Practical guidance for teaching languages from scratch in higher education, using German as a case study.

As entries for UK school exams in modern foreign languages decrease, this book serves the urgent need for research and guidance on ab initio learning and teaching in higher education. Drawing extensively on the expertise of teachers of German in universities across the UK, the volume offers an overview of recent trends, new pedagogical approaches, and practical guidance for teaching languages at the beginners’ level in the higher education classroom that will be useful for teachers of both German and other languages.

The first chapters assess the role of ab initio provision within the wider context of modern language departments and language centers. They are followed by sections on teaching methods and approaches in the ab initio classroom, including the use of music, textbook evaluation, effective use of flipped classrooms, and the contribution of language apps. Finally, the book focuses on the learner in the ab initio context and explores issues around autonomy and learner strengths.
 

A practical, step-by-step guide to the ABC Learning Design method, designed for local adaptation and readily transferable across institutions committed to educational reform. 

ABC Learning Design is a popular and effective rapid design method for developing educational programs, modules, and short courses that has been widely adopted across the UK and Europe. This book introduces ABC Learning Design to a new audience, adding insights from institutions that have localised and implemented the method in diverse contexts.

Rather than embracing difference, academic ecosystems seek to normalize and homogenize ways of working and of being a researcher. As a consequence, ableism is an endemic experience in academia, though to date no attempt has been made to theorize those experiences. Ableism in Academia provides an interdisciplinary outlook on ableism that is currently missing. Through reporting of research data and exploring personal experiences, the contributors explore the concept of what it means to be and to work outside the so-called norm.
 
The volume brings together a range of perspectives, including feminism, post-structuralism, Derridean and Foucauldian theory, crip theory, and disability theory, and draws on a number of related disciplines. Contributors use various schools of theory to raise awareness and increase understanding of the marginalized. These theories are placed in the context of neoliberal academia, and used to interrogate aspects of identity and how disability is performed, and to argue that ableism is not just a disability issue. This timely collection will be of interest to researchers in disability studies, higher education studies, and sociology, as well as to those working across the social sciences.
 

An in-depth study of contemporary novels through the lens of affect theory and ideology critique. 

Affective Crisis and the Possibility of Attachment offers a comparative critical study of contemporary fiction. It intervenes in discussions about contemporary fiction in its literary-historical relationship to postmodernism and in its socio-historical relationship to neoliberalism, arguing that contemporary literature is dominated by affective questions that are rooted in neoliberalism. Whereas previous research focused on either a literary-historical or a socio-historical approach, this study examines eighteen novels from various parts of the world in both their diachronic relation to postmodernism and in their synchronic relation to neoliberal society.

On the role smartphones play in the lives of the aging in contemporary Ireland.

This volume documents a radical change in the experience of aging. Based on two ethnographies in Dublin, Ireland, the book illustrates how smartphones enable old people to focus on crafting a new life in retirement. For some, the smartphone is an intimidating burden linked to being on the wrong side of a new digital divide. But for most, however, it has become integral to a new trajectory towards a more sustainable life, both for themselves and their environment. The smartphone has reunited extended family and old friends, helped resolve intergenerational conflicts though new forms of grandparenting, and has become a health resource. This is a book about acknowledging late middle age in contemporary Ireland and examines how older people in Ireland experience life today.
 

How smartphones are shifting the daily lives of older adults post-retirement in Kyoto and Kochi Prefecture, Japan.

Ageing with Smartphones in Japan examines sixteen months of ethnographic research following older adults, age fifty and up, in urban Kyoto and rural Kochi Prefecture, Japan as they navigate social and personal shifts post-retirement in the age of the smartphone. It attempts to answer what this transition means for friendship, gendered labor, multigenerational living, internal migration, health, as well as life purpose for older adults. This book closely investigates how the smartphone challenges gender-based norms and how older adults creatively navigate them. Using comics, drawings, and fieldwork sketches it also explores how they use digital visual communication to socialize with friends and family.

Examines the impact of smartphones and mobile phones on older people’s health and everyday lives as part of the global Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing project.

Ageing with Smartphones in Uganda is based on a sixteen-month ethnography about experiences of aging in a neighborhood in central Kampala, Uganda. Taking a convivial approach, which celebrates multiple ways of knowing about social life, Charlotte Hawkins draws from these expressions about cooperative morality and modernity to consider the everyday mitigation of profound social change. “Dotcom” is understood to encompass everything from the influence of information and communications technologies to urban migration and lifestyles in the city to shifts in ways of knowing and relating. At the same time, dotcom tools such as mobile phones and smartphones facilitate elder care through, for example, regular mobile money remittances.

This book explores how dotcom relates to older people’s health, their care norms, their social standing, their values of respect and relatedness, and their intergenerational relationships—both political and personal. It also re-frames the youth-centricity of research on the city and work, new media and technology, and politics and service provision in Uganda. Through ethnographic consideration of everyday life and self-formation in this context, this monograph seeks to contribute to an ever-incomplete understanding of how we relate to each other and to the world around us.
 

An exploration of technology’s role in the day-to-day life of aging urban Brazilians.

With people living longer all over the world, aging has begun to be framed as a socioeconomic problem. In Brazil, older people are expected to remain healthy and autonomous while actively participating in society. Based on ethnographic research in São Paulo, this book shows how older people in a middle-class neighborhood try to reconcile these expectations with the freedom and pleasures reserved for old age by using smartphones. Smartphones have become of great importance to the residents as they search for and engage in new forms of work and hobbies. Connected by a digital network, they work as content curators, sharing activities that fill their schedules. Managing multiple WhatsApp groups is a job in itself, as well as a source of solidarity and hope. Friendship groups help each to download new apps, search for medical information and guidance, and navigate the city. Together, the author shows, older people are reinventing themselves as volunteers, entrepreneurs, and influencers, or they are finding a new interest that gives their later life a purpose. The smartphone, which enables the residents to share and discuss their busy lives, is also helping them, and us, to rethink aging.

An anthropological account of the experience of aging among Peruvian migrants to Chile in the smartphone era.

What does it mean to be aging in Chile as a migrant? Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Chile analyzes the experience of aging for Peruvian migrants aged around sixty who have lived in Chile for more than twenty years. Their lives, we discover, are informed by a series of experiences of being ‘in between’. They live between two countries, two generations, and two different stages in life, between giving care and not wanting care, and between a continuing legacy and not transmitting legacy. By focusing on the entanglement of aging, migration, and technology, this book is an ethnographic contribution to an unexplored subject in the vast literature on migration studies in Chile.
 

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.
 

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.
 

A short, accessible biography exploring Alexander Williamson’s contribution to nineteenth-century science and Japanese society.

Alexander Williamson was a leading scientist and professor of chemistry at University College London in the late nineteenth century. He taught and cared for visiting Japanese students, assisting them with their goal of modernizing Japan. This short, accessible biography explores his contribution to nineteenth-century science, as well as his lasting impact on Japanese society. In 1863 five students from the Chōshū clan, with a desperate desire to learn from the West, made their way to England. They were put in the care of Williamson and his wife. Their mission was to learn about cutting-edge Western technology, science, economics, and politics. When they returned home, they rapidly became leading figures in Japanese life. The remarkable story of the part Williamson and University College London played in the modernization of Japan is little known today. This biography will promote a deeper understanding of Williamson’s scientific innovations and his legacy for Anglo-Japanese relations.
 

An insightful study into contemporary identity formation and the sense of belonging of children of immigrants from Turkey, through an ethnography of their lives in North London.

‘Am I Less British?’ focuses on the children of refugees and immigrants from Turkey in North London. Providing a rich ethnography of the lives of the children, the book studies their sense of identity and belonging, and their transnational experiences. It aims to understand how the children position themselves within a range of locations (London, North London, and Turkey), where they face class hierarchy, racism, and discrimination. Dogus Simsek explores how these children think about their sense of belonging within the contemporary political context in Britain and Turkey. De-identifying themselves from national identities and holding onto their oppressed identities appear as new forms of resistance in response to racism and exclusion.

The experiences of the young people reflect the complexity of their lives in changing political and social circumstances across the borders of nation-states, as well as the importance of other categories of identity, including local identities. Overall, the book argues that the intersections of local, national, and transnational approaches, the political context through which the lives of young people are framed, and their sophisticated engagement with ideas of race, class, ethnicity, and gender, are crucial to understanding their identity formation.
 

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.

A multidisciplinary analysis of right-wing populist movements in post-communist Europe and the reasons for their success. 

Over the past two decades, populist politicians and parties have enjoyed remarkable success across the globe. To develop a multidisciplinary understanding of the rise and functioning of right-wing populism in Central and Eastern Europe, The Anatomy of Right-Wing Populism examines two original concepts. The first, neo-feudalism, refers to an economic system whereby a relatively small group of elites holds most of the political power and controls a significant portion of the country’s economy. The second concept, neo-traditionalism, is a cultural strategy that aims to legitimize neo-feudal systems. Based on this framework, this volume provides empirical and theoretical analysis of populist movements and offers policy recommendations on how to resist illiberalism.

The first detailed study to address how Iron Age and Roman heritage in Britain is conceived and understood in the present day. 

Ancient Identities in Britain explores the relevance of Iron Age and Roman heritage in modern-day Britain. Shedding new light on the continued social significance of these ancient histories, it discusses how they are presented in the form of ancient monuments, museums, reenactments, living history exhibits, community projects, and other heritage venues across England, Scotland, and Wales. The book is not only interested in the continued resonance of ancient myths and material culture, but also the very actions, ideas, and material conditions through which antiquity becomes heritage in the present—and how present values shape the way antiquity is displayed and consumed.

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.

Original research, art, and interpretations of different experiences and explorations of Antarctica.

Antarcticness brings together disciplines, communication approaches, and ideas to explore meanings and depictions of Antarctica. Personal and professional words in poetry and prose, plus images, present and represent Antarctica, as presumed and as imagined, alongside what is experienced around the continent and by those watching from afar. These understandings explain how the Antarctic is viewed and managed while identifying aspects that should be more prominent in policy and practice.
 
The authors and artists featured in the book place Antarctica, and the perceptions and knowledge through Antarcticness, within inspirations and imaginations, without losing sight of the multiple interests pushing the continent’s governance as it goes through rapid political and environmental changes. Because of the diversity and disparity of the influences and changes the continent faces, the book’s contributions are carefully connected to provide a more coherent and encompassing perspective of how society views Antarctica, scientifically and artistically, and what the continent provides and could provide politically, culturally, and environmentally.

A study on the use of mobile health apps and human creativity.

An Anthropological Approach to mHealth underlines ten sixteen-month ethnographies, set across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America, that revealed people’s use of communicative apps, including as LINE, WeChat, and WhatsApp’s alternative primary health apps, highlighting the irrelevance of dedicated health apps. Using a “smart-from-below” approach, this book studies these surprising practices and proposes a radically different anthropological method to the development and dissemination of mobile health (mHealth), a rapidly growing sector in healthcare.

An intimate study of urban change, unveiling how a single block of flats in Romania tells a larger story about architecture and the art of making a home.

Maria Salaru takes readers inside a Romanian apartment block, tracing its evolution from 1974 to the present as residents navigate shifting political and economic landscapes. Through rich ethnographic detail, this work exposes how everyday acts of repair and maintenance reshape both individual apartments and the broader urban fabric of Piatra-Neamț. As state support for housing recedes, new forms of solidarity emerge—whether through self-organized communities, housing associations, or activist interventions—presenting a new perspective on the lived experience of architectural transformation.

This book opposes the view of architecture as static and instead presents buildings as dynamic spaces co-created over time by their inhabitants. It will appeal to social scientists exploring the intersection of materiality and urban change, as well as architects interested in the evolving relationship between people and the built environment. By capturing the micro-scale transformations that collectively redefine city life, An Anthropology of Architectural Transformation provides a persuasive case for rethinking how we study and inhabit our shared spaces.

Where is "the East of the West"? This provocative collection confronts the assumptions behind how we divide the world into knowable regions.

Anti-Atlas uses the upheavals of Eastern Europe as a lens through which to rethink the politics of area studies. This collection unsettles traditional hierarchies, questioning how knowledge is produced, who controls it, and how we divide the world into “areas.”

Consisting of an eclectic mix of scholars from Europe, the UK, and North America, the book experiments with diverse genres—from academic essays and autobiographical reflections to travel guides and data visualizations. Through this innovative approach, the editors propose a manifesto for area studies to be more critical and reflexive; to be undisciplined and deeply engaged with local perspectives.

By dismantling the assumptions embedded in atlases and disciplinary boundaries, Anti-Atlas invites readers to think differently about how we construct and categorize the world. Of particular interest to scholars of area studies and critical theory, this work reassesses what it means to study places in an era of geopolitical rupture.

An examination of the diverse motivations and practices of Arabic-learning foreigners from nineteenth-century mass tourism and European colonialism in the Middle East, up to the Second World War.

During the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, more Europeans visited the Middle East than ever before, as tourists, archaeologists, pilgrims, settler-colonists, and soldiers. These visitors engaged with the Arabic language to differing degrees. While some were serious scholars of Classical Arabic, in the Orientalist mold, many did not learn the language at all. Between these two extremes lies a neglected group of language learners who wanted to learn enough everyday colloquial Arabic to get by. The needs of these learners were met by popular language books, which boasted that they could provide an easy route to fluency in a difficult language.

Arabic Dialogues explores the motivations of Arabic learners and the effectiveness of instructional materials, principally in Egypt and Palestine, by analyzing a corpus of Arabic phrasebooks published in nine languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian) and in the territories of twenty-five modern countries. Beginning with Napoleon’s Expédition d’Égypte, the book moves through the periods of mass tourism and European colonialism in the Middle East, concluding with the Second World War. The book also considers how Arab intellectuals understood the project of teaching Arabic to foreigners, the remarkable history of Arabic learning among Yiddish- and Hebrew-speaking immigrants in Palestine, and the networks of language learners, teachers, and plagiarists who produced these phrasebooks.
 

Using case study projects, architect Urs Bette gives an insight into the epistemological processes of his creative practice and unveils the strategies he deploys in order to facilitate the poetic aspects of architecture within a discourse whose evaluation parameters predominantly involve reason. Themes discussed include the emergence of space from the staged opposition between the architectural object and the site, and the relationship between emotive cognition and analytic synthesis in the design act. In both cases, there is a necessary engagement with forms of ‘unreasonable’ thought, action or behaviors.

By arguing for the usefulness and validity of the unreasonable in architecture, and by investigating the performative relationship between object and ground, Bette contributes to the discourse on extensions, growth and urban densification that tap into local histories and voices, including those of the seemingly inanimate – the architecture itself and the ground it sits upon – to inform the site-related production of architectural character and space. In doing so, he raises debates about the values pursued in design approval processes and the ways in which site-relatedness is both produced and judged.

An experimental study of the architecture of former shtetls, reflecting on cultural memories and Jewish heritage.  

Using archival, architectural, and artistic methods, Architecture of Memory investigates the spectral architecture of former shtetls, predominantly Jewish towns in Central and Eastern Europe before World War II. Through architectural designs, art, and theoretical discussions mapping the historical legacy and present condition of shtetls, author Natalia Romik explores themes of architectural disappearance, urban remembrance, and functional change amid social upheaval. Romik’s unique design research of synagogue ruins, burial grounds, former ritual baths, and other “difficult heritage” contributes to discussions about the protection of Jewish heritage in places where there is no longer any Jewish population. 

An exploration of the architectural model as a tool for design speculation in history.

Making innovative use of the distilling lens of the architectural model, Architecture’s Model Environments is a novel and far-reaching exploration of the many dialogues buildings have with their environmental surroundings. Expanding on histories of building technology, the book sheds new light on how physical models, conventionally understood as engineering experimentation devices, enable architectural design speculation. The book begins with a catalog of ten original model prototypes—of wind tunnels, water tables, and filling boxes—and is the first of its kind to establish an architectural approach to fabricating such environmental models. Subsequent chapters feature three precedent models that have been largely overlooked within the wider oeuvres of their authors: French polymath Étienne-Jules Marey’s wind tunnels, Hungarian-American architects Victor and Aladár Olgyay’s thermoheliodon, and Scottish chemist and building ventilation expert David Boswell “The Ventilator” Reid’s test tube convection experiments. Moving between historic moments and the present day, between case studies and original prototypes, the book reveals the potent ability of models, as both physical artifacts and mental ideals, to reflect prevailing cultural views about the world and to even reshape those views.
 

 
Teachers spend much of their time on assessment, yet many higher education teachers have received minimal guidance on assessment design and marking. This means assessment can often be a source of stress and frustration. Offering a concise overview of assessment theory and practice, this guide provides teachers with the help they need. In education, theory and practice are often poorly linked. In this guide, Teresa McConlogue presents theoretical ideas and research findings and links them to practice. She considers recent theoretical work on feedback and suggests ways of developing evaluative judgment. Throughout the book, teachers are encouraged to examine their practice critically, and there are ideas for small-scale educational investigations, involving teachers, their colleagues, and students, such as using the Assessment Review Questionnaire to adapt assessments. This guide explores the concept of academic standards and proposes methods of co-constructing shared standards within a teaching team and with students through calibration activities.