An interdisciplinary perspective on the use and abuse of power in political economy.

This book explores the ambivalent nature of power as wielded in economic practices from an empirical perspective. It offers a collection of country-based cases and critically assesses the existing conceptions of power from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Analyzing power at the macro, meso, and micro levels allows the volume to highlight the complexity of political economy in the twenty-first century. Each chapter addresses key elements of a given political economy (from the ambivalence of the cases of former communist countries that do not conform with the grand narratives about democracy and markets to the dual utility of new technologies such as face-recognition), thus providing mounting evidence for the centrality of understanding ambivalence in the analysis of power.

An illuminating and intimate account of the ruptures in life at the bottom of global capitalism and caste hierarchy.

What does the collapse of India’s tea industry mean for Dalit workers who have lived, worked, and died on the plantations since the colonial era? Since the mid-1990s, the colonial era plantation system—and its workforce of more than two million people— has faced a series of ruptures stemming from neoliberal economic globalization. In the South Indian state of Kerala, the Dalit workforce is at the forefront of this crisis and its profound effects on their social identity and economic wellbeing. Plantation Crisis offers a complex understanding of how processes of social and political alienation unfold in moments of economic rupture. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Peermade and Munnar tea belts, the book analyzes the profound, multidimensional sense of crisis felt by those who are at the bottom of global plantation capitalism. Out of the colonial history of racial capitalism and indentured migration, Plantation Crisis opens our eyes to the collapse of the plantation system in India, and the profound impacts this has on the Dalit workers who lived there for generations.

A collection of essays on the career of historical novelist Georgette Heyer.

The historical works of Georgette Heyer inspire a fiercely loyal, international readership, including literary figures such as A. S. Byatt and Stephen Fry. This book brings together an eclectic range of scholars to explore the contexts of Heyer’s career. Drawing upon scholarship on Heyer and her contemporaries, the volume illustrates the ways in which her work sits in a chain of influence and why it remains pertinent to current conversations on books and publishing in the twenty-first century. From the gothic to data science, there is something for everyone in this volume, which celebrates Heyer’s esteemed status amongst historical novelists. 
 

Reassessing educational assessment: how the way we talk about exams and grades exacerbates the problems of pressure, anxiety, and expectation.

Educational assessment is important. Yet it is easy to feel that schooling and other phases of education are shaped entirely by certain assessments and that assessment is only about exam results. The idea that grades can accurately describe the aims and outcomes of education is both reductive and pervasive. This book is about the stories we tell each other about educational assessment and how they impact public trust and confidence in educational assessment. It explains the roots and nature of assessment discourses and proposes a restructuring of the debate to rebuild public confidence. It aims to challenge dominant assessment discourses and demands a more nuanced, informed debate about what happens in and beyond schools, and how this influences public thinking. Using examples from international settings to explore the nature of trust in assessment discourses, this book shows how these discourses can be reframed so that all aspects of the assessment system—policymaking, school planning, home practice with students—can be delivered with confidence.

A highly readable book offering a message of hope for education in an uncertain world.

Compassionate Leadership for School Belonging draws on forty years of international research and professional practice to show how schools can be places of safety and fulfillment, even in the most difficult of circumstances. When belonging is a school’s guiding principle, more young people experience a sense of connectedness and friendship, perform better academically, and come to believe in themselves; their teachers feel more professionally fulfilled, their families more accepted. The originality of this highly readable book lies in its scope. It offers international analysis from the OECD alongside insights from the author’s extensive research in schools, powerfully supported by observational vignettes and drawings from the children, young people, and teachers who have been her co-researchers. The book reveals patterns of dislocation, disaffection, and exclusion, and highlights the points of intervention in policy and practice needed across school systems to create the conditions for school belonging. The methodologies, concepts, and research tools offered can be used by practitioners and researchers in their own contexts and to guide school leaders towards creating their own places of belonging.
 

With Ancient Knowledge Networks, Eleanor Robson investigates how networks of knowledge enabled cuneiform intellectual culture to adapt and endure over the course of five world empires until its eventual demise in the mid-first century BC. Addressing the relationships between political power, family ties, religious commitments, and scholarship in the ancient Middle East, Robson focuses on two regions where cuneiform script was the predominant writing medium: Assyria, north of modern-day Syria and Iraq, and Babylonia, south of modern-day Baghdad. In doing so, she also studies Assyriological and historical method, both now and over the past two centuries, asking how the field has shaped and been shaped by the academic concerns and fashions of the day.

Whether spurred by religious images or history books, hardly a day goes by in South Asia without an accusation of blasphemy. What accounts for the sharp rise in religious offense, and why it is observable across religious and political differences?   

An interdisciplinary study of this trend, Outrage brings together researchers in anthropology, religious studies, and South Asian studies with rich experience in the varied ways religion and politics intersect in this region. Each chapter focuses on a recent case of alleged blasphemy or desecration in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, unpacking the religious sensitivities and political concerns. Collectively, the chapters explore common denominators across national and religious differences, such as the introduction of social media and smartphones, the possible political gains of initiating blasphemy accusations, and the growing self-assertion of marginal communities.
 

Art interpretation in practice, not theory.

How do people make sense of works of art? And how do they write to make others see the same way? There are many guides to looking at art, histories of art history and art criticism, and accounts of various theories and methods, but this book offers something very unlike the normal search for difference and division: it examines the general and largely unspoken norms shared by interpreters of many kinds.
 
Interpreting Art highlights the norms, premises, and patterns that tend to guide interpretation along the way. Why, for example, is the concept of artistic intention at once so reviled and so hard to let go of? What is involved when an interpretation appeals to an artwork’s reception? How can context be used by some to keep things under control and by others to make the interpretation of art seem limitless? And how is it that artworks only seem to grow in complexity over time?
 
This volume reveals subtle features of art writing central to the often unnoticed interpretative practices through which we understand works of art. In doing so, the book also sheds light on possible alternatives, pointing to how writers on art might choose to operate differently in the future.

A complex and nuanced interdisciplinary exploration of children in migration crises.

Children are central figures in narratives of “migration crises.” They are often depicted as either essentially vulnerable and in need of special protections, or suspiciously adult-like and a threat to national borders. This bilingual book, written in English and Spanish, challenges these simplistic narratives. Drawing on collaborations between young migrants, researchers, artists, and activists, this collection asks new questions about how crises are produced, mobility is controlled, and childhood is conceptualized. Answers to these questions have profound implications for resources, infrastructures, and relationships of care. The chapters offer insights from diverse global contexts, painting a rich and insightful tapestry about child migration. They stress that children are more than recipients of care and that the crises they face are multiple and stratifying, with long historical roots. Readers are invited to understand migration as an act of concern and love and to attend to how the solidarities between citizens and “others,” adults and children, and between children, are understood and forged.

Despite changes and challenges, coupledom has long been constructed as the normal, natural, and superior way of being an adult. The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm offers an anatomical dissection of the concept—an analysis of its structure, organization, and internal workings. It explores how the couple-norm is lived and experienced, how it has evolved and mutated, and how it varies among places and social groups. In doing so, the book provides an analysis of changing intimate citizenship regimes in Europe and makes a major intervention in understandings of the contemporary condition of personal life.
 
The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm makes an important contribution to literature on citizenship, intimacy, family life, and social change in sociology, social policy, socio-legal studies, gender/sexuality/queer studies, and psychosocial studies.
 

This volume brings together contributions by key researchers of first-millennium glass from the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe. Taking an integrative approach combining scientific, archaeological, and cultural studies, the contributors illuminate changes in production and distribution and contend that variations in trade patterns reflected larger political, social, and economic developments in the Roman, Byzantine, and Early Medieval/Early Islamic eras.

A cross-disciplinary study on Russian diaspora writing.

Since the start of the massive post-revolutionary exodus, Russian literature has thrived in multiple locations around the globe—but what happens to cultural vocabularies, politics of identity, literary canon, and language when writers transcend the metropolitan and national boundaries? This volume sets a new agenda for the study of Russian diaspora writing, reorienting the field from an excessive emphasis on the homeland to an analysis of transnational circulations that shape extraterritorial cultural practices. Integrating a variety of conceptual perspectives, ranging from diaspora and postcolonial studies to the theories of translation and self-translation, world literature, and evolutionary literary criticism, the contributors argue for a distinct nature of diasporic literary expression predicated on hybridity, ambivalence, and a sense of multiple belonging. As the complementary case studies demonstrate, diaspora narratives consistently recode historical memory, contest the mainstream discourses of Russianness, rewrite received cultural tropes, and explore topics that have remained marginal or taboo in the homeland.
 

Commerce and menstruation from the twentieth century to today.

The menstrual product industry has played a large role in shaping the past hundred years of menstrual culture, including technological innovation, creative advertising, and education in classrooms. How much do we know about this sector and how has it changed in later decades? What constitutes “the industry,” who works in it, and how is it adapting to the current menstrual equity movement?
 
Cash Flow provides a new academic study of the menstrual corporate landscape that links its twentieth-century origins to the current day. Drawing on a range of previously unexplored archival materials and interviews with industry insiders, each chapter examines one key company and brand: Saba in Norway, Essity in Sweden, Tambrands in the Soviet Union, Procter & Gamble in Britain and Europe, Kimberly-Clark in North America, and start-ups Clue and Thinx. The book provides timely insights into a secretive and largely unexamined corporate world and the ongoing political and industry-wide debate about the cost of menstrual products. Cash Flow will be of interest to a wide range of groups within and outside academia, including scholars in the emerging field of critical menstruation studies and menstrual activists.