Urban Claims and the Right to the City explores how contested processes of urban development, and the rights of city dwellers, are understood and interpreted from the perspective of women and men working, in different ways, at the grassroots in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, and London, UK. In doing so, it represents the grounded voices of authors whose work and lives mean that they engage, on a daily basis, with issues related to housing and spatial rights, and identity struggles around race, gender, disability, sexuality, citizenship, and class.
 

An anthropological account of the experience of age and ageing in an inner-city neighborhood in Milan.

This book is an anthropological account of the experience of age and ageing in an inner-city neighborhood in Milan, exploring the relationship between ageing and technology amidst a backdrop of rapid global technological innovation, including the advent of mobile health, smart cities, and a number of wider socioeconomic and technological transformations. Through extensive urban and digital ethnographic research in Milan, Shireen Walton shows how the smartphone has become a “constant companion” in contemporary life, accompanying people throughout the day and through individual and collective experiences. The volume argues that ageing with smartphones in the contemporary urban Italian context is about living with ambiguity, change, and contradiction, as well as developing curiosities about a changing world, our changing selves, and changing relationships with others.
 

An anthropological account of the experience of aging in the smartphone era in China.

The current oldest generation in Shanghai was born at a time when the average household could not afford electric lights, but today they can turn their lights off using smartphone apps. Grounded in extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban China tackles the intersection between the “two revolutions” experienced by the older generation in Shanghai: the contemporary smartphone-based digital revolution and the earlier communist revolutions and argues that we can only understand the smartphone revolution if we first appreciate the long-term consequences of these people’s experiences during the communist revolutions. Supported by detailed ethnographic material, the observations and analysis here provide a panorama view of the social landscape of contemporary China, addressing such topics the digital and everyday life, aging and healthcare, intergenerational relations and family development, community building and grassroots organizations, collective memories, and political attitudes among ordinary Chinese people.
 

A nuanced exploration of the effects of the transition to market democracy in Mongolia’s remotest areas.
 
In the early 1990s, Mongolia began a transition from socialism to a market democracy. In the process, the country became more than ever dependent on international mining revenue. Nearly thirty years later, many of Mongolia’s poor and rural feel that, rather than share in the prosperity the transition was supposed to spread, they have been forgotten.
 
Moral Economic Transitions in the Mongolian Borderlands analyzes this period of change from the viewpoint of the rural township of Magtaal on the Chinese border. After the end of socialism, the population of this resource-rich area found itself without employment or state institutions yet surrounded by lush nature and mere kilometers from the voracious Chinese market. A two-tiered resource-extractive political-economic system developed. At the same time as large-scale, formal, legally sanctioned conglomerates arrived to extract oil and other resources, local residents grew increasingly dependent on the Chinese-funded informal, illegal cross-border wildlife trade. More than a story about rampant capitalist extraction in the resource frontier, this book intimately details the complex inner worlds, moral ambiguities, and emergent collective politics constructed by individuals who feel caught in political-economic shifts that are largely outside of their control.
 

An examination of contemporary inclusive pedagogy and how it is failing students with special educational needs and disabilities. 

Inclusion conjures images of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) learning in classes alongside peers in a mainstream school. For pupils in the UK with high-level SEND, who have an Education, Health and Care Plan (formerly a Statement), this implies an everyday educational experience similar to that of their typically developing classmates. Yet in vital respects, they are worlds apart.
 
Based on the UK’s largest observation study of pupils with high-level SEND, this book exposes how attendance at a mainstream school is no guarantee of receiving a mainstream education. Observations of nearly 1,500 lessons in English schools show that these students’ everyday experience of school is characterized by separation and segregation. Furthermore, interviews with nearly five hundred pupils, parents, and school staff reveal the effect of this marginalization on the quality of their education. The book argues that inclusion is an illusion. The way schools are organized and how classrooms are composed creates a form of structural exclusion that preserves mainstream education for typically developing pupils and justifies offering a diluted pedagogy for pupils with high-level SEND. Ultimately, the book suggests why a more authentic form of inclusion is needed, and how it might be achieved.

A rich collection of primary sources on women in the history of science.

Women in the History of Science brings together primary sources that highlight women’s involvement in scientific knowledge production around the world. Including texts, images, and objects, the primary sources are each accompanied by an explanatory text, questions to prompt discussion, and a bibliography to aid further research. Arranged by time period, from 1200 BCE to the twenty-first century, and covering twelve inclusive and far-reaching themes, this book is an invaluable companion to students and lecturers alike in exploring women’s history in the fields of science, technology, mathematics, medicine, and culture.
 

An accessible and enjoyable guide to interdisciplinary research from a leading academic in urban science.

In Being Interdisciplinary, Alan Wilson draws on five decades as a leading figure in urban science to set out a systems approach to interdisciplinarity for those conducting research in this and other fields. He argues that most research is interdisciplinary at its base and that a systems perspective is particularly appropriate for collaboration because it fosters an outlook that sees beyond disciplines. A systems approach enables researchers to identify the game-changers of the past as a basis for thinking outside of convention, for learning how to do something new and how to be ambitious.
 
Building on this systems focus, the book first establishes the basics of interdisciplinarity. Then, by drawing on the author’s wide experience in interdisciplinary research—as a researcher in urban science, a university professor and vice-chancellor, a civil servant, and an institute director, it illustrates general principles and a framework from which researchers can build their own interdisciplinary approach. In the last section, the book tackles questions of managing and organizing research from individual to institutional scales.
 

A detailed account of the Chinese urbanization boom and its implications.

While the imperial and socialist periods of Chinese history were marked by a union of society and state, the rapid urbanization of China has dismantled the territorial foundation of an “earth-bound” or rural society. Through this urban revolution, the Chinese state has become a visible factor in the construction of urban life, with State-led rebuilding of residential communities hastening the demise of traditionalism and giving birth to a new China with greater urbanism and state-centered governance. In Creating Chinese Urbanism, Fulong Wu describes the landscape of urbanization in China, revealing the profound impacts of marketization on Chinese society and the consequential governance changes at the grassroots level. Taking the vantage point of concrete residential neighborhoods, this book offers a cutting-edge analysis of how China is becoming urban and conceptualizes the changes in state governance through the process of urbanization.