How UN peacekeeping camps coexist with urban life
Maren Larsen‘s Worlding Home is a study of UN peacekeeping camps in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, revealing them as dynamic, porous and embedded in city life. Larsen…
Maren Larsen‘s Worlding Home is a study of UN peacekeeping camps in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, revealing them as dynamic, porous and embedded in city life. Larsen…
Tulasi Srinivas‘s The Goddess in the Mirror is an ethnography of Bangalore’s beauty salons, teasing out how beauty intertwines with gender, labour, caste and myth in urban India.…
According to Anne Power‘s Beyond Bricks and Mortar, housing means far more than physical shelter. It shapes and is shaped by the social conditions of its inhabitants, and…
Simmons, Dana. 2025. On Hunger: Violence and Craving in America, from Starvation to Ozempic. University of California Press. ISBN: 9780520412989 xiii + 234 pp. Acknowledgements, notes, bibliograp…
John Chalcraft‘s From Subordination to Revolution advances a Gramscian theory of popular mobilisation – how ordinary and marginalised people take collective action against the powers that be. Th…
Amelie Harbisch’s Making Refugees’ Political Agency Visible refigures refugees from passive subjects to political actors within global immigration systems. Grounded in practice theory and ethnographic…
Preventing Violence by Keir Irwin-Rogers, Luke Billingham, Alistair Fraser, Fern Gillon, Susan McVie and Tim Newburn examines the UK’s public‑health approach to reducing violence and challenges to imp…
Ching Kwan Lee’s Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle combines history, ethnography and sociological analysis. According to Lucas Tse, the author’s account of political tra…
Ives, Sarah. Steeped in Heritage: The Racial Politics of South African Rooibos Tea. Duke University Press, 2017. ISBN: 978-0-8223-6993-6 xv + 255 pp. Yingkun Hou (Southeast Missouri State Un…
Sanjaya Baru’s Secession of the Successful examines 200 years of Indian migration with a focus on the drivers and impacts of the recent exodus of the country’s elite.…
Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke argues that contemporary US elites claim the language of social justice and identify with progressive causes on one hand while reinforcing…
Care Poverty and Unmet Needs edited by Teppo Kroger, Nicola Brimblecombe, Ricardo Rodrigues and Kirstein Rummery, brings together twenty-seven social policy researchers from across the Global North to…
Hormonal Theory: A Rebellious Glossary by Andrea Ford, Roslyn Malcolm, Sonja Erikainen, Lisa Raeder, and Celia Roberts (eds.) (Bloomsbury: 2024) Far beyond fitness tips about “boosting testosteron…
Paul Dolan’s Beliefism tackles a form of polarisation: hostility towards opposing views (rather than the ideological divides themselves) which he terms “beliefism”. Coming from a behaviour…
Alexander Strecker (ed). Bread for the LIving, Bread for the Dead. Tavros Press, Athens 2025. 137 pp. ISBN 978-618-87697-0-0 David Sutton (Southern Illinois University) &n…
Atul K. Shah‘s Organic Finance denounces our destructive, profit-driven financial system and proposes an alternative model rooted in community, ecology, and cultural diversity. Employing nature-…
Ruling the Mongols of Manchuria by Jiani He examines how language shaped imperial governance and nation-building in late Qing borderlands. He’s detailed and valuable linguistic history reveals t…
Dogwhistles and Figleaves by Jennifer Mather Saul and Safe Havens for Hate by Tamar Mitts explore how extremist rhetoric thrives online and why content moderation doesn’t effectively tackle…
Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare by Nora Kenworthy (MIT Press: 2024) One chilly winter day, I (the author of this review) was standing in line…
Contesting Indonesia by Kirsten E. Schulze proposes a compelling framework of a national imaginary for understanding Islamist, separatist, and communal violence in Indonesia, grounded in interviews an…
Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization by Harry Yi-Jui Wu (MIT Press: 2021) Harry Yi-Jui Wu’s Mad by the…
City of Equals by Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit examines what it means for one citizen of a city to feel equal to another, despite different experiences and…
A Mouse in a Cage by Carrie Friese explores the ethical challenges of using animals in scientific research. Through ethnographic case studies from UK labs, Friese probes the…
Disaster Nationalism by Richard Seymour examines the rise of contemporary far-right movements, which he describes as neoliberalism that has been radicalised along ethno-nationalist and protectionist l…