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      • Cultural Relics Press

        Cultural Relics Press was established in 1957, and is the only press dedicated to publishing archeology related books. It is committed to salvaging and protecting China’s cultural heritage and publicizing the content and artistic charm of traditional Chinese culture. Over the past 60 years, it has published about 7000 kinds of books on culture and archeology”. Its publications on traditional Chinese culture are well received across the world. It is the first press to engage in cultural exchange abroad and cooperate with counterparts in Europe, the United States, Hong Kong and Taiwan. It has collaborated with partners in UK, USA, Italy, Japan, former Yugoslavia, Taiwan. More than 300 awards has been received at home and abroad, including, among others, National Book Award, China Book Award, and “Most Beautiful Books in the World” (Leipzig).

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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2023

        Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan

        Young men and the digital economy

        by Hannah Schilling

        Digital technologies promise efficiency and comfort, but the smoothness of platform services relies on the hidden social labour of those who keep the gig economy running. This book presents a comparative ethnography of young men making a living through digital technologies: selling mobile airtime in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, and app-based delivery riders in Berlin, Germany. These case studies explore the significance of symbolic capital in urban youth's social existence and organisation of livelihood in the digital economy, and the technological mechanisms producing a new form of urban precarity. Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan puts forward an original comparative approach to develop a global urban sociology for the digital era. It provides an innovative analytical toolbox that decentres discussions of precarity from the standard of a normal employment contract. With its focus on symbolic capital, the ethnography shows the consequences of the proliferating gig economy for status struggles among urban youth, and carefully embeds the densification of software and services into the socio-material relations on which these new urban infrastructures are built.

      • Trusted Partner
        Geography & the Environment
        June 2024

        Gendered urban violence among Brazilians

        Painful truths from Rio de Janeiro and London

        by Cathy McIlwaine, Paul Heritage, Miriam Krenzinger Azambuja, Moniza Rizzini Ansari, Eliana Sousa Silva, Yara Evans

        This book aims to examine the nature of and resistance to gendered urban violence among Brazilian women in London and in the favelas of Maré, Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on the conceptualisation of translocational gendered urban violence framework, it highlights the importance of examining direct forms of gender-based violence across private, public and transnational spheres as interlinked with structural, symbolic and infrastructural violence. The book also explores the embodied and spatialised nature of gendered urban violence, explored through artistic engagements and arts-based methods. In developing a translocational feminist tracing methodological and epistemological approach across the social sciences and the arts, the book argues for the importance of a collaborative approach among academic, civil society organisations, artists and creative researchers with a view to engendering empathetic transformation to address gendered urban violence in the long-term.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2025

        The devil’s highway

        Urban anxieties and subaltern cultures in London’s sailortown, c.1850-1900

        by Brad Beaven

        Between 1850 and 1900, Ratcliffe Highway was the pulse of maritime London. Sailors from every corner of the globe found solace, and sometimes trouble, in this bustling district. However, for social investigators, it was a place of fascination and fear as it harboured chaotic and dangerous 'exotic' communities. Sailortowns were transient, cosmopolitan and working class in character and provide us with an insight into class, race and gendered relations. They were contact zones of heightened interaction where multi-ethnic subaltern cultures met, sometimes negotiated and at other times clashed with one another. The book argues that despite these challenges sailortown was a distinctive and functional working-class community that was self-regulating and self-moderating. The book uncovers a robust sailortown community in which an urban-maritime culture shaped a sense of themselves and the traditions and conventions that governed subaltern behaviour in the district.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2024

        The machinic city

        Media, performance and participation

        by Marcos P. Dias

        As human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital media is overlaid onto the urban landscape, The machinic city argues that performance art can help us to understand contemporary urban living. Dias analyses interventions from performance artists such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces for deliberation and reflection on urban life, and speculation on its future. While cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes mediated by technical machines, Dias analyses the performative potential of the aesthetic machine, as it assembles with media, capitalist, human and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban space is examined through its different components - design, city and technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2025

        The Derby philosophers

        Science and culture in British urban society, 1700–1850

        by Paul A. Elliott

        The Derby Philosophers focuses upon the activities of a group of Midland intellectuals that included the evolutionist and physician Erasmus Darwin, Rev. Thomas Gisborne the evangelical philosopher and poet, Robert Bage the novelist, Charles Sylvester the chemist and engineer, William George and his son Herbert Spencer, the internationally renowned evolutionist philosopher who coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest', and members of the Wedgwood and Strutt families. The book explores how, inspired by science and through educational activities, publications and institutions including the famous Derbyshire General Infirmary (1810) and Derby Arboretum (1840), the Derby philosophers strove to promote social, political and urban improvements with national and international consequences. Much more than a parochial history of one intellectual group or town, this book examines science, politics and culture during one of the most turbulent periods of British history.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2024

        The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia

        Engaging in everyday struggle

        by Alexandrina Vanke

        Despite the intense processes of deindustrialisation around the world, the working class continues to play an important role in post-industrial societies. However, working-class people are often stigmatised, morally judged and depicted negatively in dominant discourses. This book challenges stereotypical representations of workers, building on research into the everyday worlds of working-class and ordinary people in Russia's post-industrial cities. The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia is centred on the stories of local communities engaged in the everyday struggles that occur in deindustrialising settings under neoliberal neo-authoritarianism. The book suggests a novel approach to everyday life in post-industrial cities. Drawing on an ethnographic study with elements of arts-based research, the book presents a new genre of writing about workers influenced by the avant-garde documentary tradition and working-class literature.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2021

        African cities and collaborative futures

        Urban platforms and metropolitan logistics

        by Michael Keith, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, Susan Parnell

        This groundbreaking volume brings together scholars from across the globe to discuss the infrastructure, energy, housing, safety and sustainability of African cities, as seen through local narratives of residents. Drawing on a variety of fields and extensive first-hand research, the contributions offer a fresh perspective on some of the most pressing issues confronting urban Africa in the twenty-first century. At a time when the future of the region as a whole will be determined in large part by its cities, the implications of these developments are profound. With case studies from cities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania, this volume explores how the rapid growth of African cities is reconfiguring the relationship between urban social life and its built forms. While the most visible transformations in cities today can be seen as infrastructural, these manifestations are cultural as well as material, reflecting the different ways in which the city is rationalised, economised and governed. How can we 'see like a city' in twenty-first-century Africa, understanding the urban present to shape its future? This is the central question posed throughout this volume, with a practical focus on how academics, local decision makers and international practitioners can collaborate to meet the challenge of rapid growth, environmental pressures and resource gaps.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2011

        Cultural Region

        North east England 1945–2000

        by Natasha Vall

        This book is the first historical assessment of English regional cultural policy. With its dialect and striking modern icons such as the Angel of the North, the north east has been described as England's most distinctive region. This study reveals the impact of the new cultural institutions that emerged after 1945 upon a region with deeply rooted vernacular traditions. The creation of the regional arts board and the development of regional broadcasting as well as the national efforts to manage the northern economic problems presented challenges for vernacular culture. In the ensuing battle between provincial and metropolitan values the north east as a modern cultural region took shape. The concluding chapters detail the cultural regeneration of the urban riversides, a much vaunted example of successful culture-led regeneration. This volume is essential for anyone with an interest in the formation of cultural identities, the development of regional government arts policies, urban regeneration and cultural and social history. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        August 2007

        The public culture of the Victorian middle class

        Ritual and authority in the English industrial city 1840–1914

        by Simon Gunn

        The public culture of the Victorian middle class looks at the creation of a distinctive 'high' culture in the industrial cities of Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century and its incipient decline from the 1880s. The history of urban bourgeois culture has been relatively unexplored and under-theorised compared to popular culture. This volume therefore represents a significant contribution both to the study of middle-class cultural forms and to an understanding of the relationship between culture and power. In particular, it argues for the importance of ritualised modes of social behaviour in understanding the construction of authority in the nineteenth-century city. As well as many original arguments, the book provides a clear and useful overview of the public cultures of Victorian 'respectability'. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the areas of social history, cultural history, urban history, cultural studies, urban studies and the sociology of culture. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2024

        British culture after empire

        Race, decolonisation and migration since 1945

        by Josh Doble, Liam Liburd, Emma Parker

        British culture after Empire is the first collection of its kind to explore the intertwined social, cultural and political aftermath of empire in Britain from 1945 up to and beyond the Brexit referendum of 2016, combining approaches from the fields of history, English and cultural studies. Against those who would deny, downplay or attempt to forget Britain's imperial legacy, the various contributions expose and explore how the British Empire and the consequences of its end continue to shape Britain at the local, national and international level. As an important and urgent intervention in a field of increasing relevance within and beyond the academy, the book offers fresh perspectives on the colonial hangovers in post-colonial Britain from up-and-coming as well as established scholars.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2022

        A new naval history

        by Quintin Colville, James Davey, Katherine Parker, Elaine Chalus, Evan Wilson, Barbara Korte, Cicely Robinson, Cindy McCreery, Ellie Miles, Mary A. Conley, Jonathan Rayner, Daniel Spence, Emma Hanna, Ulrike Zimmerman, Max Jones, Jan Rüger

        A New Naval History brings together the most significant and interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary naval history. The last few decades have witnessed a transformation in how this field is researched and understood and this volume captures the state of a field that continues to develop apace. It examines - through the prism of naval affairs - issues of nationhood and imperialism; the legacy of Nelson; the socio-cultural realities of life in ships and naval bases; and the processes of commemoration, journalism and stage-managed pageantry that plotted the interrelationship of ship and shore. This bold and original publication will be essential for undergraduate and postgraduate students of naval and maritime history. Beyond that, though, it marks an important intervention into wider historiographies that will be read by scholars from across the spectrum of social history, cultural studies and the analysis of national identity.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Geography & the Environment
        August 2020

        Urban transformations and public health in the emergent city

        by Michael Keith, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, Susan Parnell

        The imperatives of public health shaped our understanding of the cities of the global north in the first industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are doing so again today, reflecting new geographies of the urban age of the twenty-first. Emergent cities in parts of the globe experiencing most profound urban growth face major problems of economic, ecological and social sustainability when making sense of new health challenges and designing policy frameworks for public health infrastructures. The rapid evolution of complex 'systems of systems' in today's cities continually reconfigure the urban commons, reshaping how we understand urban public health, defining new problems and drawing on new data tools for analysis that work from the historical legacies and geographical variations that structure public health systems.

      • Trusted Partner
        Lifestyle, Sport & Leisure
        September 2017

        A cultural history of chess-players

        by John Sharples

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2006

        The experience of urban poverty, 1723–82

        Parish, charity and credit

        by Alannah Tomkins

        This comparative study of urban poverty is the first to chart the irregular pulse of poverty's encounters with officialdom. It exploits an unusual methodology to secure new perspectives from familiar sources. The highly localised characteristics of the welfare economy generated a peculiarly urban environment for the poor. Separate chapters examine the parameters of workhouse life when the preconceptions of contemporaries have been stripped away; the reach of institutional charities such as almshouses, schools and infirmaries; and the surprisingly broad clientele of urban pawnbrokers. Detailed analysis of the poor is achieved via meticulous matching of individuals who fell within the purview of two or more authorities. The result is a unique insight into the survival economics of urban poverty, arising not from a tidy network of welfare but from a loose assembly of options, where the impoverished positioned themselves repeatedly to fit official, philanthropic, or casual templates of the 'deserving'. This book will be essential reading for historians of English poverty and welfare, and eighteenth-century social and economic life. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2025

        An unorthodox history

        British Jews since 1945

        by Gavin Schaffer

        A bold, new history of British Jewish life since the Second World War. Historian Gavin Schaffer wrestles Jewish history away from the question of what others have thought about Jews, focusing instead on the experiences of Jewish people themselves. Exploring the complexities of inclusion and exclusion, he shines a light on groups that have been marginalised within Jewish history and culture, such as queer Jews, Jews married to non-Jews, Israel-critical Jews and even Messianic Jews, while offering a fresh look at Jewish activism, Jewish religiosity and Zionism. Weaving these stories together, Schaffer argues that there are good reasons to consider Jewish Britons as a unitary whole, even as debates rage about who is entitled to call themselves a Jew. Challenging the idea that British Jewish life is in terminal decline. An unorthodox history demonstrates that Jewish Britain is thriving and that Jewishness is deeply embedded in the country's history and culture.

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