Since the Second World War the world has seen an economic growth spurt unprecedented in history. Economic growth is a necessary but not sufficient condition for improving human development, or in other words, economic growth is an important pre-requisite for the ultimate goal of human well-being. The four empirical essays of this book add to the general debate concerning dynamics of growth, pov…
Migrant protest has proliferated worldwide in the last two decades, explicitly posing questions of identity, rights, and equality in a globalized world. Nonetheless, such mobilizations are considered anomalies in social movement studies, and political sociology more broadly, due to 'weak interests' and a particularly disadvantageous position of 'outsiders' to claim rights connected to citizensh…
Gentrification is reshaping cities worldwide, resulting in seductive spaces and exclusive communities that aspire to innovation, creativity, sustainability, and technological sophistication. Gentrification is also contributing to growing social-spatial division and urban inequality and precarity. In a time of escalating housing crisis, unaffordable cities, and racial tension, scholars speak of …
Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in the north-eastern borderlands of Bangladesh, this book focuses on the everyday struggles of indigenous farmers threatened with losing their land due to such state programmes as the realignment of the national border, ecotourism, social forestry and the establishment of a military cantonment. In implementing these programmes, state actors challeng…
Issue Mapping for an Ageing Europe is a seminal guide to mapping social and political issues with digital methods. The issue at stake concerns the imminent crisis of an ageing Europe and its impact on the contemporary welfare state. The book brings together three leading approaches to issue mapping: Bruno Latour's social cartography, Ulrich Beck's risk cartography and Jeremy Crampton's critical…
Wives and Wanderers in a New Guinea Highlands Society brings to the reader anthropologist Marie Reay’s field research from the 1950s and 1960s on women’s lives in the Wahgi Valley, Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Dramatically written, each chapter adds to the main story that Reay wanted to tell, contrasting young girls’ freedom to court and choose partners, with the constraints (an…
The tropical forests of Oceania are an enduring source of concern for indigenous communities, for the migrants who move to them, for the states that encompass them within their borders, for the multilateral institutions and aid agencies, and for the non-governmental organisations that focus on their conservation. Grounded in the perspective of political ecology, contributors to this volume appr…
New technologies are often implemented before their ethical consequences have been fully understood. In this volume, experts working in the sciences, arts, and philosophy of technology share novel perspectives on how we can
Sounds in Translation: Intersections of music, technology and society joins a growing number of publications taking up R. Murray Schafer’s challenge to examine and to re-focus attention on the sound dimensions of our human environment. This book takes up his challenge to contemporary audiologists, musicologists and sound artists working within areas of music, cultural studies, media studies a…
This book provides an extensive and comparative account of all welfare reforms that occurred during the last three decades in Continental European countries. It reveals unexpected important structural reforms, to be understood as the culmination of a long reform trajectory, analyzed in detail with the tools of comparative historical institutionalism. With these reforms, Bismarckian welfare syst…