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Economic diversity abounds in a more-than-capitalist world, from worker-recuperated cooperatives and anti-mafia social enterprises to caring labour and the work of Earth Others, from fair trade and social procurement to community land trusts, free universities and Islamic finance. The Handbook of Diverse Economies presents research that inventories economic difference as a prelude to building ethical ways of living on our dangerously degraded planet. With contributing authors from twenty countries, it presents new thinking around subjectivity and methodology as strategies for making other worlds possible.
The Elgar Encyclopedia of Environmental Sociology serves as a repository of insight on the complex interactions, challenges and potential solutions that characterize our shared ecological reality. Presenting innovative thinking on a comprehensive range of topics, expert scholars, researchers, and practitioners illuminate the nuances, complexities and diverse perspectives that define the continually evolving field of environmental sociology.
To care can feel good, or it can feel bad. It can do good, it can oppress. But what is care? A moral obligation? A burden? A joy? Is it only human? In Matters of Care, María Puig de la Bellacasa presents a powerful challenge to conventional notions of care, exploring its significance as an ethical and political obligation for thinking in the more than human worlds of technoscience and naturecultures. Matters of Care contests the view that care is something only humans do, and argues for extending to non-humans the consideration of agencies and communities that make the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world. The first of the book’s two parts, “Knowled...
Postdevelopment in Practice critically engages with recent trends in postdevelopment and critical development studies that have destabilised the concept of development, challenging its assumptions and exposing areas where it has failed in its objectives, whilst also pushing beyond theory to uncover alternatives in practice. This book reflects a rich and diverse range of experience in postdevelopment work, bringing together emerging and established contributors from across Latin America, South Asia, Europe, Australia and elsewhere, and it brings to light the multiple and innovative examples of postdevelopment practice already underway. The complexity of postdevelopment alternatives are reveal...
With original and engaging contributions, this Handbook confirms feminist scholarship in development studies as a vibrant research field. It reveals the diverse ways that feminist theory and practice inform and shape gender analysis and development policies, bridging generations of feminists from different institutions, disciplines and regions.
The recognition is growing: truly addressing the problems of the 21st century requires going beyond small tweaks and modest reforms to business as usual—it requires "changing the system." But what does this mean? And what would it entail? The New Systems Reader highlights some of the most thoughtful, substantive, and promising answers to these questions, drawing on the work and ideas of some of the world’s key thinkers and activists on systemic change. Amid the failure of traditional politics and policies to address our fundamental challenges, an increasing number of thoughtful proposals and real-world models suggest new possibilities, this book convenes an essential conversation about the future we want.
This edited collection contributes to the theoretical literature on social reproduction—defined by Marx as the necessary labor to arrive the next day at the factory gate—and extended by feminist geographers and others into complex understandings of the relationship between paid labor and the unpaid work of daily life. The volume explores new terrain in social reproduction with a focus on the challenges posed by evolving theories of embodiment and identity, nonhuman materialities, and diverse economies. Reflecting and expanding on ongoing debates within feminist geography, with additional cross-disciplinary contributions from sociologists and political scientists, Precarious Worlds explores the productive possibilities of social reproduction as an ontology, a theoretical lens, and an analytical framework for what Geraldine Pratt has called “a vigorous, materialist transnational feminism.”
This critical introduction to consumption and its geographies provides an engaged summary of the consumption literature and demonstrates that consumption is intimately related to the production of space in everyday life. In Geographies of Consumption Juliana Mansvelt provides readers with a detailed explanation of political-economic and social-cultural perspectives on consumption at different scales. She opens with overview chapters on the history and conceptualisation of consumption and moves on to thematic chapters on consumption spaces; the body and identity; commodity chains; globalization commercial cultures. The text is illustrated throughout with comparative case study-material and features boxes and annotated notes for further reading. A review of consumption from a spatial perspective, this critical analysis of the key debates is the first synoptic overview in the geographic literature. Geographies of Consumption will be widely used in modules in economic and social geography, and should be the core text for those with a focus on consumption
This book traces the assemblage that comes into being in the spaces and experiences of childbirth. Charting the contributions of the multiple human and non-human actors that contribute to the birth experience, it offers a new perspective on childbirth that cuts across the often emotional debates about natural versus medicalised birth. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with mothers, midwives and obstetricians, it provides an insight into the collective endeavours that shape birth. In doing so, it also explores who does the work of childbirth, expanding the boundaries for who (and what) is responsible for this collective labour and highlighting the interdependencies that characterise it. Structured around eight chapters that each focus on a different actor in the birth space, the volume argues that pregnancy and childbearing brings us into new relationships: with ourselves, with the child to be born, our partners and families, those who care for us, and with more-than-human others.
This updated edition of the essential undergraduate text will introduce you to the most influential thinkers in the tradition of social theory, with a new focus on the past fifty years.