21st Century Standpoints

What are the 21st century challenges shaping our lives today and in the future? This exciting new series showcases lively, disruptive, progressive writers – established and emerging – who reach beyond the academy. Bringing pressing public issues to the general reader, scholars and students these books offer standpoints to shape public conversations at this time of social, political, economic and cultural disruption. They move beyond simple critique to propose better ways of understanding, and living in, our world.

For more information, please contact the series editors:

With this series, the BSA supports sociologists with a different type of publishing outlet with a supportive publisher and we bring sociological thinking to a general audience at a time when it is greatly needed.

Visit Policy Press for more details about the series or to purchase books.

Published Volumes


The cruel optimism of Racial Justice by Nasar Meer (March 2022)

Cars cover image.
Race, Taste, Class and Cars by Yunis Alam (July 2020)

Money cover image
Money: Myths, Truths and Alternatives by Mary Mellor
(July 2019)

What's wrong with Work? cover image.
What's wrong with Work? by Lynne Pettinger (Apr 2019)

Snobbery cover
Snobbery by David Morgan (Dec 2018)

Brexit cover image.
Making sense of Brexit by Victor J Seidler (Jan 2018)

Miseducation by Diane Reay cover image
Miseducation: Inequality, education and the working classes by Diane Reay (Oct 2017)


Series Editors

Les Back, Goldsmiths, University of London
Nasar Meer, University of Edinburgh
Mónica G Moreno Figueroa, University of Cambridge