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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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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2021

        African 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.

      • 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
        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
        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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        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
        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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      • Trusted Partner
        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. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2021

        The machinic city

        by Marcos P. Dias, Hannah Knox

      • Trusted Partner
        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.

      • Trusted Partner
        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.

      • Trusted Partner
        September 2023

        Being Able to Stop

        Against the delusion of permanent growth

        by Edited by Jean-Pierre Wils

        We moderns were the inhabitants of an age of impetuous forward movement and voracious discontent. Our main virtue was to increase our reach. Increasing our having and accelerating our being were the signposts towards the future. We just could not get enough. Using the blinkers of ignorance and self-anaesthesia, however, we managed to forget the tremendous costs incurred by this intoxication. Now disillusionment has set in. We look to the future with anxiety. We know that we have long since crossed a line and that a revision of our lifestyle is imminent. We have a bad feeling, and doubts about progress often give way to anger and rebellion. Which stocks of the modern narrative should we defend; which would we do better to let go? How will we even "be able to stop"? The path to a different society needs an attractive goal, because without the prospect of a different, better life, we will not move forward. We should start practising immediately. There is no time to lose.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2021

        Remaking the urban

        by Naomi Roux

      • Trusted Partner
        April 2020

        Russlands neuer Spionagekrieg

        Putins langer Arm in den Westen

        by Urban, Mark

      • Trusted Partner
        Lifestyle, Sport & Leisure
        August 2016

        Culture in Manchester

        Institutions and urban change since 1850

        by Janet Wolff, Mike Savage

        This book brings together studies of cultural institutions in Manchester from 1850 to the present day, giving an unprecedented account of the city's cultural evolution. These bring to light the remarkable range of Manchester's contribution to modern cultural life, including the role of art education, popular theatre, religion, pleasure gardens, clubs and societies. The chapters show the resilience and creativity of Manchester's cultural institutions since 1850, challenging any simple narrative of urban decline following the erosion of Lancashire's industrial base, at the same time illustrating the range of activities across the social classes. This book will appeal to everyone interested in the cultural life of the city of Manchester, including cultural historians, sociologists and urban geographers, as well as general readers with interests in the city. It is written by leading international authorities, including Viv Gardner, Stephen Milner, Mike Savage, Bill Williams and Janet Wolff.

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