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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2021

        Britain’s rural Muslims

        by Sarah Hackett

      • 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 2025

        Demystifying informal urban design and planning

        Insights from Asia

        by Mahyar Arefi

        Touting informal settlements or informality in general as illegal, crime-ridden, unsafe, filthy, chaotic, and formal developments as legal, orderly or safe, and so forth has not solved anything and informality as a way of life or an economic reality lingers and grows. Demystifying informal urban design and planning delves deeper into this conundrum and seeks to debunk some common misguided perceptions about it. Borrowing popular philosophical and political analogies from Isaiah Berlin and Gregory Treverton and others, it encourages urban designers and planners to become multitaskers like foxes rather than hedgehogs who can do one thing right. The book ends with some general takeaways on assuming more proactive roles in informal urban design issues and avoiding two potential pitfalls while interacting with them.

      • 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
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2025

        Social 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.

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

        Rural Urbanism

        London landscapes in the early nineteenth century

        by Dana Arnold

        This original and innovative book examines a period in with the development of London was perhaps at its most intense, for in the opening decades of the nineteenth century a concerted attempt was made to transform the metropolis into a modern European capital. For the first time the re-imaging of London is considered in relation to attitudes towards land, land ownership and the use of landscapes. The author contends that methods of land management and development and the associative values of landscape usually connected with rural environments, were in many ways equally applicable to country and city and formed essential components in the evolution of the metropolis. This study of London landscapes will be of relevance to a broad range of researchers, academics and those with a lively interest in architectural, social, economic and cultural history. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        December 2009

        Songs of protest, songs of love

        Popular ballads in eighteenth-century Britain

        by Robin Ganev, Jeffrey Richards

        Songs of Protest, Songs of Love shows how songs can bring back voices from the past in a new way. The focus of the book is on rural Britain in a time of crisis. As the traditional rights of peasants were being jettisoned to enforce a new system of enclosure, rural labourers chanted out their concerns in songs of protest. These songs became increasingly strident and popular after the 1770s as rural life became even more precarious with fluctuating grain prices and uncertain employment opportunities. Many ballads in the eighteenth century were love songs. But these are also rich in social meaning. Many of these love songs celebrated the free and easy sexuality of rural workers, especially milkmaids and ploughmen, which was contrasted with the tepid and flaccid sex life attributed to urban aristocrats. The book will be of interest to scholars, advanced students and readers with an interest in cultural history and popular ballads. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        April 2021

        On the Purposes of Life and Whether They Exist

        A philosophical fitting

        by Axel Braig

        The musician, doctor and philosopher Axel Braig considers philosophy a little like the weather: he looks for the right clothes for every situation. Braig is primarily concerned with practical, effective things from the two-and-a-half millennia fund of (Western) thinking, such as helpful approaches in existential crises. In this book, he introduces us to philosophical thinkers from Plato to Montaigne to Levinas and Feyerabend. Braig not only shares his own philosophical biography, but above all encourages us to philosophise ourselves.

      • 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
        January 2026

        The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia

        by Alexandrina Vanke

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2025

        Bordering social reproduction

        Migrant mothers and children making lives in the shadows

        by Rachel Rosen, Eve Dickson

        Bordering social reproduction explores what happens when migrants subject to policies that seek to deny them the means of life nonetheless endeavour to make and sustain meaningful lives. Developing innovative theorisations of welfare bordering, the volume provides rich ethnographic insights into the everyday lives of destitute mothers and children who are denied mainstream welfare support in the United Kingdom due to their immigration status. This book shows how enforced destitution and debt work alongside detention and deportation as part of a tripartite of exclusionary technologies of the racial state. It advances the novel concept of weathering to comprehend mother's and children's life-making practices under duress - arguing that these are neither acts of heroic resilience nor solely symptomatic of lives rendered disposable, but indications of the fragilities of repressive migration regimes and, on occasion, refusals to accept their terms of existence.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        September 2023

        Romantic women's life writing

        by Susan Civale

      • Trusted Partner
        Film theory & criticism
        August 2016

        British rural landscapes on film

        by Edited by Paul Newland

        British rural landscapes on film offers insights into how rural areas in Britain have been represented on film, from the silent era, through both world wars, and on into the twenty-first century. It is the first book to exclusively deal with representations of the British countryside on film. The contributors demonstrate that the countryside has provided Britain (and its constituent nations and regions) with a dense range of spaces in which cultural identities have been (and continue to be) worked through. British rural landscapes on film demonstrates that British cinema provides numerous examples of how national identity and the identity of the countryside have been partly constructed through filmic representation, and how British rural films can allow us to further understand the relationship between the cultural identities of specific areas of Britain and the landscapes they inhabit.

      • Trusted Partner
        Migration, immigration & emigration
        April 2014

        The British in rural France

        Lifestyle migration and the ongoing quest for a better way of life

        by Michaela Benson

        The British in rural France, available at last in paperback, is a study of how lifestyle choices intersect with migration, and how this relationship frames and shapes post-migration lives. It presents a conceptual framework for understanding post-migration lives that incorporates culturally-specific imaginings, lived experiences, individual life histories and personal circumstances. Through an ethnographic lens incorporating in-depth interviews, participant observation, life and migration histories, this monograph reveals the complex process by which migrants negotiate and make meaningful their lives following migration. By promoting their own ideologies and lifestyle choices relative to those of others, British migrants in rural France reinforce their position as members of the British middle-class, but also take authorship of their lives in a way not possible before migration. This is evident in the pursuit of a better way of life that initially motivated migration and continues to characterise post-migration lives. As the book argues, this ongoing quest is both reflective of wider ideologies about living, particularly the desire for authentic living, and subtle processes of social distinction. In these respects The British in rural France provides a unique empirical example of the relationship between the pursuit of authenticity and middle-class identification practices. The book will be of interest to lifestyle migration and migration specialists, sociologists, social anthropologists, human geographers, scholars of tourism, as well as being accessible to individuals with a broader interest in this social phenomenon.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2026

        Irish townspeople

        The early modern urban experience, c.1400–c.1640

        by Colm Lennon

        Through a series of innovative perspectives, this book examines how early modern Irish townspeople experienced the urban world through a range of family and associational ties. Migrants inducted through town citizenship and marriage bonded more closely as sisters or brothers of confraternities and guilds, consolidating parish membership. Civic religion saw the integration of religion with town politics and councils, and monastic charity of the friars' hospitals preceded the era of modern municipal welfare. In circumstances of the alienation of the long-settled Catholic townspeople from the state's religious and political Reformation in the seventeenth century, they drew sustenance from the continuity of institutions such as colleges, fraternities and hospitals and forms of coexistence with Protestant fellow-citizens.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2025

        Living with water

        Everyday encounters and liquid connections

        by Charlotte Bates, Kate Moles

        Living with water brings together sociologists, geographers, artists, writers and poets to explore the ways in which water binds, immerses and supports us. Drawing from international research on river crossings, boat dwelling, wild swimming, sea fishing, and drought impacts, and navigating urban waters, glacial lagoons, barrier reefs and disappearing tarns, the collection illuminates the ways that we live with and without water, and explores how we can think and write with water on land. Water offers a way of attending to emerging and enduring social and ecological concerns and making sense of them in lively and creative ways. By approaching Living with water from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives, and drawing on research from around the world, this collection opens up discussions that reinvigorate and renew previously landlocked debates. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 6, Clean water and sanitation

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