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      • 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
        2024

        The second half of your life - a manual

        Tips and strategies for successful ageing

        by Dr. Petra Kiedaisch

        In the middle of our lives, the cards are reshuffled: marriages are divorced, careers are questioned, friendships are ended, questions of meaning are asked, bodies change - and not just hormonally. At the same time, children leave home and parents become carers. From the age of 45, the majority of our population is at the centre of a second upheaval that affects all facets of our lives and leaves us at a loss in many ways. Not only in our daily lives, but also when it comes to planning for our own old age. This guide is designed to help us find our way. It presents the most important information from all areas relevant to a good life after 45. Leading experts from the fields of medicine, nutrition, philosophy, theology, psychology, care, law and finance give recommendations on what to look out for and what tools are needed to get through these challenging years unscathed. Useful checklists round off the articles. The book shows us the unique opportunity to see these challenges not as a crisis but as a source of strength. Not only can we come through this period of our lives healthy and happy, but we can also shape it so that the next age threshold is no longer frightening. During the second phase of adolescence, we lay the foundations for whether and how we will grow older. Be it in terms of health or living together with family and friends. With contributions from: Prof. Dr. Martin Gessmann (philosophy), Dipl. Psych. Claudia Kühner (psychology), Dr Suso Lederle (medicine), Dr Petra Forster (nutrition), Christian Hald, Anja Heine (law), Prof Dr Philipp Schreiber (finance), Prof Dr Thomas Klie (nursing care insurance), Georg Eberhardt (religion).

      • 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
        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
        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
        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
        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
        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
        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
        Literature & Literary Studies
        September 2023

        Romantic women's life writing

        by Susan Civale

      • 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
        November 2013

        Foreigners, minorities and integration

        The Muslim immigrant experience in Britain and Germany

        by Sarah Hackett

        This book explores the arrival and development of Muslim immigrant communities in Britain and Germany during the post-1945 period through the case studies of Newcastle upon Tyne and Bremen. It traces Newcastle's South Asian Muslims and Bremen's Turkish Muslims from their initial settlement through to the end of the twentieth century, and investigates their behaviour and performance in the areas of employment, housing and education. At a time at when Islam is sometimes seen as a barrier to integration and harmony in Europe, this study demonstrates that this need not be the case. In what is the first comparison of Muslim ethnic minorities in Britain and Germany at a local level, this book reveals that instances of integration have been frequent. It is essential reading for both academics and students with an interest in migration studies, modern Britain and Germany, and the place of Islam in contemporary Europe. ;

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        July 2021

        My Life with Viruses

        A researcher’s history of the fascinating world of pathogens

        by Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker in association with Jeanne Rubner

        In times of the coronavirus pandemic many people have certainly condemned them, but Professor Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker has dedicated his life to researching them and is intrigued by viruses – even if sometimes he is keenly aware of their fatal effects. To mark his 80th birthday the biochemist describes the co-evolution and co-existence as well as the eternal ‘battle’ between humans and viruses. Winnacker takes up the cause of these ‘biological elements between animate and inanimate nature’ because they play an important role in fundamental research and genetic technology, and without them human beings would not be what they are.

      • Trusted Partner
        November 2016

        Coming to Terms with Life

        by Matthias Wengenroth

        Do you struggle with thoughts and feelings that make life difficult? Have you tried all sorts of ways of dealing with this without getting anywhere? Do you feel that life is passing you by? Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), which this book describes in a clear and entertaining way, provides new and very enlightening insights into the causes of human suffering. At the same time, ACT shows how we can improve the way we handle the difficult aspects of being human, while also developing our abilities and strengths. This title shows how using the described simple but effective methods can lead you to a happier, better life.   Target Group: people who want to utilize their potential more fully, people interested in acceptance and commitment therapy, people practicing or interested in psychotherapy (psychologists, doctors, coaches, social workers)

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