Margaret Thatcher was prime minister from 1979 to 1990, during which time her Conservative administration transformed the political landscape of Britain. Science Policy under Thatcher is the first book to systematically the interplay of science and government under her leadership.
Thatcher was a working scientist before she became a professional politician, and she maintained a close watch on science matters as prime minister. Scientific knowledge and advice were important to many urgent issues of the 1980s, from late Cold War questions of defense to emerging environmental problems, such as acid rain and climate change. Drawing on newly released primary sources, Jon Agar explores how Thatcher worked with and occasionally against the structures of scientific advice, as the scientific aspects of such issues were balanced or conflicted with other demands and values. To what extent, for example, was the freedom of the individual scientist to choose research projects balanced against the desire to secure more commercial applications? What was Thatcher’s stance towards European scientific collaboration and commitments? How did cuts in public expenditure affect the publicly funded research and teaching of universities?
​In weaving together numerous topics, including AIDS and bioethics, the nuclear industry and strategic defense, Agar adds to the picture we have of Thatcher and her radically Conservative agenda, and argues that the science policy devised under her leadership, not least in relation to industrial strategy, had a prolonged influence on the culture of British science.

The first English-language collection of critical essays by Gianni Celati, one of Italy’s most important contemporary authors.

Selected Essays and Dialogues is a collection of translations of Italian essayist Gianni Celati’s theoretical and musing work from the late 1960s to the present. Its topics range from environmental perception and archaeological conceptions of historical knowledge to street theater, writing, photography, cinema, and translation. The book provides a framework of key literary, theoretical, and artistic movements of the past fifty years, as well as a guide for English-language readers to place Celati’s work in historical, cultural, and biographical contexts.

Celati’s fondness for the unexpected ordinary tempts readers to wander and become lost in the webs of his daring thoughts. Indeed, a genial adventurousness can be found within all of his writings collected here, driven by an affectionate and light-hearted engagement with the surrounding world. This collection offers a taste of his adventures of the mind and body, led by a lithe sensitivity not restricted to the so-called high arts or letters, but also very much engaged with the everyday lives, places, and tales we all constantly share.
 

Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia discusses the lived experience of urban development, redevelopment, and change in Ulaanbaatar. The fast rates of urbanization occurring in many parts of the world are often buoyed by increased investment of capital and ensuing construction, giving rise to other less visible effects among those living in cities—including diverse economic practices, politics, and ethics. Construction becomes a solution to the provision of housing but also simultaneously becomes a problem when economic processes fail to work as they should, or people are dispossessed of land to make way for further urban change.   
Rebekah Plueckhahn explores the inherent contradiction between solution and problem-making as experienced by residents of Ulaanbaatar during a tumultuous period in Mongolia’s economic history. She examines the ways residents attempt to own forms of real estate and, in turn, physically shape the city and its politics and urban economic forms from within. This book interlinks the intimate space of the home with ideologies of the national economy, urban development and disrepair and the types of politics and ethics that arise as a result.
 

A comparison of the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Walter Benjamin that examines their similarities through citation, translation, and critical commentary.

Shelley with Benjamin is an experiment in comparative reading. Born a century apart, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Walter Benjamin are separated by time, language, temperament, and genre. One is a Romantic poet known for his revolutionary politics and delicate lyricism, and the other is a melancholy intellectual who pioneered a dialectical method of thinking in constellations. Yet, taken together, their ideas are mutually illuminating.

In a series of close readings that are by turns playful, erotic, and violent, Mathelinda Nabugodi unveils affinities between two writers whose works are simultaneously interventions in literary history and blueprints for an emancipated future. In addition to offering fresh interpretations of both major and minor writings, she elucidates the personal and ethical stakes of literary criticism. The book will appeal to readers of Shelley and Benjamin as well as those with an interest in comparative literature, literary theory, romantic poetics, and creative critical writing.

A study of how the intersection of gender and Islam develops and changes in a pilgrimage-tourism nexus as part of capitalist and halal consumer markets.

Shopping with Allah illustrates the ways in which religion is mobilized in package tourism and how spiritual, economic, and gendered practices are combined in a form of tourism where the goal is not purely leisure but also ethical and spiritual cultivation. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, Thimm sheds light on how Islam and gender frame Malaysian religious tourism and pilgrimage to the Arabian Peninsula and raises many issues that are of great importance beyond these regional contexts.

This book also offers an innovative methodological-analytical toolkit to research mobility and intersectionality across sociogeographic scales. By bringing methodological holism into a fruitful engagement with the antiracist-feminist framework intersectionality, Thimm argues that hierarchical relationships, such as marginalization, power, and empowerment, can shift for an individual or a social group depending upon the social sphere.
 

Why is social media in southeast Italy so predictable when it is used by such a range of different people?

This book describes the impact of social media on the population of a town in the southern region of Puglia, Italy. Razvan Nicolescu spent 15 months living among the town’s residents, exploring what it means to be an individual on social media. Why do people from this region conform on platforms that are designed for personal expression?

Nicolescu argues that social media use in this region of the world is related to how people want to portray themselves. He pays special attention to the ability of users to craft their appearance in relation to collective ideals, values, and social positions, and how this feature of social media has, for the residents of the town, become a moral obligation: they are expected to be willing to adapt their appearance to suit their different audiences at the same time, which is crucial in a town where religion and family are at the heart of daily life.  

A collection of research and findings from the Thomas Coram Research Unit.

For fifty years, researchers at UCL’s Thomas Coram Research Unit have been undertaking ground-breaking policy-relevant social research. Their main focus has been social issues affecting children, young people, and families and the services provided for them. Social Research for our Times brings together different generations of researchers from the Unit to share some of the most important results of their studies.

Two sections focus on the main findings and conclusions from research into children and children services and on family life, minoritized groups, and gender. A third section is devoted to the innovative methods that have been developed and used to undertake research in these complex areas. Running through the book is a key strategic question: what should be the relationship between research and policy? Or put another way, what does “policy-relevant research” mean? This perennial question has gained new importance in the post-COVID, post-Brexit world that we have entered, making this text a timely intervention for sharing decades of experience. Taking a unique opportunity to reflect on the research context as well as research findings, this book will be of interest to researchers, teachers, students, and those involved in policy-making both in and beyond dedicated research units, and it can be read as a whole or sampled for individual standalone chapters.
 

In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. Two years later, the Soviet Union disintegrated. The collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union discredited the idea of socialism for generations to come. It was seen as representing the final and irreversible victory of capitalism. This triumphant dominance was barely challenged until the 2008 financial crisis threw the Western world into a state of turmoil. 

Through analysis of post-Socialist Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, as well as of the United Kingdom, China, and the United States, Socialism, Capitalism and Alternatives confronts the difficulty we face in articulating alternatives to capitalism, socialism, and threatening populist regimes. Beginning with accounts of the impact of capitalism on countries left behind by the planned economies, the book moves on to consider how China has become a beacon of dynamic economic growth, aggressively expanding its global influence. The final section of the book poses alternatives to the ideological dominance of neoliberalism in the West.
 

Sri Lanka has been at the center of far-flung networks for millennia—a key part of trade routes, the spread of religions, and Asian and European empires. This book sets out to use contemporary scholarship that focuses on that role as a crossroads to set Sri Lanka more firmly in the fields of Asian and global history. Contributors draw on the archaeology, history, literature, and art of the island from 500 BCE to 1850 CE to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates. Showing the subtle ways in which foreign elements can be simultaneously resisted and embraced, the book presents a distinctive, but deeply connected, Sri Lanka, one that is defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean.

A detailed study of one of the oldest largely intact churches in England.

The Chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, built on the ruins of a Roman fort, dates from the mid-seventh century and is one of the oldest largely intact churches in England. It stands in splendid isolation on the shoreline at the mouth of the Blackwater Estuary in Essex, where the land meets and interpenetrates with the sea and the sky. This book brings together contributors from across the arts, humanities, and social sciences to uncover the premodern contexts and modern resonances of this medieval building and its landscape setting. In analyzing the significance of the chapel and surrounding landscape over more than a thousand years, this collection additionally contributes to wider debates about the relationship between space and place, and particularly the interfaces between both medieval and modern cultures and also heritage and the natural environment.
 

Mongolia’s mining sector, along with its environmental and social costs, have been the subject of prolonged and heated debate. This debate has often cast the country as either a victim of the ‘resource curse’ or guilty of ‘resource nationalism’. In The State, Popular Mobilisation and Gold Mining in Mongolia, Dulam Bumochir aims to avoid the pitfalls of this debate by adopting an alternative theoretical approach. He focuses on the indigenous representations of nature, environment, economy, state, and sovereignty that have triggered nationalist and statist responses to the mining boom. In doing so, he explores the ways in which these responses have shaped the apparently ‘neo-liberal’ policies of twenty-first-century Mongolia, and the economy that has emerged from them, in the face of competing mining companies, protest movements, international donor organizations, economic downturn, and local and central government policies. Applying rich ethnography to a nuanced and complex picture, Bumochir’s analysis is essential reading for students and researchers studying the environment and mining, especially in Central and North-East Asia and post-Soviet regions, and also for readers interested in the relationship between neoliberalism, nationalism, environmentalism and state.
 

Antimigrant populism is on the rise across Europe, and diversity and multiculturalism are increasingly presented as threats to social cohesion. Yet diversity is also a mundane social reality in urban neighborhoods. With this in mind, Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture explores how we can live together with difference. What is needed for conviviality to emerge and what role can research play? This volume demonstrates how collaboration among scholars, civil society and practitioners can help to answer these questions. 
Drawing on a range of innovative and participatory methods, each chapter examines conviviality in different cities across the United Kingdom. The contributors ask how the research process itself can be made more convivial and show how power relations between researchers, those researched, and research users can be reconfigured—in the process producing much needed new knowledge and understanding about urban diversity, multiculturalism and conviviality. Examples include embroidery workshops with diverse faith communities, arts work with child language brokers in schools, and life story and walking methods with refugees. Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture is interdisciplinary in scope and includes contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists, as well as chapters by practitioners and activists. It provides fresh perspectives on methodological debates in qualitative social research, and will be of interest to scholars, students, practitioners, activists, and policymakers who work on migration, urban diversity, conviviality and conflict, and integration and cohesion.
 

Almost 10 years ago the mineral-rich country of Mongolia experienced rapid economic growth, fueled by China’s need for coal and copper. Hopes were raised that the economy would avoid ‘over-heating’ and Mongolia could emerge independently wealthy and powerful. This period of growth is now over. The country is facing increasing public and private debt, conflicts around sovereignty and land, multiple forms of political protest that seem to go unnoticed, and a turn toward a more conservative politics that critiques ideas about democracy and protects its own but ignores the masses. This book details this story through the intimate lives of five women. It explores how they carve out a life for themselves in a landscape that is constantly shifting, while reflecting on past hopes and aspirations. Building on long-term friendships and familiarity with the region, Rebecca attends to the ways these women have come to theorize their experiences of living a ‘life in the gap’, between desired outcomes and actual materializations. In doing so, and through attention to their different strategies, she offers a re-viewing and re-configuring – to build on the analytical vocabulary developed in the book – of official accounts to describe what is going on in this extractivist-based economy.