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Venice Variations
Tracing the Architectural Imagination
Sophia Psarra
University College London, 2018
From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability—how we imagine better urban environments—remain persistently relevant and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organization. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time.

Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city—Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital—Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic "algorithm." The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter, and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the "model city" enduring a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other "Venices" for the future.
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Victorian Alchemy
Science, Magic and Ancient Egypt
Eleanor Dobson
University College London, 2022
An engaging study of how Victorian-era representations of ancient Egypt blended science and mysticism.

With its material remnants paradoxically symbolizing both antiquity and modernity to Victorian audiences, ancient Egypt was at once evocative of ancient magical power and of cutting-edge science, a tension that might be productively conceived of as “alchemical.” Examining literature and other cultural forms including art, photography, and early film, Eleanor Dobson herein traces the myriad ways in which the Victorian fascination with ancient Egypt evoked the entwined forces of magic and science, providing more than a mere setting for Orientalist fantasies and nightmares. From imaging technologies and astronomy to investigations into the electromagnetic spectrum and the human mind itself, this book demonstrates how conceptions of modernity were inextricably bound up in the contemporary reception of the ancient world, illustrating how such ideas took root and flourished in the Victorian era and persist to this day.
 
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Village Housing
Constraints and Opportunities in Rural England
Nick Gallent, Iqbal Hamiduddin, Phoebe Stirling, and Meiling Wu
University College London, 2022
An examination of housing access and affordability barriers in rural England.

Village Housing explores the housing challenges faced by England’s amenity villages, rooted in post-war counter-urbanization and a rising tide of investment demand for rural homes. It tracks solutions to date and considers what further actions might be taken to increase the equity of housing outcomes and thereby support rural economies and alternate rural futures. The authors examine first the interwar reliance on landowners to provide tied housing and post-war diversification of responses to rising housing access difficulties, including from the public and third sectors; second, recent community-led responses; and third, actions that disrupt established production processes: self-build, low impact development, and a re-emergence of council provision. These responses to the village housing challenges are set against a broader backdrop of structural constraints and opportunities to reduce those constraints through planning, land, and tax reforms that can broaden the social inclusivity and diversity of villages and support their economic well-being.
 
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Violent Affections
Queer Sexuality, Techniques of Power, and Law in Russia
Alexander Sasha Kondakov
University College London, 2022
An inciteful analysis of the affective rhetoric surrounding Russian anti-LGBTQ violence.

Passed in 2013, Russia’s “gay propaganda” law cemented the nation’s anti-LGBTQ sentiment into legal rhetoric that has since emboldened countless instances of violence against queer people. Based on an analysis of over three hundred criminal cases of anti-queer violence in Russia before and after the introduction of the law, Violent Affections shows how violent acts are framed in emotional language by perpetrators during their criminal trials, thus uncovering the techniques of power that work to translate emotions into violence against queer people. Utilizing an original methodology of studying legal memes, this book argues that individual affective states are directly connected to the political and legislative violence aimed at policing queer lives. Alexander Sasha Kondakov expands upon two sets of interdisciplinary literature–queer theory and affect theory–in order to conceptualize what is referred to as neo-disciplinary power. The book traces how affections circulate from body to body as a kind of virus, eventually enabling the turn from a memetic response to violent action.
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Violent Extremism
A Handbook of Risk Assessment and Management
Edited by Caroline Logan, Randy Borum, and Paul Gill
University College London, 2023
A practical study of the prevention of violent extremism.

Violent extremism has galvanized public fear and attention. Driven by their concerns, the public has pushed for law enforcement and mental health systems to prevent attacks rather than just respond to them after they occur. The prevention process requires guidance for practitioners and policymakers on how best to identify people who may be at risk, to understand and assess the nature and function of the harm they may cause, and to manage them to mitigate or prevent harm. Violent Extremism provides such guidance.

Over ten chapters, prepared by leading experts, this handbook illuminates the nature of violent extremism and the evolution of prevention-driven practice. Authors draw on the literature and their experience to explain which factors might increase (risk factors) or decrease (protective factors) risk, how those factors might operate, and how practitioners can prepare risk formulations and scenario plans that inform risk management strategies to prevent violent extremist harm.

Each chapter is crafted to support thoughtful, evidence-based practice that is transparent, accountable, and ultimately defensible. Written for an international audience, the volume will be of interest to law enforcement and mental health professionals, criminal justice and security personnel, as well as criminologists, policymakers, and researchers.
 
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Viral Loads
Anthropologies of Urgency in the Time of COVID-19
Edited by Lenore Manderson, Nancy J. Burke, and Ayo Wahlberg
University College London, 2021
A diagnosis of global inequalities exploited by COVID-19 and how we might evolve.
 
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted some lives more than others. While more than half the world’s population experienced physical restrictions in the wake of the virus, Viral Loads reveals how the international response placed disparate burdens on exploited communities across the globe. Contributors from six continents situate the pandemic within a highly connected yet exceedingly unequal world marked by fragmented communities, austere economies, and unstable governments. Ambitious in its scope, Viral Loads insists that medical anthropology must be part of any future efforts to build a new post-pandemic world.  
 
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Visualising Facebook
A Comparative Perspective
Daniel Miller and Jolynna Sinanan
University College London, 2017
Since the growth of social media, human communication has become much more visual. This book presents a scholarly analysis of the images people post on a regular basis to Facebook. By including hundreds of examples, readers can see for themselves the differences between postings from a village north of London, and those from a small town in Trinidad. Why do women respond so differently to becoming a mother in England from the way they do in Trinidad? How are values such as carnival and suburbia expressed visually? Based on an examination of over 20,000 images, the authors argue that phenomena such as selfies and memes must be analysed in their local context. The book aims to highlight the importance of visual images today in patrolling and controlling the moral values of populations, and explores the changing role of photography from that of recording and representation, to that of communication, where an image not only documents an experience but also enhances it, making the moment itself more exciting.
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