Thekla Verlag
We are a publisher from Germany with a selected list of children's and young adult books.
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Theart Press
Theart Press is a South African publisher specialisingin inspirational books - including poetry, children's books and biography.
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Geography & the EnvironmentJuly 2024Living the urban periphery
Infrastructure, everyday life and economic change in African city-regions
by Paula Meth, Sarah Charlton, Tom Goodfellow, Alison Todes
The edges of cities are increasingly understood as places of dynamism and change, but there is little research on African urban peripheries, the nature of building, growth, investment and decline that is shaping them and how these are lived. This co-authored monograph draws on findings from an extensive comparative study on Ethiopia and South Africa, in conversation with a related study on Ghana. It examines African urban peripheries through a dual focus on the experiences of living in these changing contexts, alongside the logics driving their transformation. Through its conceptualisation and application of five 'logics of periphery', it offers unique, contextually-informed insights into the generic processes shaping urban peripheries, and the variable ways in which these are playing out in contemporary Africa for those living the peripheries.
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Humanities & Social SciencesAugust 2024The 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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Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2023Globalized 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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Geography & the EnvironmentJune 2024Gendered 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.
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The ArtsJune 2021Lukácsian film theory and cinema
A study of Georg Lukács' writing on film 1913–1971
by Ian Aitken
Lukácsian film theory and cinema explores Georg Lukács' writings on film. The Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukács is primarily known as a literary theorist, but he also wrote extensively on the cinema. These writings have remained little known in the English-speaking world because the great majority of them have never actually been translated into English - until now. Aitken has gathered together the most important essays and the translations appear here, often for the first time. This book thus makes a decisive contribution to understandings of Lukács within the field of film studies, and, in doing so, also challenges many existing preconceptions concerning his theoretical position. For example, whilst Lukács' literary theory is well known for its repudiation of naturalism, in his writings on film Lukács appears to advance a theory and practice of film that can best be described as naturalist. Lukácsian film theory and cinema is divided into two parts. In part one, Lukács' writings on film are explored, and placed within relevant historical and intellectual contexts, whilst part two consists of the essays themselves. This book will be of considerable interest to scholars and students working within the fields of film studies, literary studies, intellectual history, media and cultural studies. It is also intended to be the final volume in a trilogy of works on cinematic realism, which includes the author's earlier European film theory and cinema (2001), and Realist film theory and cinema (2006).
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The ArtsJanuary 2019Realist film theory and cinema
The nineteenth-century Lukácsian and intuitionist realist traditions
by Ian Aitken
'Realist film theory and cinema' embraces studies of cinematic realism and 19th century tradition, the realist film theories of Lukács, Grierson, Bazin and Kracauer, and the relationship of realist film theory to the general field of film theory and philosophy. This is the first book to attempt a rigorous and systematic application of realist film theory to the analysis of particular films. The book suggests new ways forward for a new series of studies in cinematic realism, and for a new form of film theory based on realism. It stresses the importance of the question of realism both in film studies and in contemporary life. Aitken's work will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of film studies, literary studies, media studies, cultural studies and philosophy.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2021Critical theory and feeling
The affective politics of the early Frankfurt School
by Simon Mussell
This book offers a unique and timely reading of the early Frankfurt School in response to the recent 'affective turn' within the arts and humanities. Resisting the overly rationalist tendencies of political philosophy, it argues that critical theory actively cultivates a powerful connection between thinking and feeling, and rediscovers a range of often neglected concepts that were of vital importance to the first generation of critical theorists, including melancholia, hope, (un)happiness, objects and mimesis. In doing so, it brings the dynamic work of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch and Siegfried Kracauer into conversation with more recent debates around politics and affect. An important intervention in the fields of affect studies and social and political thought, Critical theory and feeling shows that sensuous experience is at the heart of the Frankfurt School's affective politics.
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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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Humanities & Social SciencesNovember 2021De-centering queer theory
Communist sexuality in the flow during and after the Cold War
by Bogdan Popa, Gurminder Bhambra
De-centering queer theory seeks to reorient queer theory to a different conception of bodies and sexuality derived from Eastern European Marxism. The book articulates a contrast between the concept of the productive body, which draws its epistemology from Soviet and avant-garde theorists, and Cold War gender, which is defined as the social construction of the body. The first part of the book concentrates on the theoretical and visual production of Eastern European Marxism, which proposed an alternative version of sexuality to that of western liberalism. In doing so it offers a historical angle to understand the emergence not only of an alternative epistemology, but also of queer theory's vocabulary. The second part of the book provides a Marxist, anti-capitalist archive for queer studies, which often neglects to engage critically with its liberal and Cold War underpinnings.
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Geography & the EnvironmentAugust 2020Urban 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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Humanities & Social SciencesSeptember 2021
Critical theory and demagogic populism
by Paul K. Jones
Populism is a powerful force today, but its full scope has eluded the analytical tools of both orthodox and heterodox 'populism studies'. This book provides a valuable alternative perspective. It reconstructs in detail for the first time the sociological analyses of US demagogues by members of the Frankfurt School and compares these with contemporary approaches. Modern demagogy emerges as a key under-researched feature of populism, since populist movements, whether 'left' or 'right', are highly susceptible to 'demagogic capture'. The book also details the culture industry's populist contradictions - including its role as an incubator of modern demagogues - from the 1930s through to today's social media and 'Trumpian psychotechnics'. Featuring a previously unpublished text by Adorno on modern demagogy as an appendix, it will be of interest to researchers and students in critical theory, sociology, politics, German studies, philosophy and history of ideas, as well as all those concerned about the rise of demagogic populism today.
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Geography & the EnvironmentMarch 2021Sanctuary cities and urban struggles
by Jonathan Darling, Harald Bauder
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Humanities & Social SciencesOctober 2006The 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 SciencesJune 2019Critical theory and epistemology
by Anastasia Marinopoulou, Darrow Schecter
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The ArtsFebruary 2006Film theory
An introduction
by Robert Lapsley
Film theory: an introduction offers a highly readable account of film theory and is an indispensable resource for students. The discussion ranges from the late 1960s to the present, a period in which a number of conceptual strands, notably politics, semiotics and psychoanalysis were woven together in an ambitious synthesis. In this book, the authors chart the construction of this synthesis and its subsequent fragmentation, and clearly explain the various intellectual currents which have contributed to it. Divided into two parts, the first covers the conceptual background of film theory, dealing with historical materialism, semiotics and psychoanalysis, whilst in the second the authors concentrate on particular topics such as authorship, narrative, realism, the avant-garde and postmodernism. For this new edition, the authors have added a new foreword, a fully updated and expanded bibliography, and a 60-page Retrospect outlining developments within film theory since the book's original publication in 1988. This Retrospect identifies a number of broad readings of Theory, each with a different perspective on the main content of the book. As such, it provides a new and original mapping of the 'post-theory' moment in this complex and often fractured terrain. Accessible and authoritative, this book is essential reading for students of film theory, or indeed anyone seeking a deeper understanding of modern cinema. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2024The 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.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2021African cities and collaborative futures
Urban platforms and metropolitan logistics
by Michael Keith, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, Susan Parnell
This groundbreaking volume brings together scholars from across the globe to discuss the infrastructure, energy, housing, safety and sustainability of African cities, as seen through local narratives of residents. Drawing on a variety of fields and extensive first-hand research, the contributions offer a fresh perspective on some of the most pressing issues confronting urban Africa in the twenty-first century. At a time when the future of the region as a whole will be determined in large part by its cities, the implications of these developments are profound. With case studies from cities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania, this volume explores how the rapid growth of African cities is reconfiguring the relationship between urban social life and its built forms. While the most visible transformations in cities today can be seen as infrastructural, these manifestations are cultural as well as material, reflecting the different ways in which the city is rationalised, economised and governed. How can we 'see like a city' in twenty-first-century Africa, understanding the urban present to shape its future? This is the central question posed throughout this volume, with a practical focus on how academics, local decision makers and international practitioners can collaborate to meet the challenge of rapid growth, environmental pressures and resource gaps.
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Humanities & Social SciencesOctober 2023The spatiality and temporality of urban violence
by Mara Albrecht, Alke Jenss
