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      • Kia Persia Literary Agency

        KIA Literary Agency was founded in 2002 in Tehran with the aim of promoting and supporting fine literary works in all forms throughout the world. It brings about opportunities for authors, illustrators, publishers, translators, and those involved in this field to meet their counterparts. And at the same time, it introduces them to the world and will inform them of all the related events which take place in the world of art and literature.

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      • 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.

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        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.

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        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.

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        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.

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        Geography & the Environment
        August 2020

        Urban transformations and public health in the emergent city

        by Michael Keith, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, Susan Parnell

        The imperatives of public health shaped our understanding of the cities of the global north in the first industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are doing so again today, reflecting new geographies of the urban age of the twenty-first. Emergent cities in parts of the globe experiencing most profound urban growth face major problems of economic, ecological and social sustainability when making sense of new health challenges and designing policy frameworks for public health infrastructures. The rapid evolution of complex 'systems of systems' in today's cities continually reconfigure the urban commons, reshaping how we understand urban public health, defining new problems and drawing on new data tools for analysis that work from the historical legacies and geographical variations that structure public health systems.

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        The Arts
        March 2026

        Abnormal peripheries

        Slovak and Czech performance art in the 1960s and 70s

        by Sam Cermak

        This book traces an early history of performance art from the former Czechoslovakia, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in the context of the Prague Spring and the subsequent policy of Normalization that brought on cultural censorship, prosecution, and state violence against artists. The book draws on Czech and Slovak scholarship as well as primary research in archives, interviews, and fieldwork to dispel misreadings of visual and cultural idioms in pre-existing Anglophone scholarship about the region. Although the former Soviet Bloc is often equated with repression and lack of experimental art in public spaces, performance artists within the former Socialist Czechoslovakia often used public, semi-public and clandestine spheres to create their performances. By analysing both works of established artists such as Aktual, Alex Mlynárcik, Petr Stembera, Jan Mlcoch, as well as under-theorised practitioners including Luba Lauffová, Karel Miler, Temporary Society of Intense Living, and Crusaders School of Pure Humour with no Joke, this book analyses how performance can survive and sometimes even thrive on the background of a politically oppressive regime. Cermak tells a unique story of localised resistance to a monolithic public sphere through artistic intervention, a closely knit community, artistic exchange, and agonistic reframing of socialism as a philosophy rather than state ideology.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2026

        Border 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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        The Arts
        January 2026

        David Simon's American City

        by Mikkel Jensen

        This book examines the television serials created by influential showrunner David Simon. The book argues that Simon's main theme is the state of the contemporary American city and that all of his serials (barring one about the Iraq War) explore different facets of the metropolis. Each series offers distinctly different visions of the American city, but taken together they represent a sustained and intricate exploration of urban problems in modern America. From deindustrialisation in The Wire and residential segregation in Show Me a Hero to post-Katrina New Orleans in Treme and the transformation of the urban core in The Deuce, David Simon's American city traces the urban through-line in Simon's body of work. Based on sustained analysis of these serials and their engagement with contemporary politics and culture, David Simon's American city offers a compelling examination of one of television's most arresting voices.

      • 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. ;

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2023

        Border 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.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2025

        Urbicide 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.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2026

        The Carolingian South

        by Sam Ottewill-Soulsby, Graeme Ward

        The Carolingian South turns the Frankish world upside down by taking as its subject the lands of the Carolingian empire south of the Loire and the Alps. It assembles an international group of scholars from different disciplines to examine how the Carolingians defined and were defined by this region. This book asks how Carolingian power was created and negotiated in the south. It views the Frankish empire from the perspective of the Christian and Muslim polities of the Mediterranean, while also following the movement of people and ideas through the endlessly fascinating world that they made.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2021

        Remaking the urban

        by Naomi Roux

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        March 1983

        Borderline-Störungen und pathologischer Narzißmus

        by Otto F. Kernberg, Hermann Schultz

        Otto F. Kernberg gibt in diesem Buch zunächst eine umfassende systematische Übersicht über die symptomatologischen, ich-strukturellen und dynamisch-genetischen Merkmale der Borderline-Persönlichkeitsstörungen. Danach geht er auf typische Übertragungs-Gegenübertragungs-Konstellationen bei Borderline-Patienten ein und stellt eine besondere modifizierte Form analytischer Psychotherapie als Behandlungsmethode der Wahl vor. Eine ausführliche Erörterung prognostischer und differentialdiagnostischer Fragen schließt sich an. Dem bei Borderline-Patienten so häufigen inneren Leeregefühl ist ein eigenes Kapitel gewidmet. Im zweiten Teil des Buches entwickelt Kernberg ein eigenes Konzept narzißtischer Persönlichkeitsstörungen, deren Ursache er in einer pathologischen Abwehrorganisation sieht, die tiefliegende archaische Trieb- und Beziehungskonflikte verdeckt. Die abschließenden Kapitel behandeln praktisch-klinische Probleme bei narzißtischen Persönlichkeitsstörungen und versuchen eine Klärung der Unterschiede zwischen normalem und pathologischem Narzißmus.

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