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      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2025

        England’s military heartland

        Preparing for war on Salisbury Plain

        by Vron Ware, Antonia Dawes, Mitra Pariyar, Alice Cree

        A considered investigation of a long-standing army base's impact on the British countryside. What is it like to live next door to a British Army base? Beyond the barracks provides an eye-opening account of the sprawling military presence on Salisbury Plain, drawing on a wide range of voices from both sides of the divide. Targeted for expansion under government plans to reorganise the UK's global defence estate, the Salisbury 'super garrison' offers a unique opportunity to explore the impact of the military footprint in a particular place. But this is no ordinary environment: as well as being the world-famous site of Stonehenge, the grasslands of Salisbury Plain are home to rare plants and wildlife. How does the army take responsibility for conserving this unique landscape as it trains young men and women to use lethal weapons? Are its claims that its presence is a positive for the environment anything more than propaganda? Beyond the barracks investigates these questions against the backdrop of a historic landscape inscribed with the legacy of perpetual war.

      • Trusted Partner
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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.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2014

        Court and civic society in the Burgundian Low Countries c.1420–1530

        by Andrew Brown, Graeme Small

        This volume is the first ever attempt to unite and translate some of the key texts which informed Johan Huizinga's famous study of the Burgundian court, The Waning of the Middle Ages, a work which has never gone out of print. It combines these texts with sources that Huizinga did not consider, those that illuminate the wider civic world that the Burgundian court inhabited and the dynamic interaction between court and city. Through these sources, and an introduction offering new perspectives on recent historiography, the book tests whether Huizinga's controversial vision of the period still stands. Covering subjects including ceremonial events, such as the spectacles and gargantuan banquets that made the Burgundian dukes the talk of Europe, the workings of the court, and jousting, archery and rhetoric competitions, the book will appeal to students of late medieval and early modern Europe and to those with wider interests in court culture, ritual and ceremony.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Popular imperialism and the military, 1850-1950

        by John M. MacKenzie

        Colonial war played a vital part in transforming the reputation of the military and placing it on a standing equal to that of the navy. The book is concerned with the interactive culture of colonial warfare, with the representation of the military in popular media at home, and how these images affected attitudes towards war itself and wider intellectual and institutional forces. It sets out to relate the changing image of the military to these fundamental facts. For the dominant people they were an atavistic form of war, shorn of guilt by Social Darwinian and racial ideas, and rendered less dangerous by the increasing technological gap between Europe and the world. Attempts to justify and understand war were naturally important to dominant people, for the extension of imperial power was seldom a peaceful process. The entertainment value of war in the British imperial experience does seem to have taken new and more intensive forms from roughly the middle of the nineteenth century. Themes such as the delusive seduction of martial music, the sketch of the music hall song, powerful mythic texts of popular imperialism, and heroic myths of empire are discussed extensively. The first important British war correspondent was William Howard Russell (1820-1907) of The Times, in the Crimea. The 1870s saw a dramatic change in the representation of the officer in British battle painting. Up to that point it was the officer's courage, tactical wisdom and social prestige that were put on display.

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        Business, Economics & Law
        March 2009

        Global justice networks

        Geographies of transnational solidarity

        by Paul Routledge, Andrew Cumbers

        This book provides a critical investigation of what has been termed the 'global justice movement'. Through a detailed study of a grassroots peasants' network in Asia (People's Global Action), an international trade union network (the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mining and General Workers) and the Social Forum process, it analyses some of the global justice movement's component parts, operational networks and their respective dynamics, strategies and practices. The authors argue that the emergence of new globally-connected forms of collective action against neoliberal globalisation are indicative of a range of place-specific forms of political agency that coalesce across geographic space at particular times, in specific places, and in a variety of ways. Rather than being indicative of a coherent 'movement', the authors argue that such forms of political agency contain many political and geographical fissures and fault-lines, and are best conceived of as 'global justice networks': overlapping, interacting, competing, and differentially-placed and resourced networks that articulate demands for social, economic and environmental justice. Such networks, and the social movements that comprise them, characterise emergent forms of trans-national political agency. The authors argue that the role of key geographical concepts of space, place and scale are crucial to an understanding of the operational dynamics of such networks. Such an analysis challenges key current assumptions in the literature about the emergence of a global civil society. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        March 2020

        No Place for Taste

        Food Myths and the Rapid Change of Food Culture

        by Manfred Kriener

        This book is not a manual but provides an information kit so we can find our way intelligently and make decisions. Nutrition is a constant talking point, but often there is a lack of knowledge and judgement. Amidst this confusion of facts, Manfred Kriener clarifies the rapid change of our food culture. He covers the entire range from the vegan trend to insect food, from aquaculture to cultured meat. Kriener also focuses on the various obscure quality seals, chaotic labelling on the wine rack and our inconsistency as consumers. The new world of food in eleven chapters, spicy at times, but plenty of food for thought and to whet the appetite.

      • Trusted Partner
        Business, Economics & Law
        January 2024

        Welcome to the club

        by DJ Paulette, Annie Macmanus

      • Trusted Partner
        Business, Economics & Law
        July 2024

        Undermining resistance

        The governance of participation by multinational mining corporations

        by Lian Sinclair

        Why do multinational mining corporations use participation to undermine resistance? Do the struggles of local communities, activists and NGOs matter on a global scale? Why are there so many different global standards in mining? This book develops a new critical political economy approach to studying extractive accumulation, drawing on three detailed Indonesian cases to explain how participatory mechanisms continuously reshape and are reshaped by community-corporate conflict. Findings highlight feedback between local social relations, conflict, transnational activism, crises of legitimacy and global governance. The author argues that corporate social responsibility, community development, 'gender-mainstreaming' and environmental monitoring are neither simple outcomes of corporate ethics nor mere greenwashing strategies. Rather, participation is a mechanism to undermine resistance and create social relations amenable to extractive accumulation.

      • Trusted Partner
        Medicine

        Manual Trigger Point Therapy and Dry Needling for Chronic Pain

        Myofascial medicine as an approach to an unresolved challenge

        by Beat Dejung

        Medicine for the relief of pain has made little progress in the last 50 years. 16% of our population claim to suffer from chronic pain, for which no lasting help can be found, despite years of treatment by different doctors. Trigger point therapy experts have integrated myofascial techniques into their everyday therapy in recent decades and through this they have achieved good results even with complex and chronic problems. In this book, instructors from the Interest Group for Myofascial Trigger Point Therapy (IMTT) in Switzerland present 33 complex cases of patients with chronic pain, whose pain they were able to relieve perma­nently with manual trigger point therapy and dry needling. Using these case studies, double­page spreads with an edu­cational, uniform layout clearly present the diagnosis, pathophysiology and chronifcation of myofascial pain syn­dromes and, in conclusion, describe encouraging and sur­prising successes despite previous therapy resistance.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Payment and philanthropy in British healthcare, 1918–48

        by George Campbell Gosling, Keir Waddington

        This book is available as an open access ebook under a CC-BY-NC-ND licence. At a time when payment is claiming a greater place than ever before within the NHS, this book provides the first in-depth investigation of the workings, scale and meaning of payment in British hospitals before the NHS. There were only three decades in British history when it was the norm for patients to pay the hospital; those between the end of the First World War and the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948. Payment played an important part in redefining rather than abandoning medical philanthropy, based on class divisions and the notion of financial contribution as a civic duty. With new insights on the scope of private medicine and the workings of the means test in the hospital, as well as the civic, consumer and charitable meanings associated with paying the hospital, Gosling offers a fresh perspective on healthcare before the NHS and welfare before the welfare state.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2017

        Welsh missionaries and British imperialism

        The Empire of Clouds in north-east India

        by Andrew May

        In 1841, the Welsh sent their first missionary, Thomas Jones, to evangelise the tribal peoples of the Khasi Hills of north-east India. This book follows Jones from rural Wales to Cherrapunji, the wettest place on earth and now one of the most Christianised parts of India. As colonised colonisers, the Welsh were to have a profound impact on the culture and beliefs of the Khasis. The book also foregrounds broader political, scientific, racial and military ideologies that mobilised the Khasi Hills into an interconnected network of imperial control. Its themes are universal: crises of authority, the loneliness of geographical isolation, sexual scandal, greed and exploitation, personal and institutional dogma, individual and group morality. Written by a direct descendant of Thomas Jones, it makes a significant contribution in orienting the scholarship of imperialism to a much-neglected corner of India, and will appeal to students of the British imperial experience more broadly.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2009

        Design and popular entertainment

        by Christopher Breward, Christopher Frayling, Emily King, Bill Sherman

        Design and Popular Entertainment offers a selection of nine essays that examine the range of design for popular entertainment, from theatre and film, to television and radio. Investigating entertainment design from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s, the book is divided into two sections. The first addresses the 'hardware' of popular entertainment, in other words the objects through which images, sound and performance are transmitted. The second explores the construction of cinematic and televisual imagery and the design of objects for the screen, the 'software' of entertainment. In so doing it offers important insights into this little explored aspect of design. Topics covered by the collection include the design of theatrical lighting and stage sets, cinema and radio design, the representation of designers within film, and the relationship between design and television. The book's concentration on the 1950s and 1960s reflects the profound changes in modes of entertainment that took place during that period, in particular the spread of television, which not only attracted a huge popular audience but also stimulated experimental designing approaches and thinking. With particular focus on the way that both the objects and the construction of entertainment have altered audience's experience, the essays present a novel approach to the subject. This book will be of particular interest to students and teachers working in design and cultural history as well as film and theatre studies. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2013

        The House of Lords

        by Donald Shell

        The House of Lords has undergone significant change in recent years. The exclusion of the great majority of the hereditary peers in 1999 was intended as the first step in a two-stage reform process. But further reform has proved difficult to achieve and remains a matter of considerable controversy. Meanwhile, the present House has become more assertive, and is now widely recognised as making a substantial contribution to the overall work of parliament. This book, available in paperback for the first time, examines the role of the contemporary House. Who are the peers, and who among the total of over 700 are the active peers? How does the House work, and how effective is it in revising legislation and in scrutinising the work of government? Why has fundamental reform of the House been so long delayed, and what are the main arguments about reform today? These are among the questions discussed in this timely volume, which seeks to locate discussion about the House of Lords in the wider context of a clear understanding of the developing British constitution. This book will be of great value to students and academics in British politics, as well as to serious journalists and researchers. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2024

        Governing the military

        by Carlos Solar

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        November 2024

        'The industrialized designer'

        Gender, identity and professionalization in Britain and the United States, 1930-80

        by Leah Armstrong

        What does it mean to be called an industrial designer? This book traces the remarkable rise of this professional identity in historical perspective from a position of anonymity in the early twentieth century, to mid-century professionalisation, to decline and disintegration by 1980. Drawing on new, extensive, original archival research, it uncovers the history of a profession in a state of re-invention, 1930-1980 in Britain and the United States. The book tests assumptions about the relationship between the professions in the two countries, bringing them into comparative historical perspective for the first time. The gendered dynamics of professionalisation and their interaction with the representation of the heroic male designer are interrogated and critically examined. Building on new gender perspectives to the history of the industrial design profession, the book calls for a re-examination of the limits and boundaries of what constitutes professional identity and work.

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