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  • Ptolemy Dean, "Streetscapes: Historic Routes Through English Towns" (Lund Humphries, 2024)

    Ptolemy Dean, "Streetscapes: Historic Routes Through English Towns" (Lund Humphries, 2024)
    2024/11/29
    At a time of increased pressure for new urban development, where there is a focus on either object-based architecture or the rolling out of developer-designed suburban sprawl, there is a concern that the lessons learned about the creation of a general attractive ‘townscape’ or ‘streetscape’ have become forgotten or obscured. Featuring 26 of the most attractive and interesting historic town centres, Streetscapes: Historic Routes Through English Towns (Lund Humphries, 2024) by Ptolemy Dean analyses key routes and the urban or visual incidents along them and explains why they might provoke different sensations of joy, interest or containment for the inhabitant or passer-by. Each of the town studies includes two historical maps – one created by John Speed in the C16th, which explains the general overall layout of a town, its shape, size, defensive walls, and river crossings, and the other a first edition OS map from the late C19th, which reveals the extent that medieval arrangements have survived, or not. Key routes within selected towns are then selected and illustrated as a way to explaining the topography and layout of these towns and how one still experiences them. In particular, there is the recurring theme about how the town might naturally draw you through to its centre, the subtlety of character and placing of key buildings as markers, each of which is uniquely different for each town. The drawings which illustrated the town studies are not only beautiful, but can be discriminate in aspects emphasised. While, individually, the case studies are insightful and full of fascinating history and detail, as the book moves through these towns, themes, patterns and natural groupings of towns emerge. Thus, as a whole, the volume allows comparisons and explores similarities and contrasts which enrich the book’s findings and lessons. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography
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    44 分
  • Tom Scott-Smith, "Fragments of Home: Refugee Housing and the Politics of Shelter" (Stanford UP, 2024)

    Tom Scott-Smith, "Fragments of Home: Refugee Housing and the Politics of Shelter" (Stanford UP, 2024)
    2024/11/27
    Abandoned airports. Shipping containers. Squatted hotels. These are just three of the many unusual places that have housed refugees in the past decade. The story of international migration is often told through personal odysseys and dangerous journeys, but when people arrive at their destinations a more mundane task begins: refugees need a place to stay. Governments and charities have adopted a range of strategies in response to this need. Some have sequestered refugees in massive camps of glinting metal. Others have hosted them in renovated office blocks and disused warehouses. They often end up in prefabricated shelters flown in from abroad. Fragments of Home: Refugee Housing and the Politics of Shelter (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Tom Scott-Smith focuses on seven examples of emergency shelter, from Germany to Jordan, which emerged after the great "summer of migration" in 2015. Drawing on detailed ethnographic research into these shelters, the book reflects on their political implications and opens up much bigger questions about humanitarian action. By exploring how aid agencies and architects approached this basic human need, Dr. Scott-Smith demonstrates how shelter has many elements that are hard to reconcile or combine; shelter is always partial and incomplete, producing mere fragments of home. Ultimately, he argues that current approaches to emergency shelter have led to destructive forms of paternalism and concludes that the principle of autonomy can offer a more fruitful approach to sensitive and inclusive housing. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography
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    1 時間 2 分
  • Alice Rudge, "Sensing Others: Voicing Batek Ethical Lives at the Edge of a Malaysian Rain Forest" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

    Alice Rudge, "Sensing Others: Voicing Batek Ethical Lives at the Edge of a Malaysian Rain Forest" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)
    2024/11/25
    How do we confront difference and change in a rapidly shifting environment? Many indigenous peoples are facing this question in their daily lives. Sensing Others: Voicing Batek Ethical Lives at the Edge of a Malaysian Rain Forest (U Nebraska Press, 2024) explores the lives of Batek people in Peninsular Malaysia amid the strange and the new in the borderland between protected national park and oil palm plantation. As their ancestral forests disappear around them, Batek people nevertheless attempt to live well among the strange Others they now encounter: out-of-place animals and plants, traders, tourists, poachers, and forest guards. How Batek people voice their experiences of the good and the strange in relation to these Others challenges essentialized notions of cultural and species difference and the separateness of ethical worlds. Drawing on meticulous, long-term ethnographic research with Batek people, Alice Rudge argues that as people seek to make habitable a constantly changing landscape, what counts as Otherness is always under negotiation. Anthropology’s traditional dictum to “make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange” creates a binary between the familiar and the Other, often encapsulating Indigenous lives as the archetypal Other to the “modern” worldview. Yet living well amid precarity involves constantly negotiating Otherness’s ambivalences, as people, plants, animals, and places can all become familiar, strange, or both. Sensing Others reveals that when looking from the boundary, what counts as Otherness is impossible to pin down. Alice Rudge is a Lecturer in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. She works at the intersection of environmental anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and science and technology studies. She focuses on themes of alterity, ethics, Indigenous justice, plantation agriculture, and sustainable scientific practice to explore conflicting questions of what it means to live a good life in conditions of environmental breakdown. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography
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    1 時間 14 分
  • Timothy E. Nelson, "Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900-1930" (Texas Tech UP, 2023)

    Timothy E. Nelson, "Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900-1930" (Texas Tech UP, 2023)
    2024/11/22
    By most accounts, Blackdom, New Mexico existed from 1900-1930. However, as historian and artist Dr. Timothy Nelson argues in his new book, the Black colony founded in the then-territory of New Mexico has a much longer history and many afterlives, even after the residents moved away. In Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900-1930 (Texas Tech University Press, 2023), Nelson weaves together the history of a particular place with philosophy, personal vulnerability, and the historiography of the American West to provide a unique account of the rise, decline, and continuance of Blackdom as both myth and reality. A unique book, Blackdom, New Mexico places Nelson as the storyteller front and center in the narrative, tracing his own life and family history growing up in Compton, California and training as a historian in New Mexico, and connecting these threads with the history of Black colonization along what he terms the Afro-Frontier. Blackdom, New Mexico is an excellent example of how even when the past seems dead in the past, its legacies and ghosts live on. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography
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    54 分
  • Allen James Fromherz, "The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present" (U California Press, 2024)

    Allen James Fromherz, "The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present" (U California Press, 2024)
    2024/11/21
    Whether it’s in commerce or conflict, today’s world pays rapt attention to the Persian Gulf. But the centrality of the Gulf to world history stretches far beyond the oil age–its ancient ports created the first proper trading system and the launching point for the spread of global Islam. Allen James Fromherz’s new book The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present (University of California Press, 2024) puts the Gulf at the center of a centuries-long story of world history, showing how societies across the region worked around–or even shrugged off–empires to create a system of international commerce that persists today. Allen James Fromherz is Professor of History and Director of the Middle East Studies Center at Georgia State University. He is author of Qatar: A Modern History (Georgetown University Press: 2012) and Ibn Khaldun: Life and Times (Edinburgh University Press: 2010) and editor of The Gulf in World History: Arabia at the Global Crossroads (Edinburgh University Press: 2018) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Center of the World. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography
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    54 分
  • Julian Hanna, "Island" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

    Julian Hanna, "Island" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
    2024/11/21
    Darwin called the Galápagos archipelago “a little world within itself,” unaffected by humans and set on its own evolutionary path – strange, diverse, and unique. Islands are repositories of unique cultures and ways of living, seed banks built up in relative isolation. Island is an archipelago of ideas, drawing from research and first-hand experience living, working, and travelling to islands as far afield as Madeira and Cape Verde, Orkney and Svalbard, the Aran Islands and the Gulf Islands, Hong Kong and Manhattan. Islands have long been viewed as both paradise and prison – we project onto them our deepest desires for freedom and escape, but also our greatest fears of forced isolation. This book asks: what can islands teach us about living sustainably, being alone or coexisting with others, coping with uncertainty, and making do? Island (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Julian Hanna, part of the Object Lessons series, explores these and other questions and ideas, but is constructed above all from the stories and experiences gathered during a lifetime of island hopping. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography
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    31 分
  • Sasikumar Harikrishnan, "Social Spaces and the Public Sphere:: A Spatial-history of Modernity in Kerala" (Routledge, 2023)

    Sasikumar Harikrishnan, "Social Spaces and the Public Sphere:: A Spatial-history of Modernity in Kerala" (Routledge, 2023)
    2024/11/20
    What can social spaces tell us about social relations in society? How do everyday social spaces like teashops, reading rooms and libraries reify-or subvert-dominant social structures like caste and gender? These are the questions that Social Spaces and the Public Sphere:: A Spatial-history of Modernity in Kerala (Routledge, 2023) explores through a study of modern Kerala. Using archival material, discourse analysis, participant observation and personal interviews, this book traces the transformation of public spaces through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume focuses on how 'modernity' has also been a struggle for access to public spaces, and non-institutional spaces like teashops, markets, public roads, temple grounds, reading-rooms and libraries have all been crucial to how political culture was shaped, and how dominant hegemonies-caste, class or capital-have been challenged. It suggests that the secular public sphere that emerged in the last century in Kerala was a result of the constant negotiations between conflicting ideas which were put to test in these social spaces. At a time when digital spaces are fast replacing physical ones, this book is a timely reminder of the struggles that led to the emergence of secular public spaces in Kerala. It contributes to similar studies on public space that have emerged from other parts of the world over the last decades. A major contribution to understanding modern India, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of social history, political science, political sociology, gender studies, linguistics, and South Asian studies. DISCOUNT CODES: Routledge has offered two discount codes that you can use to purchase this book on their website. The discount codes are ESA03 (UK) and SMA24 (USA). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography
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    1 時間 17 分
  • Adam Bobbette, "The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java" (Duke UP, 2023)

    Adam Bobbette, "The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java" (Duke UP, 2023)
    2024/11/15
    In The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java (Duke UP, 2023), Adam Bobbette tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia's volcanoes. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, scientists became concerned with protecting the colonial plantation economy from the unpredictable bursts and shudders of volcanoes. Bobbette follows Javanese knowledge traditions, colonial geologists, volcanologists, mystics, Theosophists, orientalists, and revolutionaries to show how the earth sciences originate from a fusion of Western and non-Western cosmology, theology, anthropology, and geology. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and fieldwork at Javanese volcanoes and in scientific observatories, he explores how Indonesian Islam shaped the theory of plate tectonics, how Dutch colonial volcanologists learned to see the earth in new ways from Javanese spiritual traditions, and how new scientific technologies radically recast notions of the human body, distance, and the earth. In this way, Bobbette decenters the significance of Western scientists to expand our understanding of the evolution of planetary thought and rethinks the politics of geological knowledge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography
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    43 分