We live in an era of techno-monopoly power in which technocapitalism - through ubiquitous digital platforms - has colonized both the internet and key aspects of our everyday lives. Cities and larger urban and metropolitan environments have provided a fertile ground for the rise and rapid growth of this power. In The Urban Field, Moisio and Rossi reveal an urban monopoly capitalism supported by the "corporatized state". They critically examine the relationship between capital and the state, and the generation of an urban governmentality centred on the economization of knowledge and technology in four key sites: labour, human capital, startups and forms of life. Moisio and Rossi contend that, ultimately, the urban field is a constitutively political construct that can be enacted in a different way, no longer as a value-extraction machine but as a collective endeavour aiming at redefining established modes of economic value creation.

This textbook is an introduction to thinking ethically about global issues. Unlike existing books in this area, this book is truly interdisciplinary and includes a range of voices from both the Global South and the Global North. Rather than simply applying Western theories to case studies, Prof. Stephen Minister shows readers how to consider context and complexity, while respecting the agency of people elsewhere. It weaves together the work of thinkers and writers from the Global South with philosophical work on global ethics, relevant scholarship from other academic fields, and stories from fieldwork studying global issues on four continents.

The textbook explores a variety of topics, including: cultural difference, gender, population, poverty, natural disasters, and development. It then encourages students to build on these ideas and think more deeply about topics such as foreign aid, inequality, immigration, international trade, climate change, human rights, and war and terrorism. Because the book's style is accessible and engaging, it will be an excellent text for ethics and global studies courses, as well as being of interest to general readers who want to think better about global issues.

Social theory is a crucial resource for the social sciences. It provides rich insights into how human beings think and act and how contemporary social life is constructed. But often the key ideas of social theorists are expressed in highly technical and difficult language that can hide more than it reveals.

The new edition of this popular book continues to cut to the core of what social theory is about. Wide-ranging in scope and coverage, it is concise in presentation and free from jargon. Covering key themes and schools of thought from the classical thinkers up to the present, the third edition features a new chapter dedicated to post-colonial sociological theory. With updated literature and examples throughout, the book also includes refreshed pedagogical features to connect theory to readers' own life experiences.

Showing why social theory matters, and why it is of far-reaching social and political importance, the book is ideal for readers seeking a clear, crisp mapping of a complex but very rewarding area.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's lifework has been studied through the lens of queer studies, film studies, poetry, and many other angles, but there are themes that one could still study. This book aims to bring forth a new understanding of Pasolini as someone who worked in various arts, and through appropriating one art with. Max Ryynaenen shows Pasolini's importance for not just film and film theory, but more broadly visual studies, art research and even cultural philosophy - where Pasolini can be seen to be a real pioneer in discussing unprivileged margins in the society. Ryynaenen reads Pasolini not just as a semiotician of film, but also as a cultural philosopher, and argues for that interpretation.

This book details the discovery and exploration of one of the major scientific revelations that has emerged from the field of experimental philosophy-i.e., that heritable personality traits often predict philosophical diversity and disagreement, and may help explain fundamental philosophical biases. Adam Feltz and Edward T. Cokely provide historical and personal perspectives on this differential approach within experimental philosophy and discuss how theoretical considerations and insights have started to have practical impact on practice in risk communication, law, medicine, public policy, and engineering (e.g., science for informed decision making; the ethics of choice architecture and nudges). The main goal in this book is to provide a theoretical framework for understanding variation in fundamental philosophical intuitions and how that variation informs ethical interaction theory.

This is an open access book.

This book investigates insurgent planning practices and their potential for alternative forms of civic engagement and democracy-building. It explores how planners can challenge technocratic planning by incorporating notions of participation, inclusion, trans-sectionality and the right to the city into their daily practices. Each chapter delves into those daily practices to answer: What does insurgent planning practice look like in practice? How are radical planners coping with traditional, technocratic planning as practised in most places around the world? And what do they do to advance an agenda of democratisation and the right to the city, counteracting neoliberal forms of governance?

Chapters draw on conversations with planners in several cities around the world, cataloguing insurgent experiences that challenge the status quo of contemporary market-based, exclusionary city-making. Throughout, cross-cutting issues such as gender, race and class are explored to consider ways in which insurgent planners bring diversity into planning.

In The Habitation Society, leading economic and political sociologist Fred Block argues that we are at a time of "blocked transition" from one mode of economic and social organization to another. We now have a habitation economy because most people work at creating, maintaining or improving the soft and hard infrastructure of the communities in which we live. The problem, however, is that we do not yet have a habitation society since our economy continues to be organized through the structures, institutions and concepts of an industrial economy. While the old industrial economy is dying, the new habitation society cannot yet be born.

But it is more than this, our methods for understanding how the economy works are also built around the analysis of industrial production, which are completely inadequate, Block shows, for grasping the new reality of how we buy and consume services in the habitation economy. In the absence of concepts to make sense of what is happening, the political space becomes filled with conspiracy theories and disinformation. Specifically, it has become extremely difficult for people to understand their own relationship to the larger economy and society, in particular, there is no longer an obvious relationship between the amount or intensity of work effort and economic output.

Fred Block's compelling analysis offers a path through this confusion and a means to understand our transition and what form this will take. He examines the economy as it actually exists in the present and maps out what would make that economy work more effectively in the hope that this will empower individuals to recognize the kinds of changes that could be made to improve things for themselves, their families and their communities.

This textbook explores the histories of royal women in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It argues that by dint of an unprecedented conjunction of historical shifts and powerful personalities, it was these women, and not men, who sat at the helm of global politics; moreover, it was they who in truth steered our world's transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. Organized into chapters devoted to each of the era's great states, the book sets out to challenge several historical premises. First, it shows that women were the actual, if not always formally crowned, sovereigns of these states, or at least played a decisive role in shaping their policies. Second, the book dissolves the conventional dichotomy between East and West, showing that in both Christian Europe and Islamdom, women achieved their high status by means of similar strategies and at similar periods in history. Third, by demonstrating that there was a precedent for female authority long before the first harbingers of the women's movement in the eighteenth century, the book calls into question received ideas about historical progress and the evolution of women's liberation.

This collection of essays aims to better understand what researchers do when they practice research. The team of contributors - which includes human geographers, urban planners and environmental scientists - expose various epistemological, ontological and methodological challenges to pin down what practices "are".

The essays showcase how practice theory can help spatial scientists generate new and future-oriented insights on debates such as mobility, relationality, and forms of critical spatial practice. In this way, the book reinforces a specifically geographic and spatial account that is needed for the development of practice theory while also shining new light on current debates within practice theory on power, politics and space. The book positions practices as the point of departure to study and conceptualize socio-spatial life.

How do social practices prefigure experiences, and how does embodied experience organize the performance of practices? This book suggests that the classic concept of style offers a fresh answer to the question how doings and sayings are linked into practice bundles.

Based on a rich ethnographic study of the visual practices of the German-speaking freeskiing subculture, this work develops a theory of phenopractices, or embodied cultural practices dedicated to apprehending and expressing style. Focusing on the visual dimension, it extends the thought of Garfinkel and Schatzki using recent insights from science and technology studies and research at the intersection of neuroscience and phenomenology. This offers a new perspective on fundamental practice-theoretical questions about the nature of practice elements, social order in the context of rules and regularity, or action and practical intelligibility.

Each chapter discusses and develops foundational concepts such as time, space, action, emotion, or perception based on an analysis of freeskiing practices such as planning a route in the backcountry, testing a new ski model, or judging freestyle contests. The central argument is that cultural styles of conduct are not only symbolic structures, but a functional resource which organizes situational intelligibility and thus enables social order based on aligned and managed embodied routines. Because the stabilization, dissemination, and evolution of such styles happens via different media, practice change is primarily influenced by media rather than symbolic, rational, or functional needs or ends.

A rich ethnography and provocative theoretical argument of interest to anyone working on contemporary practice thought, advancing phenomenology, the sociology of vision, lifestyle sports, media, or practice evolution.

A woman's life is different. This is clear when a stranger's catcall makes her feel targeted in the street. When politicians make off-the-cuff sexist remarks. When media commentators wade in with their condemnation of free, unrestricted abortion. When a father is praised to the skies for attending parents' evening while the mother's attendance is taken for granted. When they fire her because she's pregnant. When they dismiss her medical symptoms as anxiety. To counter sexism today, we need to learn the art of self-defence. Today, feminism is more alive and more necessary than ever because discrimination against women has become more subtle and difficult to detect, yet it retains its paralysing power. With combative energy and acerbic wit, Bel Olid explains the key concepts of the current feminist struggle in a smart, radical and often counterintuitive way.

As AI takes hold across the planet and wealthy nations seek to position themselves as global leaders of this new technology, the gap is widening between those who benefit from it and those who are subjugated by it. As Rachel Adams shows in this hard-hitting book, growing inequality is the single biggest threat to the transformative potential of AI. Not only is AI built on an unequal global system of power, it stands poised to entrench existing inequities, further consolidating a new age of empire.

AI's impact on inequality will not be experienced in poorer countries only: it will be felt everywhere. The effects will be seen in an intensification of international migration, as opportunities increasingly concentrate in the hands of wealthier nations; in heightened political instability and populist politics; and in climate-related disasters caused by an industry that is blind to its environmental impact across supply chains.

We need to act now to address these issues. Only if the current inequitable trajectory of AI is halted, the incentives changed, and the production and use of AI decentralized and decoupled from wealthier nations will AI be able to deliver on its promise to build a better world for all.


Also available as an audiobook