sabetta). He is currently writing a book on the sociology of identities. Gabe Ignatow is Professor of Sociology and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of North Texas. His research interests are mainly in the areas of sociological theory, cognitive social science and digital research methods, and his most recent books include An Introduction to Text Mining and Text Mining: A Guidebook for the Social Sciences, both coauthored with Rada Mihalcea.