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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2023

        Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan

        Young men and the digital economy

        by Hannah Schilling

        Digital technologies promise efficiency and comfort, but the smoothness of platform services relies on the hidden social labour of those who keep the gig economy running. This book presents a comparative ethnography of young men making a living through digital technologies: selling mobile airtime in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, and app-based delivery riders in Berlin, Germany. These case studies explore the significance of symbolic capital in urban youth's social existence and organisation of livelihood in the digital economy, and the technological mechanisms producing a new form of urban precarity. Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan puts forward an original comparative approach to develop a global urban sociology for the digital era. It provides an innovative analytical toolbox that decentres discussions of precarity from the standard of a normal employment contract. With its focus on symbolic capital, the ethnography shows the consequences of the proliferating gig economy for status struggles among urban youth, and carefully embeds the densification of software and services into the socio-material relations on which these new urban infrastructures are built.

      • Trusted Partner
        Geography & the Environment
        June 2024

        Gendered urban violence among Brazilians

        Painful truths from Rio de Janeiro and London

        by Cathy McIlwaine, Paul Heritage, Miriam Krenzinger Azambuja, Moniza Rizzini Ansari, Eliana Sousa Silva, Yara Evans

        This book aims to examine the nature of and resistance to gendered urban violence among Brazilian women in London and in the favelas of Maré, Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on the conceptualisation of translocational gendered urban violence framework, it highlights the importance of examining direct forms of gender-based violence across private, public and transnational spheres as interlinked with structural, symbolic and infrastructural violence. The book also explores the embodied and spatialised nature of gendered urban violence, explored through artistic engagements and arts-based methods. In developing a translocational feminist tracing methodological and epistemological approach across the social sciences and the arts, the book argues for the importance of a collaborative approach among academic, civil society organisations, artists and creative researchers with a view to engendering empathetic transformation to address gendered urban violence in the long-term.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        October 2023

        The penny politics of Victorian popular fiction

        by Rob Breton

        Penny politics offers a new way to read early Victorian popular fiction such as Jack Sheppard, Sweeney Todd, and The Mysteries of London. It locates forms of radical discourse in the popular literature that emerged simultaneously with Brittan's longest and most significant people's movement. It listens for echoes of Chartist fiction in popular fiction. The book rethinks the relationship between the popular and political, understanding that radical politics had popular appeal and that the lines separating a genuine radicalism from commercial success are complicated and never absolute. With archival work into Newgate calendars and Chartist periodicals, as well as media history and culture, it brings together histories of the popular and political so as to rewrite the radical canon.

      • Trusted Partner
        July 2023

        Urban Pest Management

        An Environmental Perspective

        by Partho Dhang

        The management and control of pests in the urban environment in the 21st Century faces many challenges. Pest populations adapt to changing conditions brought about by environmental changes caused by global warming, human population growth, and increased pollution. Urban pests are able to expand their ranges, densities, and habitats, sometimes causing large-scale damage and disease. This book provides collective insights from academic and industry experts on perspectives concerning urban pest management and regulatory innovations arising from the rapid onset of recent environmental challenges. Chapter topics address pest biology, advances in urban pest management practices, emerging urban pest control developments, new technologies, and regulations. The book describes new methods of pest control, their impacts on human health and the environment, and strategies for integrated management limiting the use of chemicals. It provides a practical resource for researchers and policy makers in pest management, urban health, medical entomology and environmental science. · An up-to-date and comprehensive resource on environmental urban pest management · Designed to appeal to pest control operators, public health professionals, and a range of field workers, as well as researching academics and graduate students · Brings both academic and industry experts together in one volume

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2024

        The machinic city

        Media, performance and participation

        by Marcos P. Dias

        As human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital media is overlaid onto the urban landscape, The machinic city argues that performance art can help us to understand contemporary urban living. Dias analyses interventions from performance artists such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces for deliberation and reflection on urban life, and speculation on its future. While cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes mediated by technical machines, Dias analyses the performative potential of the aesthetic machine, as it assembles with media, capitalist, human and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban space is examined through its different components - design, city and technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2006

        The experience of urban poverty, 1723–82

        Parish, charity and credit

        by Alannah Tomkins

        This comparative study of urban poverty is the first to chart the irregular pulse of poverty's encounters with officialdom. It exploits an unusual methodology to secure new perspectives from familiar sources. The highly localised characteristics of the welfare economy generated a peculiarly urban environment for the poor. Separate chapters examine the parameters of workhouse life when the preconceptions of contemporaries have been stripped away; the reach of institutional charities such as almshouses, schools and infirmaries; and the surprisingly broad clientele of urban pawnbrokers. Detailed analysis of the poor is achieved via meticulous matching of individuals who fell within the purview of two or more authorities. The result is a unique insight into the survival economics of urban poverty, arising not from a tidy network of welfare but from a loose assembly of options, where the impoverished positioned themselves repeatedly to fit official, philanthropic, or casual templates of the 'deserving'. This book will be essential reading for historians of English poverty and welfare, and eighteenth-century social and economic life. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Geography & the Environment
        August 2020

        Urban transformations and public health in the emergent city

        by Michael Keith, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, Susan Parnell

        The imperatives of public health shaped our understanding of the cities of the global north in the first industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are doing so again today, reflecting new geographies of the urban age of the twenty-first. Emergent cities in parts of the globe experiencing most profound urban growth face major problems of economic, ecological and social sustainability when making sense of new health challenges and designing policy frameworks for public health infrastructures. The rapid evolution of complex 'systems of systems' in today's cities continually reconfigure the urban commons, reshaping how we understand urban public health, defining new problems and drawing on new data tools for analysis that work from the historical legacies and geographical variations that structure public health systems.

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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2021

        African cities and collaborative futures

        Urban platforms and metropolitan logistics

        by Michael Keith, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, Susan Parnell

        This groundbreaking volume brings together scholars from across the globe to discuss the infrastructure, energy, housing, safety and sustainability of African cities, as seen through local narratives of residents. Drawing on a variety of fields and extensive first-hand research, the contributions offer a fresh perspective on some of the most pressing issues confronting urban Africa in the twenty-first century. At a time when the future of the region as a whole will be determined in large part by its cities, the implications of these developments are profound. With case studies from cities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania, this volume explores how the rapid growth of African cities is reconfiguring the relationship between urban social life and its built forms. While the most visible transformations in cities today can be seen as infrastructural, these manifestations are cultural as well as material, reflecting the different ways in which the city is rationalised, economised and governed. How can we 'see like a city' in twenty-first-century Africa, understanding the urban present to shape its future? This is the central question posed throughout this volume, with a practical focus on how academics, local decision makers and international practitioners can collaborate to meet the challenge of rapid growth, environmental pressures and resource gaps.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2025

        Through the fiction of Phebe Gibbes (1764–90)

        Women, alienation, and prodigality in the long eighteenth century

        by Kathryn Freeman

        Through the Fiction of Phebe Gibbes places this prolific, newly recovered English writer at the centre of the revolutionary period. Gibbes's novels mark the struggles of women for agency in an expanding British empire, from the Seven Years' War to revolutions in American, Haiti and France. With Gibbes as a nexus in a lineage of women writers from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, Kathryn S. Freeman offers a valuable perspective on the 'long eighteenth century', with Gibbes' own evolution mirroring that of the larger period. The study traces the development of Gibbes' authorial voice from satire to irony through a range of female characters subverting patriarchal oppression. Freeman guides the reader through patterns of narrative voice, concerns with gender and sexuality, and elements of wordplay through detailed discussion of five novels representing Gibbes' evolving representation of a subversive female subjectivity.

      • Trusted Partner
        Science & Mathematics
        March 2022

        Key Questions in Urban Pest Management

        A Study and Revision Guide

        by Partho Dhang, Philip Koehler, Roberto Pereira, Daniel D Dye II

        Urban pests are common all over the world. These include cockroaches, flies, mosquitoes, bed bugs, ticks, fleas, ants, termites, rodents and others. These pests thrive in human structures, where there is food, warmth and places to hide. Urban pests are one of the leading causes of illnesses in humans due to allergies, bites, food contamination and phobias. They can also cause significant damage to property and structures. Knowledge and training in this field is vital for professional and trainee pest managers. This book is specifically intended to provide an aid to such candidates. The book contains 500 multiple-choice questions (and answers) grouped into the following major topic areas: · The history of urban entomology · Household pests · Cockroaches · Flies · Mosquitoes · Bed bugs · Termites · Sporadic pests · Stored product pests · Vertebrate pests · Pesticides and pesticide formulations · Handling pesticides · Integrated Pest Control Produced in a convenient format that can be used at any time in any place, the book allows the reader to learn and revise the subject and much more. Its structure allows the study of one topic area at a time, progressing through a simple introduction followed by key revision questions, many of which require students to use their practical knowledge. The answers to each of the questions are provided at the end with short explanations wherever appropriate.

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        Science & Mathematics
        November 2020

        Urban Ecology

        Its Nature and Challenges

        by Pedro Barbosa

        This book provides a detailed examination of specific issues in urban ecology which are of great interest to professional ecologists, researchers, students and the general public. Written by a team of international experts the book presents a series of issue-based essays and assumes that urban ecology reflects the natural forces in effect in the habitats described and provides important, succinct, and informative introductions to critical topics. Examples of topics included are: Relative Success of Invasive Species in Urban vs. Non-Urban Habitats, Urban Habitats: Who Like Them More; Vertebrates or Invertebrates?, Unintended Consequences in Urban Habitats Compared to Non-Urban Habitats, Protecting Pollinators in the Urban Environment, Climate Change and Urban Environments, How Urban Conditions Influence Ecological Interactions.

      • Trusted Partner
        Teaching, Language & Reference
        October 2023

        Crafting crime fiction

        by Henry Sutton

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2024

        The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia

        Engaging in everyday struggle

        by Alexandrina Vanke

        Despite the intense processes of deindustrialisation around the world, the working class continues to play an important role in post-industrial societies. However, working-class people are often stigmatised, morally judged and depicted negatively in dominant discourses. This book challenges stereotypical representations of workers, building on research into the everyday worlds of working-class and ordinary people in Russia's post-industrial cities. The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia is centred on the stories of local communities engaged in the everyday struggles that occur in deindustrialising settings under neoliberal neo-authoritarianism. The book suggests a novel approach to everyday life in post-industrial cities. Drawing on an ethnographic study with elements of arts-based research, the book presents a new genre of writing about workers influenced by the avant-garde documentary tradition and working-class literature.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        October 2012

        Narration in nineteenth-century French short fiction

        Prosper Mérimée to Marcel Schwob

        by Peter Cogman

        The short fiction that flourished in nineteenth-century France has attracted relatively little critical attention compared with the novel. This study focuses on some key stories by major authors of contes and nouvelles from the late 1820s to the 1890s, taking as a starting-point, aspects of narrative technique as a way of exploring not just characteristic strategies of short fiction, but also the ends to which they were put: recurrent themes, and the vision of mankind. Each chapter looks in some detail at three or four stories, referring briefly to other tales for illustration. The underlying point that emerges from this study is that the interest of a tale lies in the telling, not the events. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        December 2018

        Defensing the Earth

        by Yang Peng

        Yang Peng's alien series original science fiction works. The book continues Yang Peng's consistent style of creation—incredible imagination, extraordinary exaggeration, unrepeatable comedy, bizarre plots, sci-fi elements, relaxing, humorous, and thrilling fun. At the same time, courage, integrity, kindness, unity, patriotism, and environmental protection are integrated into the delightful storytelling. The theme is positive, setting a good example for the children. A hundred years later, a massive earthquake broke the box of the imprisoned aliens, and the aliens escaped! They raided the Antarctic research station and ransacked the Golden State to worship the Golden City, making a large number of vicious incidents. Their next goal is the country that the children have built—the brave city of the capital of Papa, and a new battle is about to start. Can the young heroes of Papa State resist the invasion of aliens and save the earth?

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