Search results for ""Manchester University Press""

Sir Thomas Stukeley, the notorious English courtier, pirate, adventurer and soldier, died at the Battle of Alcazar in Morocco in 1578, while serving in the army of King Sebastian of Portugal. This volume comprises the first modern-spelling, annotated edition of two plays in which he is a major character: George Peele's 'The Battle of Alcazar' (c.1588), and the anonymous 'Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley' (c.1596).In his extensive introduction and commentary, Charles Edelman discusses the plays' authorship, their many textual problems, and what they reveal about Elizabethan performance practices. He also challenges most of the traditional assumptions about them. This edition shows that both works, long held to be unperformable, are instead fascinating and worthwhile representatives of the most exciting age in the history of the theatre.

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Never has a reconsideration of the place of drugs in our culture been more urgent than it is today. Culture on drugs addresses themes such as the nature of consciousness, language and the body, alienation, selfhood, the image and virtuality and the nature/culture dyad and everyday life. It then explores how these are expressed in the work of key figures such as Freud, Benjamin, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, arguing that the ideas and concepts by which modernity has attained its measure of self-understanding are themselves, in various ways, the products of encounters with drugs and their effects. In each case the reader is directed to the points at which drugs figure in the formulations of ‘high theory’, and it is revealed how such thinking is never itself a drug-free zone. Consequently, there is no ground on which to distinguish ‘culture’ from ‘drug culture’ in the first place.Culture on drugs offers a novel approach and introduction to cultural theory for newcomers to the subject, simultaneously presenting an original thesis concerning the articulation of modern thought by drugs and drug culture.

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Angela Carter is best known for her novels, short fiction and journalism, but she also produced a substantial body of writing for media other than the printed page, including five radio plays, two film adaptations, an original television documentary and a number of unrealised scripts for stage and screen. Despite increasing academic interest in Carter's work, these dramatic writings have largely been ignored. In this book, Charlotte Crofts redresses this lack of critical attention by examining Carter's dramatic writings together for the first time (including two unpublished works), giving them a more central position in the Carter canon.Divided into three sections on radio, film and television, the book's interdisciplinary approach is underpinned by reference to exclusive interviews with the directors and producers with whom Carter collaborated, giving a unique insight into processes of adaptation and the technologies of media production. The author demonstrates how, far from being an aberration from her real vocation as a writer of fiction, Carter's writing for radio, film and television is an extension of her self-professed demythologising practice.

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The Henry VI plays are Shakespeare’s earliest, most theatrically exciting plays and in their day, they were among his most popular works. In a story which stretches over thirty years, Shakespeare dramatises the fall of the House of Lancaster and creates some of his most compelling characters, among them the Queen Margaret and the wildly ambitious Richard, Duke of Gloucester (the future Richard III). Modern productions have become landmark works that have defined institutions such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the English Shakespeare Company. This book, the first major study of the Henry VI plays in performance, focuses on the cultural context of modern British productions on stage and screen which have explored Shakespeare’s troubling depiction of England in crisis and related those themes to contemporaneous questions of national identity.

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This fascinating and innovative study explores the lives of people living in early modern Ireland through the books and printed ephemera which they bought, borrowed or stole from others. While the importance of books and printing in influencing the outlook of early modern people is well known, recent years have seen significant changes in our understanding of how writing and print shaped lives, and was in turn shaped by those who appropriated the written word. This book draws on this literature to shed light on the changes that took place in this unusual European society. The author finds that there, almost uniquely in Europe, a set of revolutions took place which transformed the lives of the Irish in unexpected ways, and that the rise of writing and the spread of print were central to an understanding of those changes which have previously only been understood to have been the result of conquest and colonisation. This is a book which will be read not only by those interested in the Irish past but by all those who are concerned with the impact of communications media on social change.

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Available again in paperback, this study offers a rigorous critical re-reading of fictions of humanity, history, technology and postmodern culture.Taking psychoanalysis into cyberspace, the book develops an innovative theoretical perspective on the relationship between bodies and machines to offer a focused re-examination of notions of desire, metaphor, sexed identity and difference and the process of technological transformation.The book unravels one figure in a detailed, lucid and extensive revision of Lacanian psychoanalysis in association with postmodern theory, feminism and deconstruction. Problematising the easy conjunction of human bodies and inhuman technology, the navel opens into networks of desire, history, culture and machines. Linked to the unconscious, to jokes and dreams, navels appear on the bodies of replicants and in the technological matrix, a strange excess in a future imagined in terms of corporeal ‘meat’ or posthuman machine. Exploring the significance of this omphalic excess, the book closely examines postmodern and cyberpunk texts (by Thomas Pynchon, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, William Gibson, Rudy Rucker) alongside detailed readings of contemporary cultural critics and theorists.

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A unique approach to contemporary Latin America, this volume brings together a diverse range of experts to discuss people and issues of core significance in the region.

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What has been the impact of the EU on UK central government? This book explores the ‘Europeanisation’ of the work of civil servants and ministers and how they engage with the EU. Drawing on fresh empirical evidence, the volume offers the first comprehensive analysis of the spreading impact of European integration across government. The study is placed in the context of political divisions over the EU but outlines the often neglected way in which the EU has transformed the business of government. It charts the process from the Macmillan government’s 1961 application to join the European Communities through to the end of Blair’s premiership. The book examines the character and timing of responses across government, covering the core government departments and also those more recently affected, such as the Ministry of Defence. The authors argue that central government has organized itself efficiently to deal with the demands of EU membership despite the often controversial party political divisions over Europe. However, in placing their findings in comparative context they conclude that the effectiveness of UK governments in the EU has been less striking.

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Expanded footnotes designed to help readers from all levels of familiarity with Elizabethan drama. Emphasis on the play as a theatre text - informative stage-directions. Stimulating introduction, which makes something of a break from the orthodox style .

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The Witch of Edmonton has received considerable attention recently both from scholars and critics interested in witchcraft practices and also from the directors in the theatre. The play, based on a sensational witchcraft trial of 1621, presents Mother Sawyer and her local community in the grip of a witch-mania reflecting popular belief and superstition of the time. This edition offers a thorough reconsideration of the text with a complete transcription of the original pamphlet by Henry Goodcole. This edition will be of particular interest not only to students of Renaissance Drama but also of the cultural history of the seventeenth century.. Open University adopted text (for their new Renaissance Drama module).

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Institutionalism has become one of the dominant strands of theory within contemporary political science. Beginning with the challenge to behavioural and rational choice theory issued by March and Olsen, institutional analysis has developed into an important alternative to more individualistic approaches to theory and analysis. This body of theory has developed in a number of ways, and perhaps the most commonly applied version in political science is historical institutionalism that stresses the importance of path dependency in shaping institutional behaviour. The fundamental question addressed in this book, newly available in paperback, is whether institutionalism is useful for the various sub-disciplines within political science to which it has been applied, and to what extent the assumptions inherent to institutional analysis can be useful for understanding the range of behaviour of individuals and structures in the public sector. The book consists of a set of strong essays by noted international scholars from a range of sub-disciplines within the field of political science, each analysing their area of research from an institutionalist perspective and assessing what contributions this form of theorising has made, and can make, to that research. The result is a balanced and nuanced account of the role of institutions in contemporary political science, and a set of suggestions for the further development of institutional theory.

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If one had to identify one central, defining text from modern Mexican culture, it would be Octavio Paz´s famous essay, El laberinto de la soledad. This fully annotated edition includes the complete text in Spanish (with the author’s final revisions), and notes and additional material in English. The editor’s introduction contextualizes the essay and discusses central features: autobiographical and textual origins, intellectual sources, reception and canonization, generic ambiguity, structure, and governing symbols. The intellectual sources identified range from Marx, Nietzsche and Freud to the more contemporary ones of the French College of Sociology (Caillois), the Surrealist movement, the ideas of D. H. Lawrence, previous essays from writers in Mexico (such as Samuel Ramos) and Latin America. Several lines of interpretation are examined to show how the work can be read as a psycho-historical essay, an autobiographical construct or a modern literary myth. Transdisciplinary by nature, this literary essay is both an imaginative construction of personal and national identity, and also a critical deconstruction of dominant stereotypes. It seeks to redefine the complex relationships that exist between psychology, myth, history and Mexican culture. This edition also includes excerpts of the author’s opinions on his essay, a time-line of Mexican history, a selected vocabulary, and themes for discussion and debate. Paz’s first full-length prose work remains his most well-known and widely read text, and this edition will appeal to sixth-form and university students, teachers, researchers and general readers with a knowledge of Spanish.

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Chloe Chard assembles fascinating passages from late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century accounts of travel in Italy, by Northern Europeans, writing in English (or, in some cases, translated into English at the time); it includes writings by Charles Dupaty, Maria Graham, Anna Jameson, Sydney Morgan, Henry Matthews and Hester Lynch Piozzi. The extracts often focus on the labile moods that contribute to the ‘triste plaisir’ of travelling (as Madame de Staël termed it): moods such as restlessness, anxiety, exhaustion, animal exuberance, sexual excitement and piqued curiosity. The introduction considers some of these responses in relation to the preoccupations and rhetorical strategies of travel writing during the Romantic period and introductory commentaries examine the ways in which the passages take up a series of themes, around which the five chapters are ordered: ‘Pleasure’, ‘Rising and sinking in sublime places’, ‘Danger and destabilization’, ‘Art, unease and life’, and ‘Gastronomy, Gusto and the Geography of the Haunted’.

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The 15 writers featured in this new anthology of French short stories represent the best of the genre, from Merimee to the present day. The selection includes writers as diverse as Balzac, Colette, Duras and Boulanger and is designed to introduce students to both the modern French short story and modern French literature in general. The anthology covers a wide range of texts and reflects the contribution of women writers. Not only is there a substantial introduction covering the history of the short story, thematic trends, developments in narrative technique and the notion of genre, but each story also comes with its own preface and notes. The editor's intentions are to enhance students' appreciation and understanding of individual stories at the same time as introducing a variety of critical ideas and perspectives, many of them reflecting recent developments in literary theory.

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This richly illustrated books tells the story of the different ways in which women were represented in Italian Renaissance painting. It is clearly arranged into four distinct areas that relate to the function of the art work: marriage furniture, portraiture, the nude and depictions of female saints. Uncovering the many layers of meaning hidden in the iconography of these paintings, the book reintroduces us to the cultural context in which the artists operated, providing interesting new readings of well-known works by Raphael, Leonardo and Titian, among others.

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Beginning film studies offers the ideal introduction to this vibrant subject. Written accessibly and with verve, it ranges across the key topics and manifold approaches to film studies. Andrew Dix has thoroughly updated the first edition, and this new volume includes new case studies, overviews of recent developments in the discipline, and up-to-the-minute suggestions for further reading.The book begins by considering some of film's formal features - mise-en-scène, editing and sound - before moving outwards to narrative, genre, authorship, stardom and ideology. Later chapters on film industries and on film consumption - where and how we watch movies - assess the discipline's recent geographical 'turn'.The book references many film cultures, including Hollywood, Bollywood and contemporary Hong Kong. Case studies cover such topics as sound in The Great Gatsby and narrative in Inception. The superhero movie is studied; so too is Jennifer Lawrence. Beginning film studies is also interactive, with readers enabled throughout to reflect critically upon the field.

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Beginning classical social theory introduces students and educated general readers to thirteen key social theorists by way of examining a single, exemplary text by each author, ranging from Comte to Adorno. It answers the need for a book that helps students develop the skill to critically read theory.Rather than learning how to admire the canonical theorists, readers are alerted to the flow of their arguments and the texts’ contradictions and limitations. Having gotten ‘under the skin’ of one key text by each author will provide readers with a solid starting point for further study.The book will be suitable as the principal textbook in social theory modules as much as alongside a more conventional textbook as a recommended additional tool for self-study. It will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as educated lay readers.

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The Island Book of Records brings the early years of this iconic record label to life.A fifteen-year labour of love, the volumes will fully document the analogue era of Island. Offering a comprehensive archive of album cover design and photography, together with the voices of the musicians, designers, photographers, producers, studio engineers and record company personnel that worked on each project, the volumes show in unique depth the workings of the label, covering every LP.Featuring material from recent interviews and from media interviews of the time, and each including a comprehensive discography of 45s, the books are lavishly illustrated with gig adverts (very many at venues which no longer exist), concert tickets, flyers, international LP variants, labels, LP and 45 adverts and other ephemera.These LP-sized editions are a collector’s dream, offering a truly unparalleled resource for those interested in music history and a perfect gift for any music lover.

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For the first two decades after the Cold War, Russian naval power hardly featured in the Euro-Atlantic community’s strategic thinking. This began to change in the mid-2010s, as the idea that the Russian navy poses a threat to NATO began to gain ground. That threat took shockingly real form in February 2022, when Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine.The sea in Russian strategy is the first sustained examination of Russian maritime power in the period since the fall of the Soviet Union. It brings together leading specialists from public policy and academia to reflect on historical and contemporary aspects of Russia's naval strategy and capacities.At a time of mounting tensions, which some observers have named the ‘Fourth Battle of the Atlantic’, the book offers an informed and nuanced discussion, taking into account the view from Moscow and how this differs from western perspectives. It sketches a trajectory of Russia’s power at sea and reflects on current capabilities and problems, as well as Moscow’s strategic planning for the future.

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Public understanding of, and outcry over, the dire state of the climate and environment is greater than ever before. Parties across the political spectrum claim to be climate leaders, and overt denial is on the way out. Yet when it comes to slowing the course of the climate and nature crises, despite a growing number of pledges, policies and summits, little ever seems to change. Nature is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate. We remain on course for a catastrophic 3°C of warming. What's holding us back? In this searing and insightful critique, Adrienne Buller examines the fatal biases that have shaped the response of our governing institutions to climate and environmental breakdown, and asks: are the ‘solutions’ being proposed really solutions? Tracing the intricate connections between financial power, economic injustice and ecological crisis, she exposes the myopic economism and market-centric thinking presently undermining a future where all life can flourish. The book examines what is wrong with mainstream climate and environmental governance, from carbon pricing and offset markets to 'green growth', the commodification of nature and the growing influence of the finance industry on environmental policy. In doing so, it exposes the self-defeating logic of a response to these challenges based on creating new opportunities for profit, and a refusal to grapple with the inequalities and injustices that have created them. Both honest and optimistic, The Value of a Whale asks us – in the face of crisis – what we really value.This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11, Sustainable cities and communities

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A strong emotional attachment to the memory of empire runs deep in British culture. In recent years, that memory has become a battleground in a long-drawn ideological war, inflecting debates on race, class, gender, culture, the UK’s future and its place in the world. This provocative and passionate book surveys the scene of the imperial memory wars in contemporary Britain, exploring how the myths that structure our views of empire came to be, and how they inform the present. Taking in such diverse subjects as Rory Stewart and inter-war adventure fiction, man’s facial hair and Kipling, the Alt-right and the Red Wall, Imperial Nostalgia asks how our relationship with our national past has gone wrong, and how it might be improved.

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Who governs Britain? Is Parliament sovereign? Who chooses the Prime Minister? And who enforces the rules?The United Kingdom is in the throes of political and constitutional conflict. Tensions between different Westminster and Holyrood, and between the UK and the European Union, are part of a wider picture of constitutional flux. The United Kingdom is one of only three nations that does not have the principal provisions of the organs of state, nor is how they relate to one another and to the citizen embodied in a single document. Devolution and Brexit have given rise to calls for a codified constitution, but the debate has taken place against a background of confusion and uncertainty as to existing constitutional arrangements. We must first understand what already exists and how our constitution works today. This deeply informed and elegantly written book addresses the problems that have arisen in the context of the greatest political crisis our country has faced in decades.

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ABBA ABBA is one of Anthony Burgess’s most original works, combining fiction, poetry and translation. A product of his time in Italy in the early 1970s, this delightfully unconventional book is part historical novel, part poetry collection, as well as a meditation on translation and the generating of literature by one of Britain’s most inventive post-war authors. Set in Papal Rome in the winter of 1820-21, Part One recreates the consumptive John Keats’s final months in the Eternal City and imagines his meeting the Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli. Pitting Anglo-Italian cultures and sensibilities against each other, Burgess creates a context for his highly original versions of 71 sonnets by Belli, which feature in Part Two.This new edition includes extra material by Burgess, along with an introduction and notes by Paul Howard, Fellow in Italian Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge.

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Ranging from early twentieth century modernist appropriations of non-western art through to the ways in which Mexican muralists in the 1930s negotiated European avant-gardist strategies, and then up to contemporary installation and lens-based practices during the current period of globalisation, this book seeks to understand selected moments in the art of the last one hundred years through the prism of postcolonialism.

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This book addresses a topic of increasing importance to artists, art historians and scholars of cultural studies, migration studies and international relations: migration as a profoundly transforming force that has remodelled artistic and art institutional practices across the world. It explores contemporary art’s critical engagement with migration and globalisation as a key source for improving our understanding of how these processes transform identities, cultures, institutions and geopolitics. The author explores three interwoven issues of enduring interest: identity and belonging, institutional visibility and recognition of migrant artists, and the interrelations between aesthetics and politics, including the balancing of aesthetics, politics and ethics in representations of forced migration.

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Devised as an entertainment for a Tudor monarch, Galatea might be seen, paradoxically, as a parable for our time. Inhabiting a world engaged in a process of change, the characters find themselves locked in a series of transgressive situations that speak directly to contemporary experience and twenty-first-century critical concerns. Same-sex relationships, shifts of authority, and the destabilization of meaning all lend the play a surprising modernity, making it at once the most accessible of Lyly’s plays and the one most frequently performed today. Designed for the student reader, Leah Scragg’s edition offers a range of perspectives on the work. An extensive introduction locates the play in the context of the Elizabethan court, opening a window onto a kind of drama very different from that of more familiar sixteenth-century writers, such as Marlowe and Shakespeare. The latter’s indebtedness to the play is fully documented, while detailed critical and performance histories allow an insight into the work’s susceptibility to reinterpretation.

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Postcolonialism has become one of the most exciting, popular and stimulating fields of literary and cultural studies in recent years. Yet the variety of approaches, the range of debate and the critical vocabularies often used may make it challenging for new students to establish a firm foothold in this area.Beginning Postcolonialism is a vital resource for those taking undergraduate courses in postcolonial studies for the first time and has become an established international best-seller in the field. In this fully revised and updated second edition, John McLeod introduces the major areas of concern in a clear, accessible and organised fashion. He provides an overview of the emergence of postcolonialism as a discipline and closely examines its many established critical approaches while also exploring important recent initiatives in the field. In particular, Beginning Postcolonialism demonstrates how many key postcolonial ideas and concepts can be effectively applied when reading texts and enables students to develop their own independent thinking about the possibilities and pitfalls of postcolonial critique.

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The tradition of Decadent writing in the 19th century remains a fascinating current in the evolution of modern literature. This new anthology brings together key texts from an international range of Decadent writings and writings about Decadence, many of them previously hard to find and some freshly translated from French, German, Italian, and – in a special section on ancient Roman antecedents – from Latin.The selection of texts and extracts, more fully annotated than in other sources, includes key Decadent manifestos and declarations of principle by Théophile Gautier, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde; poems by Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Symons and many others; extracts from prose fictions by J.-K. Huysmans, Aubrey Beardsley and others; critical denunciations, with more discerning responses to the challenge of Decadence; parodies by Max Beerbohm among others of Decadent attitudes and styles; and significant extracts from relevant ancient Roman writings by Petronius and Juvenal.The selection and explanatory notes combine to offer university students of literature and culture at all levels, along with teachers and lay enthusiasts, a rich resource for the understanding of Decadence as an elusive idea and as a literary tradition, in its complex evolution from the 1830s to the fin de siècle and beyond.

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This lively socio-cultural history examines household service, one of the largest, multi-layered, mobile and most indispensable sectors of employment in early modern England. Drawing on a wide variety of cultural sources including literary depiction and self-representation, this study to brings into sharp focus individual life stories of Britain’s servant class. Exploring the relationships between servants and between employers and servants; it depicts the differences between patterns of employment in London and the provinces, and the juxtaposition of servant vulnerability and servant ‘power’. This book places new importance on the household servant as a major agent in cultural change and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of servitude in London and the provinces in the two centuries following the Reformation.

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The importance of money as one of the key variables in the workings of the medieval economy is often overlooked. This new study first provides the reader with a background to the problems of modelling the medieval economy and the value of the Fisher equation of exchange to monetary historians, to the pratical processes of strking coins from silver and gold acquired through foreign trade and to the importance of royal control over mints and exchanges. These theories are then used to analyse how money worked within the economy if the early, central and late middle ages with fluctuations in the size of the circulating medium and the availability of credit acting as either a brake on or a stimulus to economic expansion. A full money economy did not emerge until c. 1300 but its existence and flexibility helped the economy survive the severe shocks of the late middle ages.

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Many definitions of postmodernism focus on its nature as the aftermath of the modern industrial age when technology developed. This book extends that analysis to postmodernism by looking at the status of science, technology, and the arts, the significance of technocracy, and the way the flow of information is controlled in the Western world.

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Was Miliband successful at turning the page on New Labour and at re-imagining social democracy for the post-global financial crisis era? This study maps the ideas - old and new - that were debated and adopted by the Labour Party under Miliband and shows how they were transformed into policy proposals and adapted to contemporary circumstances. It seeks to demonstrate that the Labour Party under Miliband tried but failed to renew social democracy. This failure is one of the several reasons why 'Milibandism' was so overwhelmingly rejected by voters at the 2015 general election. Goes offers a thought-provoking perspective on how political parties develop their thinking and political blueprints that will appeal to scholars and students of British politics and ideologies and to anyone interested in contemporary debates about social democracy.

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Charlotte Brontë: legacies and afterlives is a timely reflection on the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Brontë’s life and work. The new essays in this volume, which cover the period from Brontë’s first publication to the twenty-first century, explain why her work has endured in so many different forms and contexts. This book brings the story of Charlotte Brontë’s legacy up to date, analysing the intriguing afterlives of characters such as Jane Eyre and Rochester in neo-Victorian fiction, cinema, television, the stage and, more recently, on the web. Taking a fresh look at 150 years of engagement with one of the best-loved novelists of the Victorian period, from obituaries to vlogs, from stage to screen, from novels to erotic makeovers, this book reveals the author’s diverse and intriguing legacy. Engagingly written and illustrated, the book will appeal to both scholars and general readers.

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This text provides the first full-length consideration of women’s economic roles in early modern Scottish towns. Drawing on tens of thousands of cases entered into burgh court litigation between 1560 and 1640 in Edinburgh, Dundee, Haddington and Linlithgow, Women, credit and debt explores how Scottish women navigated their courts and their communities. The employments and by-employments that brought these women to court and the roles they had in the economy are also considered. In particular, this book explores the role of women as merchants, merchandisers, producers and sellers of ale, landladies, moneylenders and servants. Comparing the Scottish experience to that of England and Europe, Spence shows that over the course of the latter half of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth century women were conspicuously active in burgh court litigation and, by extension, were engaged participants in the early modern Scottish economy.

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Scotland’s future in the Union is in question. Since Devolution in 1997, there has been a sea-change in Scotland’s sense of itself. A distinct Scottish political culture has emerged: confident, assertive and increasingly divergent from that of its southern neighbours. Yet, as this timely and perceptive book shows, Scottish nationalism has been on the rise since the Second World War. Today, the Scottish National Party are in the ascendant, winning nearly half of all votes cast in the 2019 General Election and most of the seats. The Scottish Parliament has been a legislative trail-blazer, enacting progressive legislation well before England and Wales. And Scotland voted overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union, putting it at odds with much of the rest of the United Kingdom on the most important political decision this century. The country has transformed from the socially and politically conservative climate of the post-war period to a nation contemplating, for the second time, a move to independence – for all the uncertainty and turmoil that would bring. At a time when the country’s future has topped the agenda in Britain and abroad, this book unpicks the complex weave of Scottish politics, society and culture, providing an essential insight into Scotland’s present – and its future.

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It’s hard to escape the feeling that in Britain today nothing works. In the face of mounting inflation and widespread industrial action, this book offers an incisive analysis of the UK’s problems and a new approach to tackling them.Economic growth and higher wages, the traditional responses of mainstream politicians, are simply not enough. This is because the so-called ‘cost of living crisis’ is only the face of a deeper crisis of foundational liveability. The UK is confronted not only with squeezed residual incomes but also failing public services and decaying social infrastructure. The only way out is to embrace a political practice of adaptive reuse that works around the constraints that frustrate mainstream policies.Presenting a new model for the three pillars of liveability – disposable and residual income, essential services and social infrastructure – When nothing works challenges the assumptions of left and right in the UK political classes and offers a fresh approach to the economically visible and politically actionable.

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In this enthralling book, Ben Alderson-Day explores one of the most curious experiences known to humankind: the universal, disturbing sense that someone or something is there when we are alone – the feeling of an unseen presence.When and why do presences emerge? What does this feeling mean and where does it come from? And how can we even begin to understand a phenomenon that can be transformative for those who experience it and yet so hard to put into words? The answers to these questions lie in this fascinating exploration through cutting-edge research in contemporary psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and philosophy.Taking the reader on a riveting and emotional journey, Presence offers remarkable insights into the experience of felt presence and how it relates to a range of medical conditions, including sleep paralysis, dementia and Parkinson’s. This compelling story will stoke the fascination of sceptics and ardent believers alike who are drawn to the mystery of the unseen.

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Zygmunt Bauman is known internationally as the sociologist of postmodernity and ‘liquid’ society. But he was also a serious photographer. This book presents a selection of his black-and-white photographs, together with a range of essays by colleagues, friends and family about his work with images.The book features a mixture of short pieces on individual photographs and longer essays addressing aspects of Bauman’s photography and the life and work of his wife, Janina. These include an essay of Bauman’s from 1989, in which he considers Monika Krajewska’s photographs of abandoned Jewish graveyards in Poland. Also reprinted is an essay by Bauman’s daughter Lydia, taken from the catalogue of an exhibition of the photographs in 2010, and an essay by Keith Tester about Bauman’s interest in film. Jack Palmer discusses the relationship between Bauman’s sociology and his photography, while Peter Beilharz, Janet Wolff, and Antony Bryant and Griselda Pollock offer personal reflections on some of Bauman’s photographs. The book concludes with an essay by Karl Dudman, one of the Baumans’ grandchildren, based on a series of photographs he took in the family home shortly after his grandfather’s death.Janina Bauman appears in a number of ways in the book. Some of the photographs are of her, and several of the short essays discuss her place in Zygmunt’s life and work. Izabela Wagner, biographer of Zygmunt Bauman, presents new material on Janina’s work in the Polish film industry in the post-war period.

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From government ministers and spies to activists, drag queens and celebrities, Odd men out charts the tumultuous history of gay men in 1950s and 60s Britain. It takes us from the earliest tentative steps towards decriminalisation to the liberation movement of the early 1970s. Along the way, it catalogues shocking repression, including laws against homosexual activity and the use of brutal medical ‘treatments’. Odd men out draws on medical data and opinion polls, broadcast recordings, theatrical productions, and extensive interviews with key players, as well as an in-depth analysis of the Wolfenden Report and the circumstances surrounding its creation. It brings to life pivotal moments in gay mens’ cultural representation, ranging across the West End and emerging writers like Joe Orton, the British film industry, the BBC, national newspapers, fashion catalogues and music magazines. Celebrating the joy of gay lives as well as the hardships, Odd men out preserves the voices of a disappearing generation who revolutionised what it meant to be a gay man in twentieth-century Britain.

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In 2020, Christiaan De Beukelaer spent 150 days covering 14,000 nautical miles aboard the schooner Avontuur, a hundred-year-old sailing vessel that transports cargo across the Atlantic Ocean. Embarking in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, he wanted to understand the realities of a little-known alternative to the shipping industry on which our global economy relies, and which contributes more carbon emissions than aviation. What started as a three-week stint of fieldwork aboard the ship turned into a five-month journey, as the COVID-19 pandemic forced all borders shut while crossing the ocean, preventing the crew from stepping ashore for months on end.Trade winds engagingly recounts De Beukelaer's life-changing personal odyssey and the complex journey the shipping industry is on to cut its carbon emissions. The Avontuur’s mission remains crucial as ever: the shipping industry urgently needs to stop using fossil fuels, starting today. If we can’t swiftly decarbonise shipping, we can’t solve the climate crisis.

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At a time of climate crisis, isolation and social breakdown, Driving with strangers is a manifesto to alter how we think about our place in the world. Veteran hitchhiker and lifelong aficionado of hitchhiking culture, Purkis journeys through the history of hitchhiking to explore the unique opportunities for cooperation, friendship, sustainability and openness that it represents.Join Purkis on the kerbside, in search of Woody Guthrie as he examines the politics of the travelling song, deep on a Russian hitch-hiking expedition, or considering the politics of travel and risk on the ‘Highway of Tears’ in British Columbia, Canada. The reader is taken on a panoramic road trip through a century of hitchhiking across different decades, countries and continents.Purkis, a self-styled ‘vagabond sociologist’, is the perfect passenger to accompany you on a journey away from isolation, social distancing, closed borders and into a better understanding of why and how strangers can enrich our lives.

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Many disenchanted Kashmiris continue to demand independence or freedom from India. Written by a leading authority on Kashmir’s troubled past, this book revisits the topic of independence for the region (also known as Jammu and Kashmir, or J&K), and explores exactly why this aspiration has never been fulfilled. In a rare India-Pakistan agreement, they concur that neither J&K, nor any part of it, can be independent.Charting a complex history and intense geo-political rivalry from Maharaja Hari Singh’s leadership in the mid-1920s to the present, this book offers an essential insight into the disputes that have shaped the region. As tensions continue to rise following government-imposed COVID-19 lockdowns, Snedden asks a vital question: what might independence look like and just how realistic is this aspiration?

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This book surveys ‘thrift’ through its moral, religious, ethical, political, spiritual and philosophical expressions, focussing in on key moments such as the early Puritans and Post-war rationing, and key characters such as Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Smiles and Henry Thoreau. The relationships between thrift and frugality, mindfulness, sustainability, and alternative consumption practices are explained, and connections made between myriad conceptions of thrift and contemporary concerns for how consumer cultures impact scarce resources, wealth distribution, and the Anthropocene. Ultimately, the book returns the reader to an understanding of thrift as it was originally used - to ‘thrive’ - and attempts to re-cast thrift in more collective, economically egalitarian terms, reclaiming it as a genuinely resistant practice.

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(B)ordering Britain argues that Britain is the spoils of empire, its immigration law is colonial violence and irregular immigration is anti-colonial resistance. In announcing itself as postcolonial through immigration and nationality laws passed in the 60s, 70s and 80s, Britain cut itself off symbolically and physically from its colonies and the Commonwealth, taking with it what it had plundered. This imperial vanishing act cast Britain’s colonial history into the shadows. The British Empire, about which Britons know little, can be remembered fondly as a moment of past glory, as a gift once given to the world. Meanwhile immigration laws are justified on the basis that they keep the undeserving hordes out. In fact, immigration laws are acts of colonial seizure and violence. They obstruct the vast majority of racialised people from accessing colonial wealth amassed in the course of colonial conquest. Regardless of what the law, media and political discourse dictate, people with personal, ancestral or geographical links to colonialism, or those existing under the weight of its legacy of race and racism, have every right to come to Britain and take back what is theirs.

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What can culture, and its manifestations in artistic and creative forms, ‘do’? Creativity and resistance in a hostile world draws on original collaborative research that brings together a range of stories and perspectives on the role of creativity and resistance in a hostile world. In times of racial nationalism across the world, this volume seeks to understand how creative acts have agitated for social change. The book suggests that creative actions themselves, and acting together creatively, can at the same time offer vital sources of hope.Drawing on a series of case studies, this volume focuses on the past and emergent grassroots arts work that has responded to racisms, the legacies of colonialism or the depredations of capitalist employment across several contexts and locations, including England, Northern Ireland and India. The book makes a timely intervention, foregrounding the value of creativity for those who are commonly marginalised from centres of power, including from the mainstream cultural industries. The authors also critically reflect on the possibilities and limitations of collaborative research within and beyond the academy.

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The relationship between Germany and Russia is Europe’s most important link with the largest country on the continent. But despite Germany’s unparalleled knowledge and historical experience, its policymakers struggle to accept that Moscow’s efforts to rebalance Europe at the cost of the cohesion of the EU and NATO are an attack on Germany’s core interests. This book explains the scale of the challenge facing Germany in managing relations with a changing Russia. It analyses how successive German governments from 1991 to 2014 misread Russian intentions, until Angela Merkel sharply recalibrated German and EU policy towards Moscow. The book also examines what lies behind efforts to revise Merkel’s bold policy shift, including attitudes inherited from the GDR and the role of Russian influence channels in Germany.

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Over recent years, the issues of Brexit, COVID and the ‘migrant crisis’ put Kent in the headlines like never before. Images of asylum seekers on Kent beaches, lorries queued on motorways and the crumbling white cliffs of Dover all spoke to national anxieties, and were used to support ideas that severing ties with the EU was the best – or worst – thing the UK has ever done. In this coastal driftwork, Phil Hubbard – an exiled man of Kent – considers the past, present and future of this corner of England, alighting on a number of key sites which symbolise the changing relationship between the UK and its continental neighbours. Moving from the geopolitics of the Channel Tunnel to the cultivation of oysters at Whitstable, from Derek Jarman’s feted cottage at Dungeness to the art-fuelled gentrification of Margate, Borderland bridges geography, history, and archaeology, to pose important questions about the way that national identities emerge from contested local landscapes.

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This innovative book documents border porosities that have developed and persisted between Greece and North Macedonia over different temporalities and at different localities. By drawing on geology’s approaches to studying porosity, Dimova argues that similar to rocks and minerals that only appear solid and impermeable, seemingly impenetrable borders are inevitably traversed by different forms of passage.The rich ethnographic case studies, from the history of railroads in the southern Balkans, border town beauty tourism, child refugees during the Greek Civil War, mining and environmental activism, and the urban renovation project in Skopje, show that the political borders between states do not only restrict or regulate the movement of people and things, but are also always permeable in ways that exceed state governmentality.

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