Water Environment Federation
Water Environment Federation (WEF)publishes a variety of technical publications, including newsletters,manuals of practice and other books, magazines, and journals.
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Promoted Content
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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Promoted Content
Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2026The tragedy of the border
Asylum, destitution and homelessness
by Mark Rainey
Amid the global migration crisis, the UK has created and increasingly hostile policy environment for asylum seekers that has pushed many into unnecessary hardship and homelessness. This volume is an ethnographic study alongside refused asylum seekers and refugees living destitute in Manchester, UK. Based on over three years of research in emergency night shelters and on the streets of the city, it draws on the stories and experiences of those who have been driven into destitution by an antagonistic immigration system. The book not only explores how legal and temporal uncertainty shapes the daily lives of those who have had their asylum claims refused, but also attends to the experiences of volunteers and activists working on the frontline of the crisis. While the work is rich in detail, it also extends outwards and offers new insights into our understanding of borders and the need to rethink the grand notions of justice and hospitality.
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November 2021The Forest of the Future – A New Reality
Understanding the ecosystem
by Hans Jürgen Böhmer
What happened with forest dieback? The predictions of the 1980s that forests would be in decline across Europe have not come true. Currently, attention again focuses on the doom scenarios of the loss of entire forests and cultural landscapes in an emotional and sometimes hysterical debate. Biogeographer Hans Jürgen Böhmer refers to updated case studies and his 30 years of research experience on global ecosystems to demonstrate extremely complex interrelations of the natural world that various actors monitor in contrasting ways and characterized by different times and ideologies. Böhmer advocates to embed the sustainability debate more strongly in the living environment, rather than relying exclusively on model calculations.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJune 2023Border images, border narratives
The political aesthetics of boundaries and crossings
by Johan Schimanski, Jopi Nyman
This interdisciplinary volume explores the role of images and narratives in different borderscapes. Written by experienced scholars in the field, Border images, border narratives provides fresh insight into how borders, borderscapes, and migration are imagined and narrated in public and private spheres. Offering new ways to approach the political aesthetics of the border and its ambiguities, this volume makes a valuable contribution to the methodological renewal of border studies and presents ways of discussing cultural representations of borders and related processes. Influenced by the thinking of philosopher Jacques Rancière, this timely volume argues that narrated and mediated images of borders and borderscapes are central to the political process, as they contribute to the public negotiation of borders and address issues such as the in/visiblity of migrants and the formation of alternative borderscapes. The contributions analyse narratives and images in literary texts, political and popular imagery, surveillance data, border art, and documentaries, as well as problems related to borderland identities, migration, and trauma. The case studies provide a highly comparative range of geographical contexts ranging from Northern Europe and Britain, via Mediterranean and Mexican-USA borderlands, to Chinese borderlands from the perspectives of critical theory, literary studies, social anthropology, media studies, and political geography.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMay 2026Border enclaves
Melilla and the making of Europe’s southern periphery
by Laia Soto Bermant
Border enclaves examines the Spanish enclave of Melilla as a prism for understanding Europe's contemporary dislocations. Based on over a decade of ethnographic research, it explores how borders are enforced, contested and inhabited in a city suspended between Africa and Europe, colonial legacies and modern regimes. Through a polyphonic narrative following smugglers, migrants, teachers and politicians, it reveals how everyday practices and symbolic performances shape life in the enclave. Selective visibility-who is seen or erased-structures authority and exclusion. Situating Melilla within broader processes like Spain's colonial history and Europe's border restructuring, the book argues that its fragmented sovereignties and external dependencies make it a paradigmatic site for grasping Europe's precarious margins. It calls for an ethnographic lens attuned to dislocation as both lived experience and analytic tool.
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Sociology & anthropologyFebruary 2017Environment, labour and capitalism at sea
'Working the ground' in Scotland
by Penny McCall Howard. Series edited by Alexander Smith
This book explores how fishers make the sea productive through their labour, using technologies ranging from wooden boats to digital GPS plotters to create familiar places in a seemingly hostile environment. It shows how their lives are affected by capitalist forces in the markets they sell to, forces that shape even the relations between fishers on the same boat. Fishers frequently have to make impossible choices between safe seamanship and staying afloat economically, and the book describes the human impact of the high rate of deaths in the fishing industry. The book makes a unique contribution to understanding human-environment relations, examining the places fishers create and name at sea, as well as technologies and navigation practices. It combines phenomenology and political economy to offer new approaches for analyses of human-environment relations and technologies. It contributes to the social studies of fisheries through an analysis of how deeply fishing practices and social relations are shaped by political economy. It will be read in universities by social scientists and anthropologists and also by those with an interest in maritime Scotland.
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Humanities & Social SciencesAugust 2018Flight MH17, Ukraine and the new Cold War
by Kees van der Pijl, Radhika Desai, Alan Freeman
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2021The Irish tower house
Society, economy and environment, c. 1300–1650
by Victoria L. McAlister
The Irish tower house examines the social role of castles in late-medieval and early modern Ireland. It uses a multidisciplinary methodology to uncover the lived experience of this historic culture, demonstrating the interconnectedness of society, economics and the environment. Of particular interest is the revelation of how concerned pre-modern people were with participation in the economy and the exploitation of the natural environment for economic gain. Material culture can shed light on how individuals shaped spaces around themselves, and tower houses, thanks to their pervasiveness in medieval and modern landscapes, represent a unique resource. Castles are the definitive building of the European Middle Ages, meaning that this book will be of great interest to scholars of both history and archaeology.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2025Worlds of the ring
Nation and empire in the British and German circus
by Sabine Hanke
Worlds of the Ring is a groundbreaking exploration of the interwar European circus scene, focusing on the German Sarrasani and British Bertram W. Mills' circuses. This study illuminates the correlation between the circus's evolution and imperialism/nationalism, revealing how these enterprises shaped national identities for popular audiences. Examining the years 1918-45, the book takes a transnational perspective, uncovering the interplay of international and national forces that influenced the modern circus. Through case studies, it delves into the lives of individuals in the industry, using diverse sources like newspapers, legal documents, and performer archives. The book introduces the concept of Orientalism to analyse how circuses depicted foreign worlds, and provides a fresh perspective on interwar popular culture, globalising forces, and the circus's ties to European imperialism in the early 20th century.
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2024Brave new city
Smart Cities - a survaillance-nightmare?
by Peter Schaar
The dream of the ideal city is as old as the city itself. Since real cities often develop chaotically, the idea of perfecting them, even tearing them down if necessary, and rebuilding them according to the prevailing patterns of thought is an obvious one. The latest manifestation of this utopia is the smart city - the intelligent city, packed with the latest technology and extensively digitised. But will air taxis and hyperloops, ubiquitous sensors, access control systems and data-driven management really make the city of the future a better place to live? Are they the answer to the enormous challenges facing today's fast-growing metropolises? Or will the supposed administrative paradise ultimately mutate into a digital juggernaut?
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The ArtsJune 2021The new pornographies
Explicit sex in recent French fiction and film
by Victoria Best, Martin Crowley
The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed the striking advance of pornography into the Western cultural mainstream. Symptomatic of this development has been the use by writers, artists, and film-makers of the imagery and aesthetics of pornography, in works which have, often on this basis, achieved considerable international success. Amongst these artists are a number of French authors and directors - such as Michel Houellebecq, Catherine Breillat, Virginie Despentes, or Catherine Millet - whose work has often been dismissed as trashy or exploitative, but whose use of pornographic material may in fact be indicative of important contemporary concerns. In this study of a very significant trend, the authors explore how the reference to pornography encodes diverse political, cultural, and existential questions, including relations between the sexes, the collapse of avant-garde politics, gay sexualities in the time of AIDS, the anti-feminist backlash, the relation to the body and illness, the place of fantasy, and the sexualisation of children. It will be of interest to undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in the fields of French culture, gender, film and media studies.
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The ArtsJanuary 2019The new pornographies
Explicit sex in recent French fiction and film
by Victoria Best, Martin Crowley
The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed the striking advance of pornography into the Western cultural mainstream. Symptomatic of this development has been the use by writers, artists, and film-makers of the imagery and aesthetics of pornography, in works which have, often on this basis, achieved considerable international success. Amongst these artists are a number of French authors and directors - such as Michel Houellebecq, Catherine Breillat, Virginie Despentes, or Catherine Millet - whose work has often been dismissed as trashy or exploitative, but whose use of pornographic material may in fact be indicative of important contemporary concerns. In this, the first study of this significant trend, the authors explore how the reference to pornography encodes diverse political, cultural, and existential questions, including relations between the sexes, the collapse of avant-garde politics, gay sexualities in the time of AIDS, the anti-feminist backlash, the relation to the body and illness, the place of fantasy, and the sexualisation of children. It will be of interest to undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in the fields of French culture, gender, film and media studies.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 1997The new woman
by Sally Ledger
Sexually transgressive, politically astute and determined to claim educational and employment rights equal to those enjoyed by men, the new woman took centre stage in the cultural landscape of late-Victorian Britain. By comparing the fictional representations with the lived experience of the new woman, Ledger's book makes a major contribution to an understanding of the 'woman question' at the fin de siecle. She alights on such disparate figures as Eleanor Marx, Gertrude Dix, Dracula, Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner and Radclyffe Hall. Focusing mainly on the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the book's later chapters project forward into the twentieth century, considering the relationship between new woman fiction and early modernism as well as the socio-sexual inheritance of the 'second generation' new woman writers. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2021Border images, border narratives
by Johan Schimanski, Jopi Nyman, Sarah Green, Hastings Donnan
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2025Cross-border intimacies
Affect and emotions in marriage migration
by Lara Momesso
Since the early 1990s, economic exchanges between China and Taiwan have paved the way to migration across a previously closed border and to social and cultural interactions between the two populations. Despite these broader changes, the unresolved issue of Taiwan sovereignty has tainted not only the relations between the two governments but also the everyday life of those who move across the Taiwan Strait. In this politicised environment, intimate and affective practices linked to cross-border marriage and family formation are never just private. Instead, they are deeply entangled with the emotional and affective processes generated at the macro and meso level of political and social life and revolving around national interests. Tracing the intimate, emotional and affective practices linked to family creation, identity formation and integration with the local and national communities, this ethnographic study offers a subjective, dynamic, and complex picture of what it means to be a mainland spouse in Taiwan.
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The ArtsNovember 2022In good taste
How Britain’s middle classes found their style
by Ben Highmore, Christopher Breward
In postwar Britain, journalists and politicians prophesised that the class system would not survive a consumer culture where everyone had TVs and washing machines, and where more and more people owned their own homes. They were to be proved entirely wrong. In good taste charts how class culture, rather than being destroyed by mass consumption, was remade from flat-pack furniture, Mediterranean cuisine and lifestyle magazines. Novelists, cartoonists and playwrights satirised the tastes of the emerging middle classes, and sociologists claimed that an entire population was suffering from status anxiety, but underneath it all, a world was being constructed out of duvets, quiches and mayonnaise, easy chairs from Habitat, white emulsion paint and ubiquitous well-scrubbed, second-hand pine kitchen tables. This was less a world of symbolic goods and more an intimate environment alive with new feelings and attitudes.
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The ArtsMarch 2026Contemporary art and ecological transformation in East and Southeast Asia
by Meiqin Wang
This anthology, presenting new research from fourteen scholars, delves into the interplay between contemporary art and ecological concerns in East and Southeast Asia. Focused on the concept of artistic remediation, the book unravels the diverse capacities of art to combat systemic anthropogenic destruction to the environment and ecology. At its core, the book articulates the ongoing ecological transformation in art and art history that embraces a paradigm shift in human-nature relationships, emphasizing interconnectedness of all life forms of the Earth. Bridging art studies, activism, and environmental studies, the book examines how artistic practices in the region have engaged with ecocritical reflection, biodiversity advocacy, sustainable practices, and environmental justice, among others. Providing a platform for critical and timely analysis of artistic interventions in the face of existential crises, the book acknowledges diverse voices of scholars who have situated their scholarship in the cultural and artistic specificities of various societies, locales, and communities in the region.
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Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2026New Labour, new Britain
How the Blair governments reshaped the country
by Glen O’Hara
A bold and balanced re-appraisal of New Labour in power. Rewriting the story of New Labour, Glen O'Hara challenges the prevailing narrative to present a more balanced and positive assessment. New Labour, new Britain is the first book to examine both the intentions behind New Labour's domestic policies and their real-world effects, moving beyond the entrenched left-right debates that have dominated the party's legacy. The period from 1997 to 2007 marked a pivotal moment in modern British history, as New Labour sought to reshape Britain into a more cohesive and forward-thinking society. It saw the rise of socially liberal attitudes and flourishing public services under a government committed to rebuilding and investing in them. Yet New Labour's track record was far from flawless and its legacy remains complicated and contested. Through interviews with key players and rigorous archival research, O'Hara offers a new perspective on Tony Blair's years in power. Painting a fuller picture of New Labour's successes and challenges, he highlights its lasting impact on Britain and offers a thoughtful reassessment of its place in history.
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Literature & Literary StudiesAugust 2023Poison on the early modern English stage
Plants, paints and potions
by Lisa Hopkins, Bill Angus
Many early modern plays use poison, most famously Hamlet, where the murder of Old Hamlet showcases the range of issues poison mobilises. Its orchard setting is one of a number of sinister uses of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural knowledge resulting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and also the many new arrivals in English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts at colonisation. The fact that Old Hamlet was asleep reflects unease about soporifics troubling the distinction between sleep and death; pouring poison into the ear smuggles in the contemporary fear of informers; and it is difficult to prove. This book explores poisoning in early modern plays, the legal and epistemological issues it raises, and the cultural work it performs, which includes questions related to race, religion, nationality, gender, and humans' relationship to the environment.
