You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
It is widely understood that good, affordable eco-housing needs to be at the heart of any attempt to mitigate or adapt to climate change. This is the first book to comprehensively explore eco-housing from a geographical, social and political perspective. It starts from the premise that we already know how to build good eco-houses and we already have the technology to retrofit existing housing. Despite this, relatively few eco-houses are being built. Featuring over thirty case studies of eco-housing in Britain, Spain, Thailand, Argentina and the United States, Eco-Homes examines the ways in which radical changes to our houses – such as making them more temporary, using natural materials, or relying on manual heating and ventilation systems – require changes in how we live. As such, it argues, it is not lack of technology or political will that is holding us back from responding to climate change, but deep-rooted cultural and social understandings of our way of life and what we expect our houses to do for us.
"I think growing up in communes gives you a sense of knowing that there are different ways to organise society. As a child, you begin to realise that there are different experiments. The world you live in isn't given, it's created, it's a construct. And it gives you a sense, I think, as an adult, that you don't necessarily have to accept the way things are, and you can do things differently. Or you might accept them because you feel safe. But you know that they're made and that they can be unmade."(Sean Gaston, 2010)Over two years Josephine Hall conducted several interviews and visited three intentional communities, documenting her findings along the way. A collage of fictionalised personal accounts, interviews and investigative essays, Is this the Future? is a frank and compassionate exploration into the subject of communal living.
What ethical challenges are faced by researchers studying social and political movements? Should scholars integrate their personal politics and identities into their research? What role should activists have in shaping the purposes or processes of social scientific research? How do changing political contexts affect the ethical integrity of a research project over time? These are some of the live issues of research ethics that face students and scholars whose research ‘subjects’ are located in contentious political terrain. The contributors to this volume expose their own ethical thinking as they have met such challenges head on. Each explores real dilemmas of ethical practice on the gro...
Cyberprotest is an exploration of contemporary radical internet activism in Britain. It investigates the context, tensions and outcomes of environmentalists' use of the internet. Examining a wide variety of groups—from radical direct action protesters to the political lobbying of Friends of the Earth—it allows activists to speak of their experiences, challenges and innovations, providing a unique insight into the workings of frontline activism. Internet use in all levels of activism—from long-running campaigns to short-term intense tactics—is analysed in the quest to determine the value of this much-hyped technology. The book documents the negotiations and achievements of environment...
Across the globe, political movements opposing privatisation, enclosures, and other spatial controls are coalescing towards the idea of the ‘commons’. As a result, struggles over the commons and common life are now coming to the forefront of both political activism and scholarly enquiry. This book advances academic debates concerning the spatialities of the commons and draws out the diverse materialities, temporalities, and experiences of practices of commoning. Part one, "Materialising the Commons" focuses on the performance of new geographical imaginations in spatial and material practices of commoning. Part two, "Spaces of Commoning", explores the importance of the turn from ‘common...
The first academic account of the 21st century anti-war and peace movement. Empirically rich and conceptually innovative, Anti-War Activism pays especially close attention to the changed information environment of protest, the complex alliances of activists, the diversity of participants, as well as campaigners' use of new (and old) media.
This book is an urgent and compelling account of the Occupy movements: from the M15 movement in Spain, to the wave of Occupations flooding across cities in American, Europe and Australia, to the harsh reality of evictions as corporations and governments attempted to reassert exclusive control over public space. Across a vast range of international examples over twenty authors analyse, explain and helps us understand the movement. These movements were a novel and noisy intervention into the recent capitalist crisis in developed economies, developing an exceptionally broad identity through a call to arms addressed to ‘the 99%’, and emphasizing the importance of public space in the creation...
Creative strategies have been central to global social movements. From the theatrics of the 1999 Seattle protests, to the rebel clowns at the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles and the antics of the Yes Men, the crossovers between art and politics have increasingly become more visible and prolific. This book explores an innovative form of creative and communicative politics: the ‘performative encounter’, as a strategy for facilitating new ways of being, relating and making worlds. Unlike existing scholarship that frames such encounters in artistic or cultural terms, this book analyzes performative encounters through an organizational lens to accentuate their social-political potential, engagin...
This volume puts together the works of a group of distinguished scholars and active researchers in the field of media and communication studies to reflect upon the past, present, and future of new media research. The chapters examine the implications of new media technologies on everyday life, existing social institutions, and the society at large at various levels of analysis. Macro-level analyses of changing techno-social formation – such as discussions of the rise of surveillance society and the "fifth estate" – are combined with studies on concrete and specific new media phenomena, such as the rise of Pro-Am collaboration and "fan labor" online. In the process, prominent concepts in ...
There has been much recent celebration of the success of African 'civil society' in forging global connections through an ever-growing diaspora. Against the background of such celebrations, this innovative book sheds light on the diasporic networks - 'home associations' - whose economic contributions are being used to develop home. Despite these networks being part of the flow of migrants' resources back to Africa that now outweighs official development assistance, the relationship between the flow of capital and social and political change are still poorly understood. Looking in particular at Cameroon and Tanzania, the authors examine the networks of migrants that have been created by makin...