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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2026Soviet materialities
Socialist things, environments and affects
by Mollie Arbuthnot, Christianna Bonin, Gabriella Ferrari
Soviet materialities explores how material transforms our understanding of Soviet culture, from the textures of domestic space in 1960s apartment blocks to Gulag labour on the Moscow canal, and from avant-garde literary theory in the 1920s to conceptual art under perestroika. It starts from the ethos that the material world shapes people and society. Taking a material approach-or a range of material approaches-can therefore illuminate aspects of the cultural production and lived experiences of Soviet socialism that are not reflected in other kinds of historical records. This edited volume brings cutting-edge research by emerging scholars together with the established voices who have broken the ground in this sub-field over the last twenty years and promises to make a major intervention in the study of Soviet history and culture.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2022Civic identity and public space
Belfast since 1780
by Dominic Bryan, Sean J. Connolly, John Nagle
Civic identity and public space, focussing on Belfast, and bringing together the work of a historian and two social scientists, offers a new perspective on the sometimes lethal conflicts over parades, flags and other issues that continue to disrupt political life in Northern Ireland. It examines the emergence during the nineteenth century of the concept of public space and the development of new strategies for its regulation, the establishment, the new conditions created by the emergence in 1920 of a Northern Ireland state, of a near monopoly of public space enjoyed by Protestants and unionists, and the break down of that monopoly in more recent decades. Today policy makers and politicians struggle to devise a strategy for the management of public space in a divided city, while endeavouring to promote a new sense of civic identity that will transcend long-standing sectarian and political divisions.
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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 SciencesJuly 2022Researching urban space and the built environment
by Jonathan Blaney, Simon Trafford, Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin, Elaine Tierney, Charlotte Wildman
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Literature & Literary StudiesMarch 2023Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature
Emotions, ethics, dreams
by Megan Leitch
Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.
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The ArtsMarch 2013Space and being in contemporary French cinema
by James S. Williams
This book brings together for the first time five French directors who have established themselves as among the most exciting and significant working today: Bruno Dumont, Robert Guédiguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Claire Denis. Whatever their chosen habitats or shifting terrains, each of these highly distinctive auteurs has developed unique strategies of representation and framing that reflect a profound investment in the geophysical world. The book proposes that we think about cinematographic space in its many different forms simultaneously (screenspace, landscape, narrative space, soundscape, spectatorial space). Through a series of close and original readings of selected films, it posits a new 'space of the cinematic subject'. Accessible and wide-ranging, this volume opens up new areas of critical enquiry in the expanding interdisciplinary field of space studies. It will be of immediate interest to students and researchers working not only in film studies and film philosophy, but also in French/Francophone studies, postcolonial studies, gender and cultural studies. Listen to James S. Williams speaking about his book http://bit.ly/13xCGZN. (Copy and paste the link into your browser) ;
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Literature & Literary StudiesAugust 2022Edmund Spenser and the romance of space
by Tamsin Badcoe
Edmund Spenser and the romance of space advances the exploration of literary space into new areas, firstly by taking advantage of recent interdisciplinary interests in the spatial qualities of early modern thought and culture, and secondly by reading literature concerning the art of cosmography and navigation alongside imaginative literature with the purpose of identifying shared modes and preoccupations. The book looks to the work of cultural and historical geographers in order to gauge the roles that aesthetic subjectivity and the imagination play in the development of geographical knowledge: contexts ultimately employed by the study to achieve a better understanding of the place of Ireland in Spenser's writing. The study also engages with recent ecocritical approaches to literary environments, such as coastlines, wetlands, and islands, thus framing fresh readings of Spenser's handling of mixed genres.
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Literature & Literary StudiesJune 2021Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature
by Megan Leitch, Anke Bernau, David Matthews, James Paz
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2014The domestic, moral and political economies of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland
What rough beast?
by Kieran Keohane, Rob Kitchin, Carmen Kuhling
This book provides an analysis of neo-liberal political economics implemented in Ireland and the deleterious consequences of that model in terms of polarised social inequalities, impoverished public services and fiscal vulnerability as they appear in central social policy domains - health, housing and education in particular. Tracing the argument into the domains where the institutions are sustained and reproduced, this book examines the movement of modern economics away from its original concern with the household and anthropologically universal deep human needs to care for the vulnerable - the sick, children and the elderly - and to maintain inter-generational solidarity. The authors argue that the financialisation of social relations undermines the foundations of civilisation and opens up a marketised barbarism. Civic catastrophes of violent conflict and authoritarian liberalism are here illustrated as aspects of the 'rough beast' that slouches in when things are falling apart and people become prey to new forms of domination. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017Engendering whiteness
White women and colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627–1865
by Cecily Jones
Engendering whiteness represents a comparative analysis of the complex interweaving of race, gender, social class and sexuality in defining the contours of white women's lives in Barbados and North Carolina during the era of slavery. Despite their gendered subordination, their social location within the dominant white group afforded all white women a range of privileges. Hence, their whiteness, as much as their gender, shaped these women's social identities and material realities. Crucially, as the biological reproducers of whiteness, and hence the symbolic and literal embodiment and bearers of the state of freedom, they were critical to the maintenance and reproduction of the cultural boundaries of 'whiteness', and consequently the subjects of patriarchal measures to limit and control their social and sexual freedoms. Engendering whiteness draws on a wide variety of sources including property deeds, wills, court transcripts, and interrogates the ways in which white women could be simultaneously socially positioned within plantation societies as both agents and as victims. It also reveals the strategies deployed by elite and poor white women in these societies to resist their gendered subordination, to challenge the ideological and social constraints that sought to restrict their lives to the private domestic sphere, to protect the limited rights afforded to them, to secure independent livelihoods, and to create meaningful existences. A fascinating study that with be welcomed by historians of imperialism as well as scholars of gender history and women's studies.
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Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2017Servants of the empire
The Irish in Punjab 1881–1921
by Patrick O'Leary, Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie
Punjab, 'the pride of British India', attracted the cream of the Indian Civil Service, many of the most influential of whom were Irish. Some of these men, along with Irish viceroys, were inspired by their Irish backgrounds to ensure security of tenure for the Punjabi peasant, besides developing vast irrigation schemes which resulted in the province becoming India's most affluent. But similar inspiration contributed to the severity of measures taken against Indian nationalist dissent, culminating in the Amritsar massacre which so catastrophically transformed politics on the sub-continent. Setting the experiences of Irish public servants in Punjab in the context of the Irish diaspora and of linked agrarian problems in Ireland and India, this book descrides the beneficial effects the Irish had on the prosperity of India's most volatile province. Alongside the baleful contribution of some towards a growing Indian antipathy towards British rule. Links are established between policies pursued by Irishmen of the Victorian era and current happenings on the Pakistan-Afghan border and in Punjab.
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The ArtsJuly 2019Street theatre and the production of postindustrial space
by David Calder, Maggie B. Gale
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MedicineJanuary 2025Nursing the English from plague to Peterloo, 1665-1820
by Alannah Tomkins
This book studies the negative stereotypes around the women who worked as sick nurses in this period and contrasts them with the lived experience of both domestic and institutional nursing staff. Furthermore, it integrates nursing by men into the broader history of care as a constant if little-recognised presence. It finds that women and men undertook caring work to the best of their ability, and often performed well, despite multiple threats to nurse reputations on the grounds of gender norms and social status. Chapters consider nursing in the home, in general hospitals, in specialist institutions like the Royal Chelsea Hospital and asylums, plus during wartime, illuminated by multiple accounts of individual nurses. In these settings, it employs the sociological concept of 'dirty work' to contextualise the challenges to nurses and nursing identities.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2025Urbicide in Syria
A postcolonial understanding of civil war
by Gabriel Garroum Pla
This book provides an exhaustive analysis of the relationship between violence, urban space, and political subjectivity in Syria. It does so through an exploration of how urbicide, the violent destruction and alteration of the urban fabric, becomes a tool for the regime's governmental and sovereign exercise of power, decisively redefining state-society dynamics and cementing political loyalty in Syria. Adopting a critical and postcolonial perspective, and through the cases of Damascus and Aleppo, the volume presents a unique perspective on the civil war by examining socio-material changes in everyday political spaces and processes, from mundane destruction to urban development and reconstruction efforts, and how these are experienced by local communities. Featuring rich data collection through interviews, archival research, and aesthetic sources, the book ultimately foregrounds Syrians' political agency and creativity despite ruination.
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Humanities & Social SciencesDecember 2021Crafting identities
Artisan culture in London, c. 1550–1640
by Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin, Christopher Breward, James Ryan
Crafting identities explores artisanal identity and culture in early modern London. It demonstrates that the social, intellectual and political status of London's crafts and craftsmen were embedded in particular material and spatial contexts. Through examination of a wide range of manuscript, visual and material culture sources, the book investigates for the first time how London's artisans physically shaped the built environment of the city and how the experience of negotiating urban spaces impacted directly on their distinctive individual and collective identities. Applying an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology to the examination of artisanal cultures, the book engages with the fields of social and cultural history and the histories of art, design and architecture. It will appeal to scholars of early modern social, cultural and urban history, as well as those interested in design and architectural history.
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The ArtsJune 2017Gothic television
by Helen Wheatley
Gothic television is the first full length study of the Gothic released on British and US television. An historical account, the book combines detailed archival research with analyses of key programmes, from Mystery and Imagination and Dark Shadows, to The Woman in White and Twin Peaks, and uncovers an aspect of television drama history which has, until now, remained critically unexplored. While some have seen television as too literal or homely a medium to successfully present Gothic fictions, Gothic television argues that the genre, in its many guises, is, and has always been, well-suited to television as a domestic medium, given the genre's obsessions with haunted houses and troubled families. This book will be of interest to lecturers and students across a number of disciplines including television studies, Gothic studies, and adaptation studies, as well as to the general reader with an interest in the Gothic, and in the history of television drama.
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