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Living Rome: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Belonging looks beyond the romanticized image of Rome, towards a kaleidoscopic view of the city shaped by inequalities, socio-political challenges, and acts of resistance and solidarity. In the wake of urban developments related to migration, housing shortages, COVID-19, crime, and other social changes, this volume offers a grounded approach, mapping the contemporary realities of Italy’s capital from a variety of methodological standpoints. Contributors argue that the unseen fringes, both geographically peripheral and those embedded within the very heart of Rome, are crucial for understanding its social dynamics. These ‘hidden’ geographies foster vibrant communities, challenge ideas of home and belonging, and act as key sites of creativity, resistance and everyday life. 

Bringing together urban sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, demographers, criminologists, decolonizing and feminist scholars, this study contributes to a growing body of research on the city and its social movements, aiming to inform policy and contribute to a more just and sustainable Rome. Using a variety of methods, from quantitative cartography and policy analysis to (auto)ethnography and creative methodologies, this volume speaks well beyond Rome, to conversations about cities worldwide.

Lowell, Massachusetts was the first fully planned industrial city in the United States, and the Boott Mill, established in the 1820s along the Merrimack River, stood at the center of this bold experiment in industrial capitalism. For decades, the company-owned boardinghouses that housed the mills' workers were as much a part of the Lowell system as the looms themselves: a managed, closely supervised domestic world where the rhythms of mill life extended from the factory floor into every corner of daily existence.

Living on the Boott brings this vanished world back to life through rigorous historical archaeology. Drawing on excavations conducted at the Boott Mills boardinghouse complex, Stephen A. Mrozowski, Grace H. Ziesing, and Mary C. Beaudry examine the material remains of the men and women who lived and worked in Lowell's textile industry from the early nineteenth century through its long decline. Through painstaking analysis of ceramics, faunal assemblages, tobacco-related artifacts, and other recovered objects, the authors reconstruct the daily lives, diets, domestic routines, and social relationships of successive generations of boardinghouse residents—from the young "mill girls" recruited from rural New England who made Lowell famous, to the Irish immigrant workers who increasingly replaced them as the century progressed.

The result is a richly documented social history written not from official records alone, but from the objects people actually used, discarded, and left behind. The book illuminates how class, gender, ethnicity, and labor intersected in the intimate spaces of the boardinghouse, and documents the profound changes in living conditions as the Lowell system evolved and the workforce transformed. A landmark contribution to historical archaeology, industrial archaeology, and the history of American labor, Living on the Boott demonstrates the unique power of archaeological evidence to recover the lives of those too often overlooked by conventional historical sources.

Living the High Life in Minsk looks at the sources of stability and instability in post-Soviet authoritarian states through the case study of President Lukashenka’s firm hold on power in Belarus. In particular, it seeks to understand the role of energy relations, policies, and discourses in the maintenance of this power. The central empirical question Balmaceda seeks to answer is what has been the role of energy policies in the maintenance of Lukashenka’s power in Belarus? In particular, it analyzes the role of energy policies in the management of Lukashenka’s relationship with three constituencies crucial to his hold on power: Russian actors, the Belarusian nomenklatura, and the Belarusian electorate.

In terms of foreign relations, the book focuses on the factors explaining Lukashenka’s ability to project Belarus’ power in its relationship with Russia in such a way as to compensate for its objective high level of dependency, assuring high levels of energy subsidies and rents continuing well beyond the initial worsening of the relationship in c. 2004. In terms of domestic relations, Balmaceda examines Lukashenka’s specific use of those energy rents in such a way as to assure the continuing support of both the Belarusian nomenklatura and the Belarusian electorate. 

For over half a century, the Vietnamese people have endured the harmful legacies of Agent Orange, the toxic herbicide used by the American military as a type of chemical warfare. While scientists and politicians continue to debate how to best address its human and environmental consequences, the nearly three million Vietnamese whose lives have been shaped by its lingering effects have been largely left out of the conversation.

To understand how Agent Orange has impacted the lives and livelihoods of everyday Vietnamese people, Diane Niblack Fox interviewed families and individuals living with its aftereffects across the northern, central, and southern regions of the country. In powerfully written prose, Fox shares the personal accounts of villagers, as they describe caring for loved ones with chronic illnesses and disabilities and their attempts to secure medical and financial assistance. Living with Agent Orange also chronicles the moving stories of rebuilt lives, of family and community support, and of the overriding power of the human spirit.

Once associated only with the wealthy and privileged in Latin America, lifelong illnesses are now emerging among a wider cross section of the population as an unfortunate consequence of growing urbanization and increased life expectancy. One of these diseases is the chronic autoimmune disorder lupus erythematosus. Difficult to diagnose and harder still to effectively manage, lupus challenges the very foundations of women’s lives, their real and imagined futures, and their carefully constructed gendered identities. While the illness is validated by medical science, it is poorly understood by women, their families, and their communities, which creates multiple tensions as women attempt to make sense of an unpredictable, expensive, and culturally suspect medically managed illness.

Living with Lupus vividly chronicles the struggles of Ecuadorian women as they come to terms with the experience of debilitating chronic illness. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, Ann Miles sensitively portrays the experiences and stories of Ecuadorian women who suffer with the intractable and stigmatizing disease. She uses in-depth case histories, rich in ethnographic detail, to explore not only how chronic illness can tear at the seams of women’s precarious lives, but also how meanings are reconfigured when a biomedical illness category moves across a cultural landscape. One of the few books that deals with the meanings and experiences of chronic illness in the developing world, Living with Lupus contributes to our understanding of a significant global health transition.

For decades, Mexico has been one of the world’s top non-OPEC oil exporters, but since the 2004 peak and subsequent decline of the massive offshore oilfield—Cantarell—the prospects for the country have worsened. Living with Oil takes a unique look at the cultural and economic dilemmas in this locale, focusing on residents in the fishing community of Isla Aguada, Campeche, who experienced the long-term repercussions of a 1979 oil spill that at its height poured out 30,000 barrels a day, a blowout eerily similar to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Tracing the interplay of the global energy market and the struggle it creates between citizens, the state, and multinational corporations, this study also provides lessons in the tug-of-war between environmentalism and the lure of profits. In Mexico, oil has held status as a symbol of nationalist pride as well as a key economic asset that supports the state’s everyday operations. Capturing these dilemmas in a country now facing a national security crisis at the hands of violent drug traffickers, cultural anthropologist Lisa Breglia covers issues of sovereignty, security, and stability in Mexico’s post-peak future.

The first in-depth account of the local effects of peak oil in Mexico, emphasizing the everyday lives and livelihoods of coastal Campeche residents, Living with Oil demonstrates important aspects of the political economy of energy while showing vivid links between the global energy marketplace and the individual lives it affects.

Native Americans along the coasts of southern New England and Long Island have had close ties to whales for thousands of years. They made a living from the sea and saw in the world's largest beings special power and meaning. After English settlement in the early seventeenth century, the region's natural bounty of these creatures drew Natives and colonists alike to develop whale hunting on an industrial scale. By the nineteenth century, New England dominated the world in whaling, and Native Americans contributed substantially to whaleship crews.

In Living with Whales, Nancy Shoemaker reconstructs the history of Native whaling in New England through a diversity of primary documents: explorers' descriptions of their “first encounters,” indentures, deeds, merchants' accounts, Indian overseer reports, crew lists, memoirs, obituaries, and excerpts from journals kept by Native whalemen on their voyages. These materials span the centuries-long rise and fall of the American whalefishery and give insight into the far-reaching impact of whaling on Native North American communities. One chapter even follows a Pequot Native to New Zealand, where many of his Maori descendants still reside today.

Whaling has left behind a legacy of ambivalent emotions. In oral histories included in this volume, descendants of Wampanoag and Shinnecock whalemen reflect on how whales, whaling, and the ocean were vital to the survival of coastal Native communities in the Northeast, but at great cost to human life, family life, whales, and the ocean environment.

Facing two oceans and three seas, Alaska's coastline stretches through bays, fjords, and around islands for 45,000 miles. Living with the Coast of Alaska, a new volume in the Living with the Shore series, is a user's guide for both present and future inhabitants of Alaska. Providing individual property owners in all regions of the state with the fundamentals of hazard recognition and mitigation strategy, the authors discuss the geological history of Alaska and its relation to the area's cultural history and present customized hazard risk assessments for coastal communities.

Describing the dynamic nature of natural seismic events and coastal processes in Alaska, the authors emphasize the multiplicity of potential effects that result from a unique combination of geology, climate, and the sea. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami waves, avalanches, glacial advances, storm surges, flash flooding, wind channeling, and shoreline erosion combined with human-induced hazards such as oil spills, fire, and beach and offshore mining accidents make living with danger a way of life in Alaska. The authors provide information on federal and state laws and programs regarding natural disasters and coastal zone management as well as practical suggestions for the design and construction of buildings. For private, commercial, and public developments, this book offers a manual to help Alaskans make informed decisions to minimize, if not avoid, damage and danger.

A woman who went West with her husband in the 1840s must have expected hardships and privation, but during the 1940s, when Etta Koch stopped off in Big Bend with her young family and a 23-foot travel trailer in tow, she anticipated no more than a civilized camping trip between her old home in Ohio and a new one in Arizona. It was only when she found herself moving into an old rock house without plumbing or electricity in the new Big Bend National Park that Etta realized, "From the sheltered life of a city girl of moderate circumstances, I too would have to face the reality of frontier living."

In this book based on her journals and letters, Etta Koch and her daughter June Cooper Price chronicle their family's first years (1944-1946) in the Big Bend. Etta describes how her photographer husband Peter Koch became captivated by the region as a place for natural history filmmaking-and how she and their three young daughters slowly adapted to a pioneer lifestyle during his months' long absences on the photo-lecture circuit. In vivid, often humorous anecdotes, she describes making the rock house into a home, getting to know the Park Service personnel and other neighbors, coping with the local wildlife, and, most of all, learning to love the rugged landscape and the hardy individuals who call it home.

Camelids are vital to the cultures and economies of the Andes. The animals have also been at the heart of ecological and social catastrophe: Europeans overhunted wild vicuña and guanaco and imposed husbandry and breeding practices that decimated llama and alpaca flocks that had been successfully tended by Indigenous peoples for generations. Yet the colonial encounter with these animals was not limited to the New World. Llamas beyond the Andes tells the five-hundred-year history of animals removed from their native habitats and transported overseas.

Initially Europeans prized camelids for the bezoar stones found in their guts: boluses of ingested matter that were thought to have curative powers. Then the animals themselves were shipped abroad as exotica. As Europeans and US Americans came to recognize the economic value of camelids, new questions emerged: What would these novel sources of protein and fiber mean for the sheep industry? And how best to cultivate herds? Andeans had the expertise, but knowledge sharing was rarely easy. Marcia Stephenson explores the myriad scientific, commercial, and cultural interests that have attended camelids globally, making these animals a critical meeting point for diverse groups from the North and South.