Humanities & Social Sciences
May 2021
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2026The cultural politics of food in South Africa
Media, nourishment, inequality
by Mehita Iqani, Sarah Gibson
Food is both a material system of nourishment, necessary for human survival, and a communicative system that signifies multiple meanings across human cultures. This book explores the cultural politics of food in the South African context, bringing together a range of disciplinary perspectives on the links between media, nourishment, and inequality. The chapters all highlight the multiplicity of meanings that food has in South African society. These include historical perspectives on the impact of colonialism, migration and apartheid had on food and foodways in South Africa; sociological interventions on food and society; aesthetic practices in relation to food; and mediated food cultures in South Africa. Taken together, the book critically explores the multiple ways in which food is never just food, and always linked to complex and shifting modalities of meaning and knowledge in the South African context.
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Humanities & Social SciencesSeptember 2019Inequality and democratic egalitarianism
by Mark Harvey, Norman Geras
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Humanities & Social SciencesOctober 2023
Towards a just Europe
A theory of distributive justice for the European Union
by João Labareda
This highly original book constitutes one of the first attempts to examine the problem of distributive justice in the European Union in a systematic manner. João Labareda argues that the set of shared political institutions at EU level, including the European Parliament and the Court of Justice of the EU, generate democratic duties of redistribution among EU citizens. Furthermore, the economic structure of the EU, comprising a common market, a common currency and a free-movement area, triggers duties of reciprocity among member states. The responsibilities to fulfil these duties, Labareda argues, should be shared by the local, national and supranational levels of government. Not only should the EU act as a safety net to the national welfare systems, applying the principle of subsidiarity, but common market and Eurozone regulations should balance their efficiency targets with fair cooperation terms. The concrete policy proposals presented in this book include a threshold of basic goods for all EU citizens, an EU labour code, a minimum EU corporate tax rate and an EU fund for competitiveness. Labarada argues that his proposals match the political culture of the member states, are economically feasible, can be translated into functioning institutions and policies and are consistent with the limited degree of social solidarity in Europe. This book is a major contribution to the understanding of what a just Europe would look like and what it might take to get us there. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 10, Reduced inequalities
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Social & cultural historyJanuary 2016Gender, rhetoric and regulation
Women's work in the Civil Service and the London County Council, 1900–55
by Helen Glew
The Civil Service and the London County Council employed tens of thousands of women in Britain in the early twentieth century. As public employers these institutions influenced both each other and private organisations, thereby serving as a barometer or benchmark for the conditions of women's white-collar employment. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources - including policy documents, trade union records, women's movement campaign literature and employees' personal testimony - this is the first book-length study of women's public service employment in this period. It examines three aspects of their working lives - inequality of pay, the marriage bar and inequality of opportunity - and demonstrates how far wider cultural assumptions about womanhood shaped policies towards women's employment and experiences. Scholars and students with interests in gender, British social and cultural history and labour history will find this an invaluable text.
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Society & culture: generalJuly 2014Radical childhoods
Schooling and the struggle for social change
by Jessica Gerrard
At a time when education appears to be simply reproducing social class relations, Radical childhoods offers a timely consideration of how children's and young people's education can confront and challenge social inequality. Presenting detailed analysis of archival material and oral testimony, the book examines the experiences of students and educators in two schooling initiatives that were connected to two of the most significant social movements in Britain: Socialist Sunday Schools (est. 1892) and Black Saturday/Supplementary Schools (est. 1967). Analysing across time, the author explores the ways in which these two very different schooling movements incorporated large numbers of women, challenged class and race inequality, and attempted to create spaces of 'emancipatory' education independent to the state. It argues that despite appearing to be on the 'margins' of the public sphere these schools were important, if contested and complex, sites of political struggle.
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Literature & Literary StudiesJune 2023
Cormac McCarthy
A complexity theory of literature
by Lydia R. Cooper
Combining the fields of evolutionary economics and the humanities, this book examines McCarthy's literary works as a significant case study demonstrating our need to recognise the interrelated complexities of economic policies, environmental crises, and how public policy and rhetoric shapes our value systems. In a world recovering from global economic crisis and poised on the brink of another, studying the methods by which literature interrogates narratives of inevitability around global economic inequality and eco-disaster is ever more relevant.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2026
The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia
by Alexandrina Vanke
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Computing & ITMay 2026Democratizing AI
by Annette Zimmermann
Democratizing AI offers a powerful rethinking of how artificial intelligence should be governed. Challenging the dominance of tech elites in shaping AI's future, Zimmermann argues that AI deployment is a political act-one that must be subject to democratic control. She proposes a practical "playbook" for reclaiming agenda-setting power through civic participation, public ownership, and institutional reform. Engaging with leading critics, Zimmermann defends a risk-sensitive proceduralist approach while acknowledging the deeper structural challenges posed by capitalism, inequality, and democratic fatigue. This book is a call to action: to resist learned helplessness, confront techno-authoritarianism, and shape AI's trajectory in line with democratic values. Thoughtful, urgent, and visionary, the book is essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of technology and democracy.
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Business, Economics & LawSeptember 2010The US Economy Today
by Edward Ashbee, Bill Jones
The US Economy Today provides an invaluable introduction to American economic history since 1929. Its coverage includes the New Deal, the post-war boom, "stagflation" in the 1970s, "Reaganomics", the Clinton and Bush years, the 2008 - 2009 economic crisis and President Obama's first hundred days. In addition, this volume considers core contemporary economic policy debates and draws conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of the US economic "model". It looks at the causes and consequences of inequality, the extent to which there is economic mobility, and the impact of globalization and foreign trade. This book will be essential reading for those studying or teaching American economics, economic history or politics and all those looking for a thorough and comprehensive introduction to this area. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesJune 2020The Trump revolt
by Edward Ashbee
This book considers the reasons for Donald Trump's surprise victory in the 2016 presidential election. It charts the prolonged campaign and the realigning processes that took place, analysing the ideas that defined the Trump platform, the electoral shifts in states regarded as solid 'firewalls' for the Democratic Party and the responses of Republican Party elites. Although he is subject to contradictory pressures, the book places Trump firmly within the right-wing populist tradition. However, it argues that the sentiments that drove his campaign were not only a response to economic fears, high levels of inequality and racial resentment - they were also shaped by the structural character of American governance, which fuels hostility towards Washington DC and the 'political class'. The book concludes by assessing the extent to which Trump's victory and parallel developments in Europe mark a reconfiguration of neoliberalism.
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2010The flâneur and his city
Patterns of daily life in Paris 1815–1851
by Richard D. E. Burton, Mike Thompson
The book provides a 'flâneur's eye view' of Parisian life in the first half of the nineteenth century: dress, cafés and restaurants, but also shops and passages, the omnibus, bals publics and carnival. The author provides general conclusions about the private and public spheres in 'le vieux Paris'. Like the flâneur, the author concentrates less on factual information for its own sake - which may be found in the secondary works cited in the text and footnotes - than on the 'semiological' or anthropological significance of the cultural forms in question. Links are drawn between cultural institutions and class relations in pre-1850 Paris, with particular emphasis on cultural inequality, on the persistence of cross-class contacts, and the growing differences between classes as reflected in behaviour and attitudes. ;
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Literature & Literary StudiesJune 2026
The politics of Middle English parables
Fiction, theology, and social practice
by Mary Raschko
The politics of Middle English parables examines the dynamic intersection of fiction, theology and social practice in late-medieval England. Parables occupy a prominent place in Middle English literature, appearing in dream visions and story collections as well as in lives of Christ and devotional treatises. While most scholarship approaches the translated stories as stable vehicles of Christian teaching, this book highlights the many variations and points of conflict across Middle English renditions of the same story. In parables related to labour, social inequality, charity and penance, the book locates a creative theological discourse through which writers attempted to re-construct Christian belief and practice. Analysis of these diverse retellings reveals not what a given parable meant in a definitive sense but rather how Middle English parables inscribe the ideologies, power structures and cultural debates of late-medieval Christianity.
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Business, Economics & LawNovember 2012The activation of citizenship in Europe
by Thomas Pfister, Emil Kirchner, Thomas Christiansen
This instructive study examines how a transnational discourse on 'modern' social policy - based the guiding principles of 'activation' and an 'activating welfare state' - intervenes in the concepts and practices of citizenship. What are the consequences of this reorientation for citizenship? How does it relate to patterns of exclusion and inequality inherent in each historical citizenship formation? What exactly is the EU's role in this context? The detailed qualitative study focuses on the European Employment Strategy - and in particular its gender equality dimension - as a central process where the activation agenda is constructed and equipped with meanings. It traces how this discourse is received and translated into practices of citizenship in three EU member states - Germany, the UK, and Hungary. The activation of citizenship in Europe will be principally of interest to academics and practitioners in the fields of European integration, social policy, and citizenship. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesNovember 2014Class, ethnicity and religion in the Bengali East End
A political history
by Sarah Glynn
This exploration of one of the most concentrated immigrant communities in Britain combines a fascinating narrative history, an original theoretical analysis of the evolving relationship between progressive left politics and ethnic minorities, and an incisive critique of political multiculturalism. It recounts and analyses the experiences of many of those who took part in over six decades of political history that range over secular nationalism, trade unionism, black radicalism, mainstream local politics, Islamism and the rise and fall of the Respect Coalition. Through this Bengali case study and examples from wider immigrant politics, it traces the development and adoption of the concepts of popular frontism, revolutionary stages theory and identity politics. It demonstrates how these theories and tactics have cut across class-based organisation and acted as an impediment to addressing socio-economic inequality; and it argues for a left materialist alternative. It will appeal equally to sociologists, political activists and local historians. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesNovember 2021The ABC of the projectariat
Living and working in a precarious art world
by Kuba Szreder
The ABC of the projectariat contributes new thinking on and practical responses to the widespread problem of precarious labour in the field of contemporary art. It works as both a critical analysis and a practical handbook, speaking to and about the vast cohort of artistic freelancers worldwide. In an accessible ABC format, the book strikes a unique balance between the practical and the theoretical: the analysis is backed up by lived experience, the arguments are rooted in concrete examples and there are suggestions for constructive action. Roughly half of the entries expose the structural underpinnings of projects and circulation, isolating traits such as opportunism, neoliberalism, inequality, fear and cynicism at the root of the condition of the projectariat. This discussion is paired with a practical account of different modes of action, such as art strikes, productive withdrawals, political struggles and better social time machines. Just as proletarians had nothing to lose but their chains, the projectarians have nothing to miss but their deadlines.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJune 2023
Worrier state
Risk, anxiety and moral panic in South Africa
by Nicky Falkof
Risk, anxiety and moral panic are endemic to contemporary societies and media forms. How do these phenomena manifest in a place like South Africa, which features heightened insecurity, deep inequality and accelerated social change? What happens when cultures of fear intersect with pervasive systems of gender, race and class? Worrier state investigates four case studies in which fear and anxiety appear in radically different ways: the far right myth of 'white genocide'; so-called 'Satanist' murders of young women; an urban legend about township crime; and social theories about safety and goodness in the suburbs. Falkof foregrounds the significance of emotion as a socio-political force, emphasising South Africa's imbrication within globalised conditions of anxiety and thus its fundamental and often-ignored hypermodernity. The book offers a bold and creative perspective on the social roles of fear and emotion in South Africa and thus on everyday life in this complex place.
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Humanities & Social SciencesOctober 2025Social democracy and the urban scene
Party responses to the diversifying centre-left
by Nik. Brandal, Øivind Bratberg
Social democratic parties struggle to appeal to a divided electorate. Particularly prescient is the clash between working-class voters thatare socially conservative and middle-class voters who are liberally inclined but economicallyleft. Are politics and policies that appeal to both even a possibility? Nowhere is thatdebate more acute than in European cities, yet in no other political space are answers more likely to be found.Where urban voters turn left, they are increasingly attracted by radical and green alternatives to social democracy.Social democracy and urban politicsdelves into the changing relationship between these three party families on the urban scene. Mapping electoral geography, governing strategies and the interface between parties and social movements on the left, the authors reflect upon the formation and dilemmas of a broader progressive alliance.
