Geography & the Environment
June 2026
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2026
The spatiality and temporality of urban violence
by Mara Albrecht, Alke Jenss
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Humanities & Social SciencesMay 2026Sexual violence in racial capitalism
by Alison Phipps
Most texts on sexual violence treat capitalism as backdrop or afterthought. In contrast, political economy is the core of this book. Phipps explores the centrality of sexual violence to racial capitalist processes: the enclosure of bodies, the extraction of labour, the expropriation of land and resources, and the disposal of unwanted populations. Importantly, she argues that both sexual violence and sexual fear create social control and surplus value. Through a framework called the coloniality of sexual violence, Phipps conjoins acts of sexual violence and ideas of sexual threat in an analysis of gendered and raced property relations and the split colonial/modern psyche. She argues that fantasies of sexual danger represent the infolded violence of racial capitalism, which is why fear of revolution is often fear of rape. Revolution, however, is always imminent: violence is necessary because power is incomplete.
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Geography & the EnvironmentJune 2025Demystifying 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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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 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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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2025Europeanisation as violence
Souths and Easts as method
by Kolar Aparna, Daria Krivonos, Elisa Pascucci
The book offers a novel lens to situate Europeanisation as violence - through institutions and technologies of development, cultural heritage, and borders, among others - by bringing South and East within a relational frame. Through four inter-related sections, it foregrounds Europeanisation as infrastructural violence and colonial asymmetries, slow violence and the construction of stratified subalternities, epistemic dispossession, and border epistemologies.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2026The promise of violence
Collective memory and the making of revolutionaries in Iran
by Younes Saramifar
Revolutionaries in Iran choose to identify memories of the Iran-Iraq War as their 'collective' memory to mark the war era as the temporal reference in history - the time of times, or sometimes even a time beyond time. Can a sole event and its violence truly become - for some - the all-encompassing, constituting element of history and memory? This book pursues this question and follows revolutionaries in the maze of 'collective' memory to offer a temporal account of the breakdown of happenings - as well as the mending of happenings through the force of remembrance.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2024
Intimacy and injury
In the wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa
by Nicky Falkof, Srila Roy, Shilpa Phadke
Both India and South Africa have shared the infamy of being labelled the world's 'rape capitals', with high levels of everyday gender-based and sexual violence. At the same time, both boast long histories of resisting such violence and its location in wider cultures of patriarchy, settler colonialism and class and caste privilege. Through the lens of the #MeToo moment, the book tracks histories of feminist organising in both countries, while also revealing how newer strategies extended or limited these struggles. Intimacy and injury is a timely mapping of a shifting political field around gender-based violence in the global south. In proposing comparative, interdisciplinary, ethnographically rich and analytically astute reflections on #MeToo, it provides new and potentially transformative directions to scholarly debates this book builds transnational feminist knowledge and solidarity in and across the global south.
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Humanities & Social SciencesOctober 2025Social 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 SciencesAugust 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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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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Geography & the EnvironmentJune 2026
Living the urban periphery
by Paula Meth, Sarah Charlton, Tom Goodfellow, Alison Todes
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2026Vibes as value
Young workers and affective labour in the service economy
by David Farrugia, Julia Coffey, Steven Threadgold, Megan Sharp, Lena Molnar
Vibes as value explores the relationship between subjectivity, labour and value in the hospitality industry, and thereby how youth, gender, sexuality, race and social class are embodied and made productive in the service economy. It shows that the key product of hospitality labour is 'vibes', or moments of enjoyment and relationality co-produced through exploitative relationships amongst workers and consumers. In the process, the book theorises hospitality as a form of affective labour organised through the normative and structural relations of precarious service work. It shows how identity construction produces value within the highly unequal social terrain of the service economy, and how hospitality labour enacts hierarchies of value extending far beyond the limits of the industry itself.
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Humanities & Social SciencesNovember 2025The lure of violence
The Right and the Edwardian crisis in Britain, 1901–14
by Alessandro Saluppo
This book provides a comprehensive examination of conservative and right-wing responses to the Edwardian crisis in Britain (1901-1914). It stresses how the upsurge of right-wing extremism within and outside the Conservative party was accompanied by the crystallization of a culture of violence. The preparation, instigation or threatening of violent acts against all those who appeared to threaten the organic nature and vigour of the national community found expression in a myriad of ultra-nationalist organisations, citizen policing groups, private military associations, and paramilitary formations. The book innovatively reconstructs the belief system and the practices of those right-wing actors, which pursued the goals of military preparedness, "racial regeneration" and imperial unity, while defending the amorphous goals of authority, order and 'national efficiency' against the forces of radicalism and socialism. The book helps to cast light on the bellicose and authoritarian reflexes that traversed British conservatism in the turbulent prewar years.
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The ArtsJanuary 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 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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2018Rediscovering Sex
From pressure to pleasure in bed - an excersise book for men
by Michael Sztenc
Penises are clever guys, sensitive and touchy. At least that’s what Michael Sztenc says. And as a sex and couples’ therapist who has worked on male sexuality for over 25 years, he should know. With practical exercises that have been tried and tested for years, he helps the men who come to him with their problems to develop a sense for their bodies and their own eroticism.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJune 2025Before Gender
Lost stories from trans history 1850-1950
by Eli Erlick
Discover the trailblazing lives of thirty trans people who will radically change everything you've been told about transgender history. Highlighting influential individuals from 1850 to 1950 who are all but unknown today, Eli Erlick shares thirty remarkable stories from romance to rebellion and mystery to murder. These narratives chronicle the grit, joy and survival of trans people long before gender became an everyday term. Organised into four parts, paralleling today's controversies over gender identity - kids, activists, workers and athletes - Before Gender introduces figures whose forgotten stories transform the discussion. These ground-breaking histories include two of the first teens to access gender-affirming medical treatment, a countess who instigated an LGBTQ+ riot forty years before Stonewall and the greatest female billiards player of the 1910s. Bold and visionary, Erlick's debut uncovers these lost stories from the depths of the archives to narrate trans lives in a way that has never been attempted before.
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Geography & the EnvironmentMarch 2021Sanctuary cities and urban struggles
by Jonathan Darling, Harald Bauder
