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      • University of Washington Press

        Who We Are   The University of Washington Press is celebrating its centennial this year. We publish compelling and transformative work with regional, national, and global impact. We are committed to the idea of scholarship as a public good and work collaboratively with our authors to produce books that meet the highest editorial and design standards. We value and promote equity, justice, and inclusion in all our work.   What We Publish   We publish in the following core academic areas:   American Studies Anthropology Art History / Visual Culture Asian American Studies Asian Studies Critical Ethnic Studies Environmental History Native American and Indigenous Studies US History Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies   We also publish vibrant nonfiction about the Pacific Northwest and beyond, often in partnership with museums, cultural organizations, and Indigenous nations and communities.

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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
        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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        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
        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.

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        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
        July 2026

        Flappers and the Jazz Age

        Women and leisure in Ireland, 1920s–30s

        by Eileen Hogan, Louise Ryan

        People's ordinary, everyday lives - and more specifically, their leisure activities - are often obscured within existing academic research on 1920s-30s Ireland. This book seeks to redress that neglect by exploring the relationship between identity, recreation, and culture both North and South of the border, with particular attention to women's lived experiences. Leisurely pursuits during this period were commonly overshadowed by religious influence and the nation-building projects in post-partition Ireland. Nevertheless, there existed alternative spaces, where people enjoyed dancing, singing, listening to music, shopping, glamour, reading magazines, swimming, travelling, and going to the cinema. Such activities reflected international trends beyond national borders. This book documents those activities and spaces through a feminist lens and intersectional analysis of gender, class, religion and rural/urban identities. It brings together multi-disciplinary perspectives including cultural studies, architecture, geography, fashion, and musicology. In so doing, we present new insights and advance understanding of this under-researched aspect of Irish history.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2026

        Black socialities

        Urban resistance and the struggle beyond recognition in Paris

        by Vanessa Eileen Thompson

        From author: This is a cutting-edge exploration of black urban politics in Parisian racialized working class and working poor districts, the formation of abolition geography, and the possibilities of new forms of political blackness. In Black Socialities. Urban resistance and the struggle beyond recognition in Paris, Vanessa E. Thompson argues that black urban politics in the French banlieues are multi-racial and spatially grounded towards abolition. Based on a close engagement with urban black activist practices against racial imagery in the city, policing and state racism, and housing insecurity, she shows how radical anti-racism goes beyond struggles for recognition and unfolds alongside new formations of political blackness that is based on urban conviviality. This form of black politics has much to teach us in this current conjuncture of liberal anti-racism and state recognition politics.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2012

        Working–class suburb

        Social change on an English council estate, 1930–2010

        by Mark Clapson

        Not all council estates are the same. A detailed historical account of the birth and social evolution of the Whitley council estate in Reading, Working-Class Suburb challenges many of the more depressing images and cultural stereotypes about council housing in twentieth and twenty-first century England. Key areas covered by the study are housing and politics; community campaigns; women and the corporate life of council estates; the uses of leisure; the relationships between tenants, residents and the local authority, and continuities in working-class life despite economic, demographic and political change. The book will be of interest to anyone studying urban history and social history, to professionals working in the fields of housing policy and housing studies, and to the growing number of academics interested in suburban studies. ;

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        Business, Economics & Law
        January 2023

        What a waste

        Outsourcing and how it goes wrong

        by Andrew Bowman, Ismail Ertürk, Peter Folkman, Julie Froud, Colin Haslam, Sukhdev Johal, Adam Leaver, Mick Moran, Nick Tsitsianis, Karel Williams

        This is the first ever book to analyse outsourcing - contracting out public services to private business interests. It is an unacknowledged revolution in the British economy, and it has happened quietly, but it is creating powerful new corporate interests, transforming the organisation of government at all levels, and is simultaneously enriching a new business elite and creating numerous fiascos in the delivery of public services. What links the brutal treatment of asylum-seeking detainees, the disciplining of welfare benefit claimants, the profits effortlessly earned by the privatised rail companies, and the fiasco of the management of security at the 2012 Olympics? In a word: outsourcing. This book, by the renowned research team at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change in Manchester, is the first to combine 'follow the money' research with accessibility for the engaged citizen, and the first to balance critique with practical suggestions for policy reform.

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        Business, Economics & Law
        October 2004

        Qualities of food

        by Mark Harvey, Andrew McMeekin, Alan Warde

        In this book, the complexity and the significance of the foods we eat are analysed from a variety of perspectives, by sociologists, economists, geographers and anthropologists. Chapters address a number of intriguing questions: how do people make judgments about taste? How do such judgments come to be shared by groups of people?; what social and organisational processes result in foods being certified as of decent or proper quality? How has dissatisfaction with the food system been expressed? What alternatives are thought to be possible? The multi-disciplinary analysis of this book explores many different answers to such questions. The first part of the book focuses on theoretical and conceptual issues, the second part considers processes of formal and informal regulation, while the third part examines social and political responses to industrialised food production and mass consumption. Qualities of food will be of interest to researchers and students in all the social science disciplines that are concerned with food, whether marketing, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, human nutrition or economics.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2021

        The machinic city

        by Marcos P. Dias, Hannah Knox

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