front cover of Reading Today
Reading Today
Edited by Heta Pyrhönen and Janna Kantola
University College London, 2018
Today we’re just as, if not more, likely to scroll, click, and tap the cold, shiny screen of a laptop, tablet, or smartphone as we are to turn the pages of a book. How has the advent of new technologies changed the way we read? Do our devices encourage quick and cursory reading? Is the experience of reading becoming “flatter” alongside the devices themselves? How have our conceptions changed of what reading is?
           
With Reading Today, Heta Pyrhönen and Janna Kantola have assembled contributions that respond to these questions and many more. The contributors unpack emerging strategies of reading. They consider, for example, how paying attention to our emotional reactions while reading can significantly affect how we experience the process. Other chapters consider the impacts of technology on reading through such topics as experimental literature, the contemporary encyclopedic novel, and the healing power of books.
 
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Rebuilding Public Confidence in Educational Assessment
Mary Richardson
University College London, 2022
Reassessing educational assessment: how the way we talk about exams and grades exacerbates the problems of pressure, anxiety, and expectation.

Educational assessment is important. Yet it is easy to feel that schooling and other phases of education are shaped entirely by certain assessments and that assessment is only about exam results. The idea that grades can accurately describe the aims and outcomes of education is both reductive and pervasive. This book is about the stories we tell each other about educational assessment and how they impact public trust and confidence in educational assessment. It explains the roots and nature of assessment discourses and proposes a restructuring of the debate to rebuild public confidence. It aims to challenge dominant assessment discourses and demands a more nuanced, informed debate about what happens in and beyond schools, and how this influences public thinking. Using examples from international settings to explore the nature of trust in assessment discourses, this book shows how these discourses can be reframed so that all aspects of the assessment system—policymaking, school planning, home practice with students—can be delivered with confidence.
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Re-Centring the City
Urban Mutations, Socialist Afterlives and the Global East
Edited by Jonathan Bach and Michal Murawski
University College London, 2019
Re-Centring the City rethinks the concept of the center in studies of the urban across the social sciences and humanities. Through cases ranging from Moscow and Berlin to Mexico City, Cairo, and Chennai, the contributions explore the tension between forces of decentering and recentering as they reshape the political, economic, and social fabric of the urban and force us to reconsider the genealogy of the contemporary global city.    
By drawing our attention back to the center as an object of analytical and empirical study, this book counters a long-term trend in both planning and urban scholarship that emphasizes decentralization as the hallmark of the twenty-first-century city. It argues that such a “centrifugal” turn in urban studies is neither empirically accurate nor normatively incontestable, especially when one looks beyond the West. Rather, as the contributions to this volume show, decentering obscures the ways in which the center continues to exert a powerful influence on cities of today. The concise chapters, situated at the intersection of urban studies, social anthropology, architecture, and art theory, provide new perspectives on the role of the center in defining the city’s terrain. Together, they constitute a collection of sharp, provocative interventions into debates about the transformation of global urban forms in the twenty-first century.
 
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front cover of Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920–2020
Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920–2020
Edited by Maria Rubins
University College London, 2021
A cross-disciplinary study on Russian diaspora writing.

Since the start of the massive post-revolutionary exodus, Russian literature has thrived in multiple locations around the globe—but what happens to cultural vocabularies, politics of identity, literary canon, and language when writers transcend the metropolitan and national boundaries? This volume sets a new agenda for the study of Russian diaspora writing, reorienting the field from an excessive emphasis on the homeland to an analysis of transnational circulations that shape extraterritorial cultural practices. Integrating a variety of conceptual perspectives, ranging from diaspora and postcolonial studies to the theories of translation and self-translation, world literature, and evolutionary literary criticism, the contributors argue for a distinct nature of diasporic literary expression predicated on hybridity, ambivalence, and a sense of multiple belonging. As the complementary case studies demonstrate, diaspora narratives consistently recode historical memory, contest the mainstream discourses of Russianness, rewrite received cultural tropes, and explore topics that have remained marginal or taboo in the homeland.
 
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Reflexive Translation Studies
Translation as Critical Reflection
Silvia Kadiu
University College London, 2019
Over the past few decades, translation studies have increasingly focused on the ethical dimension of translational activity with an emphasis on reflexivity to assert the role of the researcher in highlighting issues of visibility, creativity, and ethics. In Reflexive Translation Studies, Silvia Kadiu investigates the viability of theories that seek to empower translation by making visible its transformative dimension, such as championing the visibility of the translating subject or the translator’s right to creativity. Inspired by Derrida’s deconstructive thinking, Kadiu presents practical ways of challenging theories that argue reflexivity is the only way of developing an ethical translation. She questions the capacity of reflexivity to counteract the power relations at play in translation and problematizes affirmative claims about self-knowledge by using translation itself as a process of critical reflection.

In exploring the interaction between form and content, Reflexive Translation Studies promotes the need for an experimental, multisensory, and intuitive practice, which invites students, scholars, and practitioners alike to engage with theory productively and creatively through translation.
 
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Refuge in a Moving World
Tracing Refugee and Migrant Journeys Across Disciplines
Edited by Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh
University College London, 2020
The journeys and experiences of refugees and migrants are deeply complex and highly varied. It takes critical reflections from a diverse range of fields and angles to communicate the nuanced tangles of power structures and inequalities on local, national, and international levels. Bringing (?) together over thirty contributions, Refuge in a Moving World discusses migration and displacement from a kaleidoscopic collection of voices.
 
Through interdisciplinary lenses, the contributors explore the ways that different people experience and respond to their own situations and to those of other people. Refuge in a Moving World combines vital reflections on the intricacies of conceptualizing experiences of forced migration and how people inhabit and negotiate everyday life. Ultimately, Refuge in a Moving World argues that working collaboratively to share experiences of migration and displacement fosters more sustainable responses to our moving world.
 
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Regulating Content on Social Media
Copyright, Terms of Service and Technological Features
Corinne Tan
University College London, 2018
How are social media users influenced by platform when creating content, and does this influence determine whether or not they comply with copyright laws? These are pressing questions in today’s internet age, and Regulating Content on Social Media answers them by analyzing social media use from a copyright perspective. Corinne Tan compares the regulation of copyright laws across selected social media platforms—Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter, and Wikipedia—with other regulatory factors such as the terms of service and the technological features of each platform. This comparison enables her to explore how each platform affects the role copyright laws play in securing compliance from their users. Through empirical research and a hypothetical case study detailing the social media activities of user Jane Doe, the book argues that, in spite of copyright laws’ purported regulation, users are encouraged by the social media platforms themselves to behave in ways that may be inconsistent with the law.

The first book to look at how social media platforms affect users’ compliance with copyright laws, Regulating Content on Social Media is a timely addition to the current media landscape.
 
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Reinventing the Good Life
An Empirical Contribution to the Philosophy of Care
Jeannette Pols
University College London, 2023
An analytical exploration of what it means to live a good life.

Ever since Adam Smith’s musings on “the invisible hand” became more famous than his work on moral sentiments, social theorists started to pay less attention to everyday ethics and aesthetics. Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand posits that social outcomes emerge by dint of the behaviors of individuals rather than their intentions or virtues.

Modernist and scientific approaches to determining the common good or good forms of governance have increasingly relied on techniques of generalization, rationalization, and universalization. Everyday ethics and aesthetics—and recently also matters of truth—came to be regarded as individual matters of taste. This shift, however, has meant that we no longer comprehend why and how people display a deep concern with everyday life values in their social practices. People continue to enact these values and live by them while academics lack the vocabulary and methods to grasp them.

By reconstructing the history of ideas about everyday-life values, and by analyzing the role of such values in contemporary care practices for patients with chronic disease in the Netherlands, Reinventing the Good Life seeks to explore new ways to study the values of everyday life, particularly in situations where the achievement of a clear-cut or uniform good is unlikely. The book presents a practice-based epistemology and methodology for studying everyday care practices and supporting their goodness. This analytical approach ultimately aims to generate ideas that will allow us to relate in more imaginative ways to the many pressing concerns that we are forced to live with today.
 
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Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia
An Anthropology of Forgetting, Repair and Urban Traces
Francisco Martinez
University College London, 2018
What happens to legacies that do not find any continuation? In Estonia, a new generation that does not remember the socialist era and is open to global influences has grown up. As a result, the impact of the Soviet memory in people's conventional values is losing its effective power, allowing for new opportunities for recuperation.

Francisco Martinez brings together a number of sites of interest to explore the vanquishing of the Soviet legacy in Estonia: a street market in Tallinn where concepts such as "market" and "employment" take on distinctly different meanings from their Western use; Linnahall, a multi-purpose venue, whose Soviet heritage now poses difficult questions of how to present the building’s history; Tallinn’s cityscape, where the social, spatial, and temporal coevolution of the city can be viewed and debated; Narva, a city that marks the border between the Russian Federation, NATO, and the European Union and represents a place of continual negotiation; and the new Estonian National Museum in Raadi, an area on the outskirts of Tartu that has avoided promoting a single narrative of the past.

By exploring these places of cultural and historical significance, which all contribute to our understanding of how the new generation in Estonia is not following the expectations and values of its predecessor, the book also demonstrates how we can understand generational change in a material sense.
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Re-Mapping Centre and Periphery
Asymmetrical Encounters in European and Global Contexts
Edited by Tessa Hauswedell, Axel Körner, and Ulrich Tiedau
University College London, 2019
Historians often assume a one-directional transmission of knowledge and ideas, leading to the establishment of spatial hierarchies defined as centers and peripheries. In recent decades, transnational and global historians have contributed to a more inclusive understanding of intellectual and cultural exchanges that profoundly challenges the ways we draw our mental maps. Covering the early modern and modern periods, Re-Mapping Centre and Periphery investigates the asymmetrical and multidirectional structure of such encounters within Europe as well as in a global context. The international team of contributors demonstrates how, as products of human agency, center and periphery are conditioned by mutual dependencies. Rather than representing absolute categories of analysis, they are subjective constructions determined by a constantly changing discursive context. Through its analysis, the volume develops and implements a conceptual framework for remapping centers and peripheries, based on conceptual history and discourse history
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Renaissance Fun
The Machines behind the Scenes
Philip Steadman
University College London, 2021
An amusing account of the technology of Renaissance entertainment and the ancient influences that inspired it.

Renaissance Fun is about the technology of entertainment in the forms of stage machinery, theatrical special effects, gardens, fountains, automata, and self-playing musical instruments from the Renaissance. How did the machines behind these shows work? How exactly were chariots filled with singers let down onto the stage? How were flaming dragons made to fly across the sky? How were seas created on stage? How did mechanical birds imitate real birdsong? What was “artificial music,” three centuries before Edison and the phonograph? How could pipe organs be driven and made to play themselves by waterpower alone? And who were the architects, engineers, and craftsmen who created these wonders? While this book is offered as entertainment in itself, it also offers a more serious scholarly argument centered on the enormous influence of Vitruvius and Hero, two ancient writers who composed on the subject.
 
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front cover of Repurposing the Green Belt in the 21st Century
Repurposing the Green Belt in the 21st Century
Peter Bishop, Alona Martinez, Rob Roggema, and Lesley Williams
University College London, 2020
The green belt has been one of the UK’s most consistent and successful planning policies. It has limited urban sprawl and preserved the countryside around cities—but what is its role in an era of unprecedented urban growth and potentially catastrophic climate change? Repurposing the Green Belt in the 21st Century examines the history of the green belt in the UK and how it has influenced planning regimes in other countries. Despite the undoubted achievements of the green belt, the authors argue, it is time to review it as an instrument of urban planning and landscape design, now that the problem of the ecological impact of cities and the mitigation measures of major climate changes are at the top of the urban agenda across the world.
 
Through an examination of practice in the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, and Germany, Repurposing the Green Belt in the 21st Century proposes a framework for a reconsideration of the critical relationship between the city and its hinterlands. It will be useful for undergraduate and postgraduate students of planning, landscape architecture, urban design, architecture, and land economics, as well as practitioners in design, planning, and real estate.
 
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Research in Global Learning
Methodologies for Global Citizenship and Sustainable Development Education
Edited by Douglas Bourn
University College London, 2023
A diverse collection of global educational research.

Young people around the world are calling ever more urgently on policymakers to address today’s global challenges of sustainability, structural inequality, and social justice. It is little surprise that learning in a global society, understanding sustainable development, and being active global citizens are increasingly popular themes for education at all levels. Educational research makes a crucial contribution to knowledge that can address the great questions of our time, and evidence from a diversity of studies is vital if we are to build a clear picture. Research in Global Learning showcases methods and findings from a range of early career researchers who conducted illuminating studies located around the globe, specifically Brazil, China, Ghana, Greece, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Poland, South Korea, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Flexibility of approach is key to successful educational research in differing contexts. The studies in this volume use a range of approaches to investigate four important themes: the relationship between policy and practice, opportunities and constraints within the education system and the role of teachers, challenges and opportunities for higher education, and the perspectives of young people and students. Case studies, quantitative and qualitative research, participatory action research, longitudinal studies, and analysis of textbooks through critical discourse analysis are all used to demonstrate how learning about global citizenship and sustainability can inspire learners and contribute to quality education.
 
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Resisting Postmodern Architecture
Critical Regionalism before Globalisation
Stylianos Giamarelos
University College London, 2022
A critical reappraisal of one of the most popular architectural theories of the recent past on its fortieth anniversary.

Since its first appearance in 1981, critical regionalism has enjoyed a celebrated worldwide reception as an architectural theory that defends the cultural identity of a place resisting the homogenizing onslaught of globalization. Its principles of acknowledging the climate, history, materials, culture, and topography of a specific place are integrated into architects’ education across the globe. But at the same time, the richer cross-cultural history of critical regionalism has frequently been reduced to schematic juxtapositions of “the global” with “the local.”
 
This book uses more than fifty interviews and previously unpublished archival material from six countries to resituate critical regionalism within the wider framework of debates around postmodern architecture, the diverse contexts from which it emerged, and the cultural media complex that conditioned its reception. In so doing, it explores the intersection of three areas of growing historical and theoretical interest—postmodernism, critical regionalism, and globalization—and shows how the “periphery” was not just a passive recipient, but also an active generator of architectural theory and practice.
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Responsibility of Intellectuals
Reflections by Noam Chomsky and Others after 50 years
Edited by Nicholas Allott, Chris Knight, and Neil Smith
University College London, 2019
With the publication of “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Noam Chomsky burst onto the US political scene as a leading critic of the war in Vietnam. Privilege, he argues, brings with it the responsibility to tell the truth and expose lies, but our intellectual culture only pays lip service to this ideal. The essay has been described as the “single most influential piece of anti-war literature” of the Vietnam war period. Since then, Chomsky has continued to equip a growing international audience with the facts and arguments needed to understand—and change—our world. According to the New York Times, Chomsky “may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet today.”

This book revisits “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” half a century later. It includes six new essays written to celebrate Chomsky’s famous intervention and explore its relevance in today’s world. Nicholas Allott, Chris Knight, Milan Rai, and Neil Smith have studied and written about Chomsky’s thought for many years, while Craig Murray and Jackie Walker describe the personal price they have paid for speaking out. The book concludes with Chomsky’s recollections of the background to the original publication of his essay, followed by extensive commentary from him on its fiftieth anniversary.
 
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front cover of Restaging the Past
Restaging the Past
Historical Pageants, Culture and Society in Modern Britain
Edited by Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, and Alexander Hutton
University College London, 2020
Restaging the Past is the first collection devoted to the study of pageants in Britain, ranging from their Edwardian origins to the present day. In the twentieth century, people all across Britain succumbed to “pageant fever.” Thousands of people dressed up in historical costumes and performed scenes from local history, and hundreds of thousands more watched them. These pageants were one of the most significant aspects of popular engagement with the past between 1900 and the 1970s: they took place in large cities, small towns, and tiny villages, and engaged a wide range of organizations and social groups, from Women’s Institutes to political parties, schools to churches, and even youth organizations.
 
Pageants were community events, bringing people together in a shared celebration and performance of the past; they also involved many prominent novelists, professional historians, and other writers, and as a result were featured repeatedly in popular and highbrow literature. Although the pageant tradition has largely died out, the contributors argue that it deserves to be acknowledged as a key aspect of community history during a period of great social and political change—and, they show, because of its former prominence, some lingering signs of “pageant fever” can still be seen in Britain today.
 
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Rethinking Class Size
The Complex Story of Impact on Teaching and Learning
Peter Blatchford and Anthony Russell
University College London, 2020
The debate over whether class size matters for teaching and learning is one of the most enduring—and aggressive—in education research. Teachers often insist that small classes benefit their work, but many experts argue that evidence from research shows class size has little impact on pupil outcomes, and therefore does not matter. That dominant view has informed international policymaking. In Rethinking Class Size, the lead researchers on the world’s biggest study into class size effects present a counterargument. Through detailed analysis of the complex relations involved in the classroom they reveal the mechanisms that support teachers’ experience, and they conclude that class size matters very much indeed.
 
Drawing on twenty years of systematic classroom observations, surveys of practitioners, detailed case studies, and extensive reviews of research, Peter Blatchford and Anthony Russell contend that common ways of researching the impact of class size are limited and sometimes misguided. While class size may have no direct effect on pupil outcomes, it can have a significant impact on interconnections within classroom processes. In describing these connections, the book opens up the everyday world of the classroom and shows that the influence of class size is felt everywhere.
 
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Rethinking Heritage for Sustainable Development
International Frameworks, Local Impacts
Sophia Labadi
University College London, 2022
An innovative look at heritage in sustainable development, based on archival research on UN and World Bank documents and ethnographic fieldwork in Africa.

In 2015, the UN adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which have since influenced international and intergovernmental organizations and governments and dictated priorities for international aid spending. Culture, including heritage, is often presented as fundamental to addressing the SDGs. Yet in practice heritage is marginalized when SDGs are being discussed and implemented.
 
This volume presents a substantial and original assessment of whether and how heritage has contributed to three key dimensions of sustainable development (poverty reduction, gender equality, and environmental sustainability) within the context of its marginalization from the SDGs and from previous international development agendas. The book adopts a novel, inclusive, large-scale, and systematic approach, providing the first comprehensive history of the international approaches to culture (including heritage) in development from 1970 to the present day. It critically assesses the international projects implemented in sub-Saharan Africa that aimed to demonstrate the contribution of heritage for development in time for the negotiation of the SDGs, reflecting on the shortcomings of selected projects and providing recommendations for rethinking heritage for development.
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Rethinking the Andes-Amazonia Divide
A Cross-Disciplinary Exploration
Edited by Adrian J. Pearce, David G. Beresford-Jones, and Paul Heggarty
University College London, 2020
Nowhere on Earth is there an ecological transformation so swift and so extreme as between the snow line of the high Andes and the tropical rainforest of Amazonia. Because of that, the different disciplines that research the human past in South America have tended to treat these two great subzones of the continent as self-contained enough to be studied independently of each other. Objections to that approach have repeatedly been raised, however, warning against imagining too sharp a divide between the people and societies of the Andes and Amazonia when there are clear indications of significant connections and transitions between them.
 
Rethinking the Andes-Amazonia Divide brings together archaeologists, linguists, geneticists, anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and historians to explore both correlations and contrasts in how the various disciplines see the relationship between the Andes and Amazonia, from deepest prehistory up to the European colonial period. This collaboration has emerged from an innovative program of conferences and symposia conceived to generate discussion and cooperation across the divides between disciplines.
 
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Rethinking Urban Risk and Resettlement in the Global South
Edited by Cassidy Johnson, Garima Jain, and Allan Lavell
University College London, 2021
A study on urban risk and resettlement programs in the Global South in the era of climate change.

Environmental changes impact everyone, but the burden is especially heavy upon the lives and livelihoods of the urban poor and those living in informal settlements. In an effort to reduce urban residents’ exposure to climate change and natural disasters, resettlement programs are becoming widespread across the Global South. Yet, while resettlement may reduce a region’s future climate-related disaster risk, it can also often increase poverty and vulnerability. This volume collates the findings from a research project that examined urban areas across the globe, including case studies from India, Uganda, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Cambodia, and the Philippines. The book offers a unique approach to resettlement, providing an opportunity for urban planners to re-think how disaster risk management can better address the accumulation of urban risks in the era of climate change.
 
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Revolution Beyond the Event
The Afterlives of Radical Politics
Edited by Charlotte Al-Khalili, Narges Ansari, Myriam Lamrani, and Kaya Uzel
University College London, 2023
A critical perspective on the lived realities of revolutionary afterlives.

Revolution Beyond the Event brings together leading international anthropologists and emerging scholars to examine revolutionary legacies from the MENA region, Latin America, and the Caribbean. It explores the idea that revolutions have varied afterlives that complicate the assumptions about their duration, pace, and progression, and argues that a renewed focus on the temporality of radical politics is essential to our understanding of revolution. Through a careful selection of case studies, the book provides a critical perspective on the lived realities of revolutionary afterlives, challenging the liberal humanist assumptions implicit in the modern idea of revolution and reappraising the political agency of people caught up in revolutionary situations across a variety of ethnographic contexts.
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Revolutionizing a World
From Small States to Universalism in the Pre-Islamic Near East
Mark Altaweel and Andrea Squitieri
University College London, 2018
This book investigates the long-term continuity of large-scale states and empires, and its effect on the Near East’s social fabric, including the fundamental changes that occurred to major social institutions. Its geographical coverage spans, from east to west, modern-day Libya and Egypt to Central Asia, and from north to south, Anatolia to southern Arabia, incorporating modern-day Oman and Yemen. Its temporal coverage spans from the late eighth century BCE to the seventh century CE during the rise of Islam and collapse of the Sasanian Empire.

The authors argue that the persistence of large states and empires starting in the eighth/seventh centuries BCE, which continued for many centuries, led to new sociopolitical structures and institutions emerging in the Near East. The primary processes that enabled this emergence were large-scale and long-distance movements, or population migrations. These patterns of social developments are analyzed under different aspects: settlement patterns, urban structure, material culture, trade, governance, language spread, and religion, all pointing at movement as the main catalyst for social change. This book’s argument is framed within a larger theoretical framework termed as "universalism," a theory that explains many of the social transformations that happened to societies in the Near East, starting from the Neo-Assyrian period and continuing for centuries. Among other influences, the effects of these transformations are today manifested in modern languages, concepts of government, universal religions and monetized and globalized economies.
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Rewriting Buddhism
Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270
Alastair Gornall
University College London, 2020
Rewriting Buddhism is the first intellectual history of premodern Sri Lanka’s most culturally productive period. This era of reform shaped the nature of Theravada Buddhism both in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, and even today continues to define monastic intellectual life in the region. Alastair Gornall argues that the long century’s literary productivity was not born of political stability, as is often thought, but rather of the social, economic and political chaos brought about by invasions and civil wars.
 
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Rewriting Language
How Literary Texts Can Promote Inclusive Language Use
Christiane Luck
University College London, 2020
Extensively studied and heavily debated, inclusive language is a hot topic. Despite decades of research and scholarship, findings on its importance slip into neglect. How do we convince speakers of the importance of inclusive language? Christiane Luck’s Rewriting Language provides one possible answer: read fiction.
 
By engaging readers with the issue, novels spread awareness and promote linguistic change. Novels have the power to paint the problems presented with accessibility and spark change. Analyzing five iconic literary texts, including Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Verena Stefan’s Häutungen, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, and June Arnold’s The Cook and the Carpenter, Luck dives into the possibilities and challenges of linguistic neutrality. Rewriting Language illustrates the link between language and imagination. As Luck concludes, novels are valuable tools to embolden inclusive language use.
 
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Ruptures
Anthropologies of Discontinuity in Times of Turmoil
Edited by Martin Holbraad, Bruce Kapferer, and Julia F. Sauma
University College London, 2019
A “rupture” is a radical and often forceful discontinuity, an active ingredient of a world in turmoil, lying at the heart of some of the most defining experiences of our time, including the rise of populist politics and the corollary impulse towards protest and revolutionary change.

            With Ruptures, editors Martin Holbraad, Bruce Kapferer, and Julia F. Sauma have brought together leading and emerging international anthropologists to explore the concept of rupture in select ethnographic and historical contexts. Among the contributions are chapters that look at images of the guillotine in the French Revolution, reactions to Trump’s election in the United States, the motivations of young Danes who join ISIS in Syria, “butterfly effect” activism among environmental anarchists in northern Europe, the experiences of political trauma and its “repair” through privately sponsored museums of Mao’s revolution in China, people’s experience of the devastating 2001 earthquake in Gujarat; the rupture of Protestant faith among Danish nationalist theologians, and the attempt to invent ex nihilo an alphabet for use in Christian prophetic movements in Congo and Angola.
 
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