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Waste(d) Collectors
Modern waste disposal systems in mega-cities of the global South are embedded in socio-cultural belief systems, colonial histories and neoliberal logics which operate by reproducing existing social hierarchies. Sneha Sharma critically interrogates the politics around urban waste disposal in Mumbai, India, by undertaking an ethnographic journey to the city's most unwanted space, a dumping site. She challenges the dominant techno-managerial paradigm in waste management and reveals how spaces and people are made into waste through exclusionary social practices. Offering new insights on topics of urban marginality, informality, and urban planning, this book will attract scholars from sociology, urban studies, and human geography.
The Slightest Attachment
While the disciplinary architecture of hospitals has long prevailed in psychiatry, many care teams now work in smaller structures, within communities. Ariane d'Hoop explores one of these places: Drawing on fieldwork in a psychiatric day center for teenagers, she traces how spatial arrangements matter in the care practice. From a corner in which one can withdraw, to a kitchen inviting to hang around, or displayed artworks that pique one's curiosity, caregivers use the material environment to stir up the slightest affinity from teenagers. This study thus expands our idea of what attachment is, and makes us more able to recognize the subtle dynamics between care, things, and spaces. With a preface by Jeannette Pols.
Informal Transactions of Low Income Houses in South Africa
Through a series of intricate informal processes and human-centric institutional arrangements, beneficiaries of South African government-subsidized housing force formally registered properties into informality. Sandile Mbatha explores the concept of informality in relation to how such beneficiaries challenge predominant understandings of property relations. These practices are embedded in complex urban tenure dynamics that prevail in post-colonial societies; societies, in which the state's imposition of predominantly western forms of tenure and property rights ignore the anthropological nature of housing.
Platformization of Urban Life
The increasing platformization of urban life needs critical perspectives to examine changing everyday practices and power shifts brought about by the expansion of digital platforms mediating care-services, housing, and mobility. This book addresses new modes of producing urban spaces and societies. It brings both platform researchers and activists from various fields related to critical urban studies and labour activism into dialogue. The contributors engage with the socio-spatial and normative implications of platform-mediated urban everyday life and urban futures, going beyond a rigid techno-dystopian stance in order to include an understanding of platforms as sites of social creativity and exchange.
Climate Protection, Resource Efficiency, and Sustainable Engineering
The big societal challenges, such as climate change and public health, call for innovative approaches to address them. The contributors of this book present new ways to tackle these challenges by inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations in light weight engineering. They introduce a framework for transdisciplinary collaboration, explore the potential of light weight engineering in the areas of climate protection, resource efficiency, and sustainable mobility. To do so, they exemplify results and limitations of transdisciplinary collaboration based on three case studies: the optimization of rescue tools, the re-design of products to foster re-use and recycling processes in companies and society, and the additive manufacturing of individualized assistive tools and prostheses.
The Sublime of the Political
In an age of immediate and global exchange of information, the ability to theorize about political conditions remains largely an elite, technocratic, and esoteric enterprise. In this timely intervention, Dean Caivano and Sarah Naumes argue that storytelling in the form of narrative and autoethnography creates an emancipatory potential through its ability to theorize from below, welcoming marginalized and excluded voices. Drawing from the disciplines of political studies, philosophy and literary studies, this volume offers a new assessment of political texts through the lens of the sublime as a fertile terrain to challenge who can write and disseminate political ideas – and how.
Pariahs or Partners?
In the past three decades, radical right parties had the opportunity to directly influence political developments from the highest public office in many post-communist Central and Eastern European countries. Oliver Kossack provides the first comprehensive study on government formation with radical right parties in this region. Even after the turn of the millennium, some distinct features of the post-communist context persist, such as coalitions between radical right and centre-left parties. In addition to original empirical insights, the time-sensitive approach of this study also advances the discussion about concepts and methodological approaches within the discipline.
The Necro-President
This Brief develops the necro-president as a figure through which the collapse of American political life becomes visible. In our present moment of political upheaval, the necro-president reflects how death, not law or the people, has come to shape the meaning of the presidency. The office, once imagined as a source of vitality and democratic promise, now signals exhaustion, spectacle, and symbolic decay. Focusing on the 2024 election, The Necro-President shows how Joe Biden and Donald Trump came to represent two sides of a collapsing republic. Biden, cast as a spectral figure, became a symbol of entropy and decline. Trump, by contrast, positioned himself as a resurrectionist, a messianic leader who could overcome decay and save the republic. What followed was not the return of life to the presidency but the normalization of death as a mode of rule. This critical philosophical intervention moves beyond debates about democratic erosion and constitutional crisis. It asks what happens when political life continues even after the symbols that once gave it meaning have gone hollow. This book is open access.
A Politics of All
No historical figure is more synonymous with establishing American democracy than Thomas Jefferson. Revolutionary, iconoclastic, yet pragmatic, the legacy of Jefferson as an intellectual and politician continues to reverberate across academic and public circles. However, Jefferson's writings on power, authority, and politics point to a different understanding of self-government than dominant liberal and republican interpretations suggest. Dean Caivano's interpretation of Jefferson's political, anthropological, and sociological meditations on power reveals an unknown Jefferson, who conceives the American nation-state as a network of dynamic autonomous communities enacted by a politics of all....
