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Piccadilly Press publishes books primarily for readers aged 5 – 12 years old. Their books are fun, family-orientated stories that possess the ability to capture readers’ imagination and inspire them to develop a life-long love of reading.
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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.
Passages: On geo-analysis and the aesthetics of precarity is a multi-genre and transdisciplinary text addressing themes such as colonialism, nuclear zones of abandonment, migration control regimes, transnational domestic work, the biocolonial hostilities of the hospitality industry, legal precarities behind the international criminal justice regime, the shadow-worlds of the African soccerscape, and immunity regimes related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This book invites inquiry into today's apocalyptic narratives, humanitarian reason, and international criminal justice regimes, as well as the precarity generated by citizen time and 'consulate time'. The aesthetic breaks emerging from the book's image-text montage draw attention to the ethics of encounter and passage that challenges colonial, domestic, and nation-statist sovereignty regimes of inattention.
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Since the mid-2000s, the harsh reality of call centre employment for a generation of young workers in Portugal has been impossible to ignore. With its endless rows of small cubicles, where human agents endure repetitive telephone conversations with abusive clients under invasive modes of technological surveillance, discipline and control, call centre work remains a striking symbol of labour precarity, a condition particularly associated with the neoliberal generational disenchantment that 'each generation does better than its predecessor'. This book describes the emergence of a regime of disciplined agency in the Portuguese call centre sector. Examining the ascendancy of call centres as icons of precarity in contemporary Portugal, this book argues that call centre labour constitutes a new form of commodification of the labouring subject. De Matos argues that call centres represent an advanced system of non-manual labour power exploitation, due to the underestimation of human creativity that lies at the centre of the regimented structures of call centre labour. Call centres can only guarantee profit maintenance, de Matos argues, through the commodification of the human agency arising from the operators' moral, relational and social embedded agentive linguistic interventions of creative improvisation, decision-making, problem-solving and ethical evaluation.
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In this eye-opening ethnography, we learn about the experiences of Muslim migrant husbands from Pakistan and Kashmir, who marry their British counterparts in the hope of marital and global social mobility bliss. For many, the parallel and intertwined migration and marital journeys do not pan out in the way they had hoped. Many experience precarity and vulnerability within the household and/or in employment, with some even being subjected to harrowing forms of domestic violence. Migrant husbands navigate an increasingly hostile British immigration system not only in public but also in private, at the hands of their wives and in-laws. The ethnography demonstrates how citizenship can be deployed as a performance of white power within single group identity, differentiated through colonial legacies of 'Britishness'.
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This volume puts ambiguity and its generative power at the centre of analytical attention. Rather than being cast negatively as a source of confusion, bewilderment or as a dangerous portent, ambiguity is held as the source of the dynamic between knowledge and experience and of certainty amid uncertainty. It positions human life between the realms of mystery and mastery where ambiguity is understood as the experience and expression of life and part of navigating the human condition. In turn, the tension between the tradition in anthropology of examining cultural certitudes through ethnographic description and efforts to challenge dominant expressions of incertitude are explored. Each chapter presents ethnographic accounts of how people engage individually and collectively with the self, the other, human-made institutions and the more-than-human to navigate ambiguity in a world affected by viral contagion, climate change, economic instability, labour precarity and (geo)political tension.
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The ABC of the projectariat contributes new thinking on and practical responses to the widespread problem of precarious labour in the field of contemporary art. It works as both a critical analysis and a practical handbook, speaking to and about the vast cohort of artistic freelancers worldwide. In an accessible ABC format, the book strikes a unique balance between the practical and the theoretical: the analysis is backed up by lived experience, the arguments are rooted in concrete examples and there are suggestions for constructive action. Roughly half of the entries expose the structural underpinnings of projects and circulation, isolating traits such as opportunism, neoliberalism, inequality, fear and cynicism at the root of the condition of the projectariat. This discussion is paired with a practical account of different modes of action, such as art strikes, productive withdrawals, political struggles and better social time machines. Just as proletarians had nothing to lose but their chains, the projectarians have nothing to miss but their deadlines.
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Souza lays carpet in apartments and Luiza is an actress; their lives are dominated by precarity, failure, and sacrifice. After a chance meeting they feel a mutual interest. It’s hard to say if they fall for each other because that’s not how they move through the world. Still, this is a story, and Souza and Luiza are the gravitational center of a narrator writing about them while sitting in a crowded cafe; she’s interested in exploring people, feelings, but principally, the art of fiction.Souza is a refreshing work situated between ambiguity and voraciousness, it’s exquisite and subtle, intelligent and poetic, and Nina Avellaneda is an author to keep a close eye on.
Vida que resurge en las orillas" (Life that resurfaces on the shores) compiles ten years of the work of Manuel Amador and the Women, Art and Politics Workshop, which has inspired dozens of collective actions to confront violence against women in Ecatepec and the rest of Mexico. The protagonists of these actions are co-authors of the book. The voices and images gathered in this book are one of the most important experiences for the construction of peace and justice through art in recent years. In this insistence appeared a pedagogy from the bodies and the art, a pedagogy of the performance against the damage and the mistreatment; a knowledge as answer before the destruction of lives, an alternative speech of human rights before the precarization and the silencing. Actions of performance that generate, from the body, a ritual... For justice and the knowledge that is born from those bodies, for hope and memory"".
Of Love and Other Lemons is a collection that plays with the form of the personal essay, turning it on its head, insisting on the we versus the i, the distant versus the familiar, even as it can only be about the persona/l. As such it is honest but impersonal, particularly of one but speaking of (if not for) the other, creative nonfiction premised on what remains fictional for women on this side of the third world. Here are, and ultimately, essays about being raised a girl in Manila, feminist in the academe, woman struggling with/in the silences and noise of nation everyday.
