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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2025Threads of labour
Tapestry of an ex-industrial community
by Lisa Taylor
Charting a collaborative art-based project using carpet-making skills and the industrial heritage of the region, the book investigates how a cleaved ex-industrial community used arts methodologies as a cohesion strategy. Drawing on images from the company's archives, the book mines the history of Firths Carpets Limited, a firm that carpeted interiors across the globe from the mid-1800s. Women's labour and tastes were business critical to the production and sale of Firths carpets. Drawing on the author's personal connection to the village, an ethnographic sensibility and novel research techniques, ex-worker responses to a village radically altered by ruination are explored. Ex-workers felt nostalgia for the dignity of work and a sense of homesickness in a village ghosted by industrial spectres of the past. Threads of Labour argues that left-behind deindustrialised places require acts of social re-making if their communities are to survive.
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Business, Economics & LawJune 2024The labour movement in Lebanon
Power on hold
by Lea Bou Khater
The labour movement in Lebanon: Power on hold narrates the history of the Lebanese labour movement from the early twentieth century to today. Bou Khater demonstrates that trade unionism in the country has largely been a failure, for reasons including state interference, tactical co-optation, and the strategic use of sectarianism by an oligarchic elite, together with the structural weakness of a service-based laissez-faire economy. Drawing on a vast body of Arabic-language primary sources and difficult-to-access archives, the book's conclusions are significant not only for trade unionism, but also for new forms of workers' organisations and social movements in Lebanon and beyond. The Lebanese case study presented here holds significant implications for the wider Arab world and for comparative studies of labour. This authoritative history of the labour movement in Lebanon is vital reading for scholars of trade unionism, Lebanese politics, and political economy.
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Business, Economics & LawFebruary 2022The labour movement in Lebanon
by Lea Bou Khater, Simon Mabon
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Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2026New Labour, new Britain
How the Blair governments reshaped the country
by Glen O’Hara
A bold and balanced re-appraisal of New Labour in power. Rewriting the story of New Labour, Glen O'Hara challenges the prevailing narrative to present a more balanced and positive assessment. New Labour, new Britain is the first book to examine both the intentions behind New Labour's domestic policies and their real-world effects, moving beyond the entrenched left-right debates that have dominated the party's legacy. The period from 1997 to 2007 marked a pivotal moment in modern British history, as New Labour sought to reshape Britain into a more cohesive and forward-thinking society. It saw the rise of socially liberal attitudes and flourishing public services under a government committed to rebuilding and investing in them. Yet New Labour's track record was far from flawless and its legacy remains complicated and contested. Through interviews with key players and rigorous archival research, O'Hara offers a new perspective on Tony Blair's years in power. Painting a fuller picture of New Labour's successes and challenges, he highlights its lasting impact on Britain and offers a thoughtful reassessment of its place in history.
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Humanities & Social SciencesDecember 2022Class, work and whiteness
Race and settler colonialism in Southern Rhodesia, 1919–79
by Nicola Ginsburgh
This book offers the first comprehensive history of white workers from the end of the First World War to Zimbabwean independence in 1980. It reveals how white worker identity was constituted, examines the white labouring class as an ethnically and nationally heterogeneous formation comprised of both men and women, and emphasises the active participation of white workers in the ongoing and contested production of race. White wage labourers' experiences, both as exploited workers and as part of the privileged white minority, offer insight into how race and class co-produced one another and how boundaries fundamental to settler colonialism were regulated and policed. Based on original research conducted in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK, this book offers a unique theoretical synthesis of work on gender, whiteness studies, labour histories, settler colonialism, Marxism, emotions and the New African Economic History.
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2026Vibes as value
Young workers and affective labour in the service economy
by David Farrugia, Julia Coffey, Steven Threadgold, Megan Sharp, Lena Molnar
Vibes as value explores the relationship between subjectivity, labour and value in the hospitality industry, and thereby how youth, gender, sexuality, race and social class are embodied and made productive in the service economy. It shows that the key product of hospitality labour is 'vibes', or moments of enjoyment and relationality co-produced through exploitative relationships amongst workers and consumers. In the process, the book theorises hospitality as a form of affective labour organised through the normative and structural relations of precarious service work. It shows how identity construction produces value within the highly unequal social terrain of the service economy, and how hospitality labour enacts hierarchies of value extending far beyond the limits of the industry itself.
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Humanities & Social SciencesNovember 2023
Intimacy and mobility in an era of hardening borders
Gender, reproduction, regulation
by Haldis Haukanes, Frances Pine
This book is a collection of articles by anthropologists and social scientists concerned with gendered labour, care, intimacy and sexuality, in relation to mobility and the hardening of borders in Europe. Interrogating the relation between physical, geopolitical borders and ideological, conceptual boundaries, it offers a range of vivid and original ethnographic case studies that will capture the imagination of anyone interested in gendered migration, policies of inclusion and exclusion, and regulation of reproduction and intimacy. The book presents ethnographic and phenomenological discussions of people's changing lives as they cross borders, how people transgress and reshape moral boundaries of proper gender and kinship behaviour, and moral economies of intimacy and sexuality. It also focuses on migrants' navigation of social and financial services in their destination countries, putting questions about rights and limitations on citizenship at the core.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMay 2021
Critical race theory and inequality in the labour market
by Ebun Joseph
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Sociology & anthropologyFebruary 2017Environment, labour and capitalism at sea
'Working the ground' in Scotland
by Penny McCall Howard. Series edited by Alexander Smith
This book explores how fishers make the sea productive through their labour, using technologies ranging from wooden boats to digital GPS plotters to create familiar places in a seemingly hostile environment. It shows how their lives are affected by capitalist forces in the markets they sell to, forces that shape even the relations between fishers on the same boat. Fishers frequently have to make impossible choices between safe seamanship and staying afloat economically, and the book describes the human impact of the high rate of deaths in the fishing industry. The book makes a unique contribution to understanding human-environment relations, examining the places fishers create and name at sea, as well as technologies and navigation practices. It combines phenomenology and political economy to offer new approaches for analyses of human-environment relations and technologies. It contributes to the social studies of fisheries through an analysis of how deeply fishing practices and social relations are shaped by political economy. It will be read in universities by social scientists and anthropologists and also by those with an interest in maritime Scotland.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2020The modernisation of the Labour Party, 1979–97
by Christopher Massey
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Humanities & Social SciencesAugust 2018Labour united and divided from the 1830s to the present
by Yann Béliard, Emmanuelle Avril
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Humanities & Social SciencesSeptember 2021Nostalgia and the post-war Labour Party
by Richard Jobson
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Humanities & Social SciencesJune 2024Politicising and gendering care for older people
Multidisciplinary perspectives from Europe
by Anca Dohotariu, Ana Paula Gil, Lubica Volanská
This book offers a new critical framework for understanding the processes of politicising and gendering care for older people and their manifestations in several European contexts. It interrogates how care for older adults varies across time and place while searching for an in-depth comprehension of how it becomes an arena of political struggle and the object of public policy in different countries and at various societal and political levels. It brings together multidisciplinary contributions that examine the issue of care for older people as a political concern from many angles, such as problematising care needs, long-term care policies, home care services, institutional services and family care. The contributions reveal the diversity of situations in which the processes of politicising and gendering care for older adults overlap, contradict or reinforce each other while leading to increased gender (in)equalities on different levels.
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2025The return of the housewife
Why women are still cleaning up
by Emma Casey
An illuminating look at the world of cleanfluencers that asks why the burden of housework still falls on women. Housework is good for you. Housework sparks joy. Housework is beautiful. Housework is glamorous. Housework is key to a happy family. Housework shows that you care. Housework is women's work. Social media is flooded with images of the perfect home. TikTok and Instagram 'cleanfluencers' produce endless photos and videos of women cleaning, tidying and putting things right. Figures such as Marie Kondo and Mrs Hinch have placed housework, with its promise of a life of love and contentment, at the centre of self-care and positive thinking. And yet housework remains one of the world's most unequal institutions. Women, especially poorer women and women of colour, do most low-paid and unpaid domestic labour. In The return of the housewife, Emma Casey asks why these inequalities matter and why they persist after a century of dramatic advances in women's rights. She offers a powerful call to challenge the prevailing myths around housework and the 'naturally competent' woman homemaker.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2019Labour united and divided from the 1830s to the present
by Emmanuelle Avril, Yann Béliard
Spanning a period which stretches from the 19th century to the present day, this book takes a novel look at the British labour movement by examining the interaction between trade unions, the Labour Party, other parties and groups of the Left, and the wider working class, to highlight the dialectic nature of these relationships, marked by consensus and dissention. It shows that, although perceived as a source of weakness, those inner conflicts have also been a source of creative tension, at times generating significant breakthroughs. The book brings together labour historians and political scientists who provide a range of case studies as well as more wide-ranging assessments of recent trends in labour organising. It will therefore be of interest to academics and students of history and politics, as well as to practitioners, in the British Isles and beyond.
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The ArtsFebruary 2026Visual arts and medicine in early modern Europe and beyond
A collection of essays and sources
by Robert Brennan, Fabian Jonietz, Romana Sammern
This book opens up new perspectives on the relationship between art, medicine, and science in late-medieval and early modern Europe. Looking beyond the traditional nexus of art, anatomy, and optics, the volume sheds light on a broader array of connections between artists and physicians: collaborations between painters and doctors on colour charts, handwork skills common to sculptors and surgeons, the transmission of art theory through medical texts long before the emergence of art writing itself as an independent genre, and the kinship of medical diagnosis with early modes of connoisseurship. Reconfiguring the histories of art, medicine, and science, the book also traverses conventional boundaries between physical and mental health, religious and medical modes of healing, menial and exalted forms of knowledge and labour, as well as vernacular and scientific understandings of human difference, including gender, race, and neurodiversity.
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March 2026Legacies of British slavery in Australia and New Zealand
by Zoë Laidlaw, Jane Lydon
This book investigates the legacies of British slavery beyond Britain, focusing upon the colonisation of Australia and New Zealand, and explores why this history has been overlooked. After August 1833, when the British Parliament abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape, the former slave-owners were paid compensation for the loss of their 'property'. New research has begun to show that many beneficiaries had ties to other parts of the British Empire, including the settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. Through a range of case studies, contributors to this collection trace the movement of people, goods, capital, and practices from the Caribbean to the new Australasian settler colonies. Chapters consider a range of places, people and themes to reveal the varied ways that slavery continued to shape imperial relationships, economic networks, and racial labour regimes after 1833.
