This book explores what anthropology can contribute to an understanding of how people live through pandemics. It reflects on how pandemics are experienced and what we can learn from Covid-19 as well as previous instances that might inform future responses and help to alleviate suffering. The chapters highlight current research and longer-term reflections from different countries and areas of the discipline, covering medical anthropology, care and surveillance, digital and experimental ethn...

The fact that tourism is a major global industry forecast to continue its dramatic growth well into the twenty-first century is often cited as a rationale for its analysis. However, while the connection between individual locations and the world's global markets is an obvious product of tourism, the heart of the tourist experience is the construction of identity: the relation of the traveller to resident populations; the participants' views of themselves and others; tourists' search for au...

In planning debates, culture is often treated as a fixed element, either as a quasi-economic resource or as a category of behaviour. Yet a wealth of research and analysis is available that moves the spotlight from the question of what culture is, towards understanding what we are doing when we talk about culture. This book brings that focus to planning research, examining culture as a socio-historical concept, and introducing a line of scholarship, both established and recent, to show what...

What are the key rationalities that underpin planning policy discourses and how do they 'frame' seemingly irreconcilable conflicts around development and environmental protection? Providing a thorough assessment of these important questions, this stimulating book reviews planning policy in the UK and the rationality of 'sustainable development'. Supported by a wealth of empirical material collected over the past ten years, the study examines the national, regional and local tiers of planni...

What kinds of expertise and knowledge relate to electricity, and where is the space for alternative voices? How can the new roles for electricity in social and cultural life be acknowledged? How can we speak about ‘it’ in its own right while acknowledging that electricity is not one thing? This book re-describes electricity and its infrastructures using insights from anthropology and science and technology studies, raising fascinating questions about the contemporary world and its future. ...

This book presents lively case studies of tourism developments in the European High North from diverse perspectives. It compares views of the changing political ecology of a fragile region shaped by climatic and cultural factors. In exploring the mutual relations between new developments in Arctic travel narratives and tourism practices. Green Ice: Tourism Ecologies in the European High North pays particular attention to the changing discourses that produce, and are in turn produc...

This collection examines the conflicts and realities of development at a local, empirical level. It provides a series of case studies which illuminate the attitudes and actions of all of those involved in local development schemes. The material is drawn from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. All the contributors use rigorous anthropological methods of analysis to shed light on the place of feelings of personal sentiment and identity in reactions to planned development schemes. ...

Planning in contemporary democratic states is often understood as a range of activities, from housing to urban design, regional development to economic planning. This volume sees planning differently—as the negotiation of possibilities that time offers space. It explores what kind of promise planning offers, how such a promise is made, and what happens to it through time. The authors, all leading anthropologists, examine the time and space, creativity and agency, authority and responsibili...

Energy related infrastructures are crucial to political organization. They shape the contours of states and international bodies, as well as corporations and communities, framing their material existence and their fears and idealisations of the future. Ethnographies of Power brings together ethnographic studies of contemporary entanglements of energy and political power. Revisiting classic anthropological notions of power, it asks how changing energy related infrastructures are im...

This textbook offers a fresh approach to the study of comparative politics and public policy. Instead of concentrating on why countries differ, Learning From Comparative Public Policy explores how countries can learn from each other about the success and failure of policy initiatives. With its theory and practice focus, the lively narrative analyzes the cultural and resources problems involved in importing policies, and the roles of institutions, regulators, think tanks and expert...

Since the late eighteenth century, academic engagement with political, economic, social, cultural and spatial changes in our cities has been dominated by theoretical frameworks crafted with reference to just a small number of cities. This book offers an important antidote to the continuing focus of urban studies on cities in ‘the Global North’.Urban Theory Beyond the West contains twenty chapters from leading scholars, raising important theoretical issues about cities thro...

Learning the City: Translocal Assemblage and Urban Politics critically examines the relationship between knowledge, learning, and urban politics, arguing both for the centrality of learning for political strategies and developing a progressive international urbanism.Presents a distinct approach to conceptualising the city through the lens of urban learningIntegrates fieldwork conducted in Mumbai's informal settlements with debates on urban policy, political...