Do you know your animus from your anomie? Puzzled by all that jargon at university? Now there's no need to be. "Megawords" provides definitions for the key terms every student in the humanities and social sciences needs to know. Richard Osborne takes readers on a journey into the knowledge required to exist, survive and thrive in the new millennium and in an interconnected global space that includes cyberpunk and cyborg, chaos theory and conspiracy theories, the postcolonial and the diaspora, hybridity and whiteness, the postmodern and the post-feminist, the digital and the Net. He also covers much older yet still influential terms like Enlightenment, empiricism, positivism, aesthetics, agency, nationhood, and citizenship. Osborne also shows how particular concepts arise at particular times with particular authors and intellectual personalities. The entries include examples, anecdotes, cross-referencing and historical contexts.

Author Biography

Richard Osborne is author of the international bestseller Philosophy for Beginners (over one million copies sold in 30 countries). He is also author of Sociology for Beginners, Freud for Beginners, Ancient Eastern Philosophy for Beginners and Crime and the Media. He is senior lecturer in philosophy, semiotics and cultural studies at Camberwell College of Art, London.