Introduces the system for planning and consenting Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects in England.

Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) are the major UK projects involving power stations and large renewable energy schemes, motorways, railways, and a range of other high profile, high impact, and sometimes controversial development schemes, including some closely linked to the United Kingdom’s transition to Net Zero. This book explains where the separate system for governing major infrastructure came from and how it operates in practice, with a particular focus on the relationship between planning, consent, and delivery of these infrastructure projects.

Detailed case studies of the A14 highway, Thames Tideway super sewer, Galloper offshore windfarm, and Progress Power station, drawing on research by the authors, illustrate issues of the often-overlooked continuing role of local government, the engagement of local communities and stakeholders, and the modification of schemes between consent and construction.
Confronting ongoing government planning reform, increased concern about climate change, and still unresolved consequences of Brexit, as well as timeless debates like over national need versus local impact, this timely book offers rich detail on the particular approach to major infrastructure planning in England but also speaks to wider issues around the governance of development and implementation of government policy under late capitalism.
 

An innovative material culture perspective on migration research.

Material Culture and (Forced) Migration argues that materiality is a fundamental dimension of migration. People take things with them, or they lose, find, and engage things along the way. Movements themselves are framed by objects such as borders, passports, tents, camp infrastructures, boats, and mobile phones. This volume brings together chapters on a broad range of movements—from forced migration and displacement to retirement migration. What ties the chapters together is their perspective of material culture.
 
Centering on four interconnected themes—temporality and materiality, methods of object-based migration research, the affective capacities of objects, and the engagement of things in place-making practices—the volume provides a material culture perspective for migration scholars around the globe, from a wide range of disciplines. The chapters’ focus on everyday objects and practices will appeal to all those interested in the tangible experiences of migration.

A fresh approach to Roman archaeology that elucidates the impact of material culture in shaping imperial life, from technological innovations to social structures.

Materialising the Roman Empire defines an innovative research agenda for Roman archaeology, highlighting the diverse ways in which the Empire was made materially tangible in the lives of its inhabitants. The volume explores how material culture was integral to the process of imperialism, both as the Empire grew, and as it fragmented, and in doing so it provides up-to-date overviews of major topics in Roman archaeology.

Each chapter offers a thorough overview of a major field within the archaeology of the Roman Empire. The book’s authors explore the distinctive contribution that archaeology and the study of material culture can make to our understanding of the key institutions and fields of activity in the Roman Empire. The opening chapters address major technologies that, at first glance, appear to be mechanisms of integration across the Roman Empire: roads, writing, and coinage. The focus then shifts to the analysis of key social structures oriented around material forms and activities found all over the Roman world, such as trade, urbanism, slavery, craft production, and frontiers. Finally, the book extends to more abstract dimensions of the Roman world: art, empire, religion, and ideology, in which the significant themes remain the dynamics of power and influence. The whole builds towards a broad exploration of the nature of imperial power and the interconnections that stimulated new community identities and created new social divisions.
 

Medical Humanity and Inhumanity in the German-Speaking World is the first volume dedicated to exploring the interface of medicine, the human and the humane in the German-speaking lands. The volume tracks the designation and making through medicine of the human and inhuman, and the humane and inhumane, from the Middle Ages to the present day. Eight individual chapters undertake explorations into ways in which theories and practices of medicine in the German-speaking world have come to define the human and highlight how such theories and practices have consolidated, or undermined, notions of humane behavior. Cultural analysis is central to this investigation, foregrounding the reflection, refraction and indeed creation of these theories and practices in literature, life-writing, and other discourses and media. Contributors bring to bear perspectives from literary studies, film studies, critical theory, cultural studies, history, and the history of medicine and psychiatry. Thus, this collection is historical in the most expansive sense, for it debates not only what historical accounts bring to our understanding of this topic. It encompasses, too, investigation of life-writing, theory and literary and documentary works and so brings to light elusive, paradoxical, underexplored – yet vital – issues in history and culture.
 

The first scholarly appraisal of suffragette Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett in more than 30 years.

“Courage calls to courage everywhere” is the best-known phrase associated with Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), the leading UK suffragist and women’s rights campaigner of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But what is the source of her quote, and what is its context?

This book reproduces Fawcett’s essential speeches, pamphlets, and newspaper columns to tell the story of her dynamic contribution to public life. Thirty-five texts and twenty-two images are contextualized and linked to contemporary news coverage as well as to historical and literary references. These speeches, articles, artworks, and photographs cover both the advances and the defeats in the campaign for women’s votes. They also demonstrate a variety of the topics and causes Fawcett pursued: the provision of education for women, feminist history, a love of literature (and Fawcett’s own attempt at fiction), purity and temperance, the campaign against the employment of children, the British Army’s approach to the South African War, the Unionist cause against Home Rule for Ireland, and the role of suffrage organizations during World War I. This volume offers a rich, intertextual web of literary works, preferred reading material, organizations, contacts, friends, and sometimes enemies, that reveals Fawcett the individual throughout sixty-one years of campaigning.

An argument for the importance of circulation in the study of museum collections, both past and present.

How did the process of the circulation re-examine, inform, and unsettle common assumptions about the way museum collections have evolved over time and space? Mobile Museums presents an argument for the importance of circulation in the study of museum collections, both past and present. It brings together a diverse array of international scholars and curators from a variety of disciplines to consider the mobility of collections, especially in the context of Indigenous community engagement. By foregrounding the question of circulation, the book represents a paradigm shift in the understanding of the history and future uses of museum collections. Taking on a global perspective and addressing a variety of types of collection, including the botanical, ethnographic, economic, and archaeological, the book helps us to understand why the mobility of museum collections was a fundamental aspect of their history—and why it continues to matter today.
 

An exploration of luck in modernity, modern imagination, and modern stories.
 
Beliefs, superstitions, and tales about luck are present across all human cultures. Humans are perennially fascinated by luck and by its association with happiness and danger, uncertainty and aspiration. Yet it remains an elusive, ungraspable idea, one that slips and slides over time: all cultures reimagine what luck is and how to tame it at different stages in their history, and our own era is no exception to the rule.
 
Modern Luck sets out to explore the enigma of luck’s presence in modernity, examining the hybrid forms it has taken on in the modern imagination, and in particular in the field of modern stories. Analyzing a rich and unusually eclectic range of narratives taken from literature, film, music, television, and theatre, from Dostoevsky to Philip K. Dick, Pinocchio to Cimino, Curtiz to Kieslowski, it lays out first the usages and meanings of the language of luck, and then the key figures, patterns, and motifs that govern the stories told about it, from the late nineteenth century to the present day.

The Modernist Bestiary centres on Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d’Orphée (1911), a multimedia collaborative work by French-Polish poet Guillaume Apollinaire and French artist Raoul Dufy, and its homonym, The Bestiary or Procession of Orpheus (1979), by British artist Graham Sutherland. Rather than reconstructing the lineage of these two compositions, the book uncovers the aesthetic and intellectual processes involved that operate in different times, places and media. The Apollinaire and Dufy Bestiary is an open-ended collaboration, a feature that Sutherland develops in his re-visiting, and this book shows how these neglected works are caught up in many-faceted networks of traditions and genres. The contributors’ encounters with these works take the form of poetry and essays, all moving freely between different disciplines and practices, humanistic and posthumanist critical dimensions, as well as different animals and art forms. They draw on disciplines ranging from music, art history, translation, Classical poetry, and French poetry, and are nurtured by approaches including phenomenology, cultural studies, sound studies, and critical animal studies. Collectively the book shows that the aesthetic encounter, by nature effective, is by nature also interdisciplinary and motivating and that it spurs the critical in addressing the complex issues of 'human animality'.
 

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.
 

The first comparative ethnographic study on the impact of digital media on worldwide music.

Offering a radically new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, this volume redresses anthropology’s frequent oversight of music as a topic of study. By positioning music as an expansive subject for digital anthropology, Georgina Born demonstrates how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital media studies, and science and technology studies. Music and Digital Media includes five original ethnographies spanning pop, folk, and crossover musical genres throughout Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada, and the UK. A further three chapters engage experimentally with the platforms of music-making and distribution, presenting pioneering ethnographies of an extra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max MSP.

Myanmar’s Education Reforms reviews the changing state of education in Myanmar as the country has dealt with a profound transformation over the past decade and a half. Education has served as a litmus test for judging the level of openness of any Myanmar government, especially those in place for the past seven decades. Marie Lall situates education within the context of the wider reforms and the process of making peace that began in 2012, using it as a case study on how these reforms have progressed and continue to progress. Drawing on data collected over fifteen years in the field, Lall argues that despite controlling the majority of the civilian government, the National League for Democracy is not delivering on its promise of social justice.