Browse

For much of the twentieth century Marx’s ideas not only inspired resistance to colonial rule, but also provided the backbone of other movements for social justice around the world. This book demonstrates that Marxism is a living tradition that has been the cornerstone of revolutionary practice and theory in the global South. It shows that rather than being a rigid set of propositions, Marxism has reflected local conditions and contexts, which have determined how it has travelled around the world. This is the first book that makes available to a large community of readers the lives, ideas and legacies of a selection of revolutionaries from the global South who have played an exceptional role in contributing to counter-hegemonic change. It urges us to learn from global Marxism in the never-ending task of grasping the changing historical conditions of capitalism and the complex world in which we live.

This book is about the loud and noisy subculture of wider football fandom who attend matches home and away, who spend a huge amount of their time and money following their team, who help to create the chants that form the 'atmosphere' at matches but who provide a constant challenge to the football authorities and police through their attendance and modes of expression. It aims to provide a deep ethnographic account of these supporters, their interpretations, attitudes, motivations and behaviour. The increasing number of fans travelling to away matches from the 1960s onwards certainly provided more regular opportunity for confrontation between rival fan groups. Most importantly for the purposes of the book, it is likely that many of those labelled 'hooligans' at the time were merely part of travelling groups of fans, some of whose members were engaged in the 'hooligan' activity. The book touches upon the seismic changes that have transformed football fandom since the mid-1990s. It considers the changes that have swept through football and details how the fans responded to these changes. The book provides a longitudinal and thickly descriptive ethnographic account of the carnival fan, based on observations with fans of three different football clubs. It also argues that recent technological developments have been playing a huge part in defining and shaping fan culture.

Ireland, as elsewhere, has witnessed an increase in immigration. The unprecedented economic boom that occurred between the mid-1990s and 2007/08 was associated with a reversal in Ireland's longstanding population decline or stagnation. The increase in the ethnic and cultural mix in Ireland occurred over a relatively short period of time and in high volumes. As a result, the level of Ireland's migrant population is comparable to many other Western European countries. This book examines the lived housing experiences of recently arrived migrants in Ireland. It relies on migrants' first-hand accounts of their housing experiences during the period commonly associated with Ireland's 'Celtic Tiger' economic boom on the basis that increases in immigration coincided with and contributed to increases in house prices and private rents, on the one hand, and rising social housing need on the other. As the analysis in the book is based primarily on migrants' views and perceptions, the 'housing pathways approach' breaks new ground in the housing studies field as it focuses on the experiences, interactions and behaviours of recently arrived migrants in Ireland in areas including the leaving home process, initial engagement with housing systems and residential mobility. The book also locates the 'housing pathways approach' within debates concerning social research methodologies in a way that adds to the social scientific analytical toolkit.

The edges of cities are increasingly understood as places of dynamism and change, but there is little research on African urban peripheries and the nature of building, growth, investment and decline that is shaping them. This multi-authored monograph examines African urban peripheries through a dual focus on the logics driving the transformation of these spaces and the experience of living through these changes. As well as exploring the generic dynamics of peripheral change across the continent, it provides rich qualitative insights into the specificity and distinctiveness of a range of peripheral locations. Using substantial comparative empirical data from city-regions in Ethiopia, South Africa and Ghana, in conversation with research in other African contexts, it provides a cogent analysis of spatial transformations and everyday life on the African city periphery. It argues that urban peripheries are formed through five distinct but interconnected logics that capture the complexities of periphery formation and changes therein. However, it illustrates that to fully understand the nature of change in urban peripheries, we need to situate these logics in relation to the varied lived experiences of people living there. Developed within a framework of comparative urbanism, the book considers multiple issues, including economic and infrastructural transitions, political practices, social outcomes and differences, and spatial and material changes. In order to bring the realities of ‘living the periphery’ to life, the book foregrounds the voices of residents throughout, supported by visual images.

Things move fast in the world of the videogame and videogame scholarship. Given that videogames constitute a new arena for academic study, many of the recent publications have tended to address games in a rather generalist manner, often as a means of mapping the field. Any intersection between the world of the scholar and the world of the videogame, therefore, has to be carefully negotiated. This collection represents a series of frozen analytic moments, and an opportunity for reflection among a range of critics approaching games from different places and with varied disciplinary backgrounds. It takes a 'bottom-up' approach, seeking not to survey the entire field, but instead to move closer to the experience of playing particular games. The experience of being-in-the-world of a game is contingent on the particular design, across a range of dimensions, of a given game and that design provides the formal and structural features of a game. Within the terms of the narratology/ludology debate that so characterized early public discussions about the action of scholarship in relation to videogames, it might be assumed that any focus on games as texts refers only to their non-interactive elements. The essays address a game or group of games in detail and in so doing go some way towards addressing the very complex and diversely rendered relationship between videogame text, play and performance. The experience of playing games, in all its various affective colouring, occurs through the interchange between technology, aesthetics and the player's own particular investments.

This book reports on the findings of an eighteen-month UKRI funded mixed-methods research project that took place in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales between September 2020 and November 2021. It provides a comprehensive overview of the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on the UK’s cultural sector, identifying implications for policy, practice and the sector’s future direction. Over eleven chapters, the book summarises the local, regional and national policy responses to the crisis, and provides statistical analyses of the impacts on the UK’s cultural workforce and audiences’ responses to the pandemic. These insights are further illustrated via detailed case studies of cultural sub-sectors of theatre, museums and galleries, screen industries, libraries and festivals, interviews with cultural leaders and an ecosystem case study of the Greater Manchester city region.

The book identifies recurrent themes emerging from the research, commenting on policy responses, audience confidence, shifts to digital engagement and civic responsibility, organisational practice and recovery. It offers a robust analysis of the short, medium and longer-term impacts of Covid-19 and highlights their implications for cultural practitioners, organisations, funders and policymakers. The unique contribution of the book lies in the presentation of findings which highlight the challenges faced by cultural practitioners, organisations and audiences from different backgrounds, regions and art forms. Using lenses which focus on both macro and micro levels, the book provides fresh insights into the implications for research on, with, and around the cultural sector, highlighting possible future directions for arts management, audience research and cultural policy studies.

This book offers a new analytical framework for the multi-layered processes of politicising and gendering care for older people, understood as an inherently political and gendered condition of human existence. It brings together contributions that focus on different manifestations and interpretations of these processes in several European settings and at various societal and political levels. It investigates how care for older adults varies across time and place and aims to provide an in-depth comprehension of how it becomes an arena of political struggle and the object of public policy and political intervention. The book comprises multidisciplinary research stemming from gender studies, history, political science, public policy, social anthropology, social work, and sociology. These analyses examine the issue of care for older people as a political concern from many angles, such as problematising care needs, long-term care policies, home care services, institutional services, and family care. The book’s contributions reveal the diversity of situations in which the processes of politicising and gendering care for older adults overlap, contradict, or reinforce each other while leading to increased gender (in)equalities on different levels – familial, professional, and societal. Both caring for older adults or being taken care of when becoming old(er) or frail are potentially a feature of any personal trajectory, which is always contextually situated. Therefore, this book is an invitation to reflect upon care for older people as an issue particularly significant at any time and relevant at any societal level or socio-political sphere.

This book documents the political and cosmological processes through which the idea of “total territorial rule” at the core of the modern international system came into being in the context of early to mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon (Sri Lanka). It develops a decolonial theoretical framework informed by a “pluriverse” of multiple ontologies of sovereignty to argue that the territorial state itself is an outcome of imperial globalization. Anti-colonialism up to the mid nineteenth century was grounded in genealogies and practices of sovereignty that developed in many localities. By the mid to late nineteenth century, however, the global state system and the states within it were forming through colonizing and anti-colonizing vectors. The modern territorial state predates modern nationalism and created a contaminated container in which anticolonialism had been constricted by the late nineteenth century in Ceylon, but also elsewhere in the British Empire. By focusing on the ontological conflicts that shaped the state and empire, we can rethink the birth of the British Raj and place it in Ceylon some fifty years earlier than in India. In this way, the book makes a theoretical contribution to postcolonial and decolonial studies in globalization and international relations by considering the ontological significance of “total territorial rule” as it emerged historically in Ceylon. Through emphasizing one important manifestation of modernity and coloniality – the territorial state – the book contributes to research that studies the politics of ontological diversity, sovereignty, postcolonial and decolonial international studies, and globalization through colonial encounters.

The Athenian anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement has been reinvigorated in recent years. Its public protests and battles against the Greek state, police and other capitalist institutions are prolific and highly visible, replete with rioting, barricades and Molotov cocktails. This book is concerned not so much with anarchist theory, as with examining the forces that give the Athenian anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement its specific shape. The author draws on Alberto Melucci's (1995a) work on collective identity, while offering a first-hand, ethnographic account of Athenian anarchists and anti-authoritarians in action, based on his time there in 2011 and 2013, living, squatting and protesting within this milieu. In the course of the chapters of the book, the author argues that varying shades of anarchic tendencies, and ensuing ideological and practical disagreements, are overcome for the most part in (often violent) street-protests. Athenian anarchists and antiauthoritarians are a pertinent area of research because of both their politics and their geographical location. There is the whole 'rise of anarchism throughout the activist world' phenomenon, visible from Seattle to Genoa, Quebec City to São Paulo. Anarchist and anti-authoritarian social movements are prominent actors in resistance to the current phase of capitalism in multiple, global locations. Throughout Europe, North and Latin America, Asia and the Antipodes, radical resistance to neo-liberalism often has an anarchist and/ or anti-authoritarian cast.

Race, bordering and disobedient knowledge studies how different kinds of (b)orders are negotiated and challenged in antiracism and activism by people categorised as migrants and their supporters. Building on decolonial and race-critical perspectives and critical border studies, the chapters in the book analyse the specificities of bordering and hierarchical ordering in different parts of Europe, notably its outskirts to the south, north and west. Furthermore, the chapters reveal how disobedient knowledge counteracts the structuring processes of bordering and ordering. The anthology develops the concept of disobedient knowledge to address knowledges created in encounters of differently positioned activists and practices applied in research engagement. Through this conceptual frame, the chapters examine resistance and disobedience in relation to borders, racialised social orders, conventional practices and hegemonic discourses. In particular, this makes visible the resistance of groups that have no other options – for whom questioning border regimes and racialised hierarchies is part of everyday survival. The book also investigates activism that involves the choice to fight for social justice and global change, when adopting a position of solidarity towards groups targeted by racism and border regimes. With a focus on activist challenges to the prevailing perceptions of European ‘racelessnes’, epistemologies of resistance, disobedient practices and ways of building shared struggles, the book provides invaluable knowledge about European societies, their border zones and relations to other parts of the world. The book is essential reading for scholars and students in sociology, ethnic and racial studies, anthropology, political science, gender studies, and cultural studies.