Bøger udgivet af Manchester University Press

In an era of mass extinction, climate emergency, and biodiversity collapse, what role do digital media have in securing liveable futures? To what extent are digital media mitigating or intensifying environmental crises? And what theoretical, empirical, and methodological frameworks are needed to make sense of emerging digital ecologies? In a context where digital media are reshaping the futures of conservation, environmentalism, and ecological politics--for better and for worse---Digital ecologies confronts the political and ethical stakes of these developments. The collection draws together leading social science and humanities scholars, in order to examine the growing entanglement of animals, plants, and ecosystems, with digital media technologies. The book's original empirical chapters explore novel mediated encounters between humans and other animals: from exercise apps where users race wild animals, to livestreams of chickens and lobsters, and digital sound recordings of extinct species. Authors interrogate new forms of governance and surveillance arising with digital media - as satellite-tagged birds monitor the high seas, or digital smart forests and seed data bases reconfigure life in new ways. More broadly, the book explores the political and ethical potentials new assemblages of human, animals, technologies, and environments: as social media creates complex opportunities for environmental activism and new ecologies of software emerge. Beginning with the editors' own agenda-setting introduction, and closing with three chapter-length provocations for the future of research in the field, the book offers both an overview and intervention into the rapidly expanding field of digital ecologies.

How robust are children's rights in a highly interdependent world? How have these cherished rights fared in the face of adversity, and what has driven these pressing challenges?In 1989, the United Nations General Assembly unveiled the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), receiving endorsement from 196 states worldwide--every UN member except the United States. This pivotal moment raised expectations of an era where children's rights would hold sway. The lofty ideals of human rights and the sanctity of children's dignity resound in policy documents, but on the ground, a complex range of challenges unfolds. The interplay of global governance structures, national strategies, and local factors creates a landscape where children's rights often teeter on the precipice. Considering more than three decades since the CRC's inception, this book comprehensively explores a wide range of contemporary crises, raising crucial questions about the effectiveness of international commitments in children's rights. Unlike conventional human rights scholarship, this book spotlights often-neglected crises, unveiling the blind spots in scholarly and policy dialogues. It champions a global perspective, recognizing the profound influence of global and transnational forces. The book's accomplished contributors, hailing from various academic disciplines including international relations, law, education, political science, and public policy, collectively enrich this examination with diverse perspectives. Their multidisciplinary expertise enables the readers to gain deeper insights into complex global issues, transcending conventional boundaries and fostering a holistic understanding.

Delving into the intricate web of clinical research and psychotropic drugs, On Trial illuminates the captivating story of psychiatrist Roland Kuhn. Long celebrated as the discoverer of the first antidepressant Tofranil, more recently he has become the subject of controversy after patients exposed his extensive drug testing on unwitting subjects at the Münsterlingen Psychiatric Clinic in Switzerland. But is it fair to condemn him according to today's ethical standards, which themselves emerged from the research practices of his time?Drawing on Kuhn's extensive, newly accessible private archive, the book explores the early era of industry-sponsored clinical research in psychiatry. It unravels the interplay between the clinic, patients, physicians, nurses, corporations, and authorities, examining the forces that converged during the experiments.Spanning the decades from the 1940s to the 1980s, the Münsterlingen drug trials are meticulously situated within the evolving landscape of medical experimentation. Which people and institutions were involved, and who knew what? How were substances tested, which patients were affected? According to which patterns were the drugs administered? When did which values, guidelines, and standards apply, and what role did they play in practice?On Trial not only reconstructs the Münsterlingen drug tests but also weaves them into a broader tapestry about the historical development of clinical trials. This thought-provoking exploration enriches our understanding of the psychopharmaceutical journey while challenging us to consider the enduring ethical dilemmas that underpin medical research.

The mid-century (1930s-60s) was an era of seismic shifts for British women, including those living under British rule in the colonies, in both the public and private spheres. The traditional narrative of these years is that of a wave of expansion and constriction, with the swelling of economic and political freedoms for women in the 1930s, the cresting of women in the public sphere during the Second World War, and the resulting break as employment and political opportunities for women dwindled in the 1950s when men returned home from the front. But as the burgeoning field of interwar and mid-century women's writing has demonstrated, this narrative is in desperate need of re-examination. This book aims to revivify studies of female writers, journalists, broadcasters, and public intellectuals living or working in Britain, or under British rule, during the mid-century while also complicating extant narratives about the divisions between domesticity and politics. The essays in this collection explore how women represented the transformation of the quotidian -- including the home, employment, family life, and religious participation -- during the mid-century.

An important interdisciplinary collaboration that contextualises how Brexit has changed citizens' rights and presents the experiences of Brexit in the UK, EU and beyond. The authors contributing to the project come from different disciplines, including sociology, law, anthropology and political sciences. The book analyses citizenship and migration policies and how Brexit has changed the rights of British, EU and third-country nationals. Further, it locates such policy changes within the longer histories of British and EU migration policies. This highlights how Brexit was not an isolated event, but rather has found place within wider trends of restriction of citizenship rights on both sides of the Channel. Through different ethnographic and cultural studies, the book presents the experiences of British and EU nationals in the UK, Belgium and Spain. It discusses issues of citizenship and naturalisation, belonging, conviviality and hostility, families, risk and political mobilisation, to show the wide-ranging consequences of Brexit. By triangulating different experiences and perspectives, it shows how Brexit involves a loss of formal rights (and attempts to contain them). At the same time, it shows how Brexit involves wider issues of transformation of British and EU societies, and questions of who and how is accepted in such societies. Taken together, the analyses of the book aim to put at the centre the citizens impact by Brexit and to show the long-term consequences of the Brexit process. A wide-ranging analysis that allows to understand the ramifications of Brexit in the future of the UK and the EU.

Relics, dreams, voyages conjures a new cultural map of the early-modern world. Its main theme is centre and periphery, and many exiles are celebrated here: Jacobites and recusant Catholics; wandering Gaelic scholars; mercenary soldiers in Moravia and Slovenia; art dealers in c18 Rome. This book also considers centres of baroque culture outside the mainstream: exiled English Catholic Colleges in Flanders and Spain; a remote symbolic garden in rural Scotland; architectural fantasies from an isolated circle at Birr in the midlands of Ireland. It meditates on cultural transmission from Asia and the Americas to Europe: one test case is the painter Rubens, his circle of Antwerp Jesuits, and what they learned from the New Worlds. Many of the essays consider the secretive cultures of exiled or persecuted British Roman Catholics, including the pseudo-relics constructed in Antwerp for the posthumous cult of Mary Queen of Scots, and the triumphal procession of a vandalised statue at the exiled English College in Valladolid. The visual arts are examined across a wide temporal and geographical span, and many subversive iconographies are decoded: at the French and English courts, in remote Scotland, in Nagasaki, in Valladolid. Drawing on original research in libraries, collections, and archives in five countries, and in as many languages, this book draws many astonishing, unfamiliar and beautiful texts, things and events, into a cartography of the subtle, sometimes secret patterns of baroque culture worldwide. This books offers a new, extraordinary cultural geography of the baroque world, opening doors to many rich and strange cultural artefacts, from "China to Peru."

John Polidori is the least regarded figure in the history of literary vampirism and yet his novella The Vampyre (1819) is perhaps 'the most influential horror story of all time' (Frayling). Polidori's story transformed the shambling, mindless monster of folklore into a sophisticated, seductive aristocrat that stalked London society rather than being confined to the hinterlands of Eastern Europe. Polidori's Lord Ruthven was thus the ancestor of the vampire as we know it. This collection is a first book-length critical study that explores the genesis of Polidori's vampire. It tracks his bloodsucking progeny across the centuries and maps his disquieting legacy from the melodramatic vampire theatricals in the 1820s, through further Gothic fictions and horror films, to twenty-first-century paranormal romance. It includes a critique of the fascinating and little-known The Black Vampyre (1819) - a text inspired by Polidori and the first Black vampire in fiction. Leading and emerging scholars of the vampire and Gothic provide innovative analyses of the variations on monstrosity and deadly allure spawned by Polidori's revenant. The collection advances from the ground-breaking research of Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day and the first special issue of Gothic Studies devoted to vampires. Appended is an annotated edition of the text of The Vampyre and supplementary material.Polidori died a suspected suicide aged 25; he has been sorely neglected. This stimulating collection makes a coherent case for the importance of John Polidori's tale and redeeming 'poor Polidori'.

Based on the findings of a 15-month research project led by the Centre for Cultural Value, this significant new book offers a comprehensive overview of the impacts of Covid-19 on the UK's cultural sector and highlights implications for its future direction.The book provides a summary of the local, regional and national policy responses to the crisis. It offers a rigorous statistical analysis of the impacts of these policy responses and of the pandemic itself on the cultural workforce across the UK and a mixed-methods analysis of audiences' responses to the pandemic. These insights are nuanced and illustrated via detailed case studies of a number of key sub-sectors of the cultural industries (theatre, museums and galleries, screen industries, libraries and festivals) and via an ecosystem analysis of the Greater Manchester city-region. The book identifies and critically reflects on the core, recurrent themes that have emerged from the research and highlights the implications for cultural practitioners, organisations, funders and policymakers as we move into the endemic stage of Covid-19. It advocates for a more equitable and regenerative cultural sector, where freelancers and marginalised cultural workers and audiences are valued and included, and for a more engaged and collaborative approach to cultural sector research to enable to sector to know itself better and adapt to rapid change.

Graveyard Gothic examines the crucial role played by graveyards and other burial sites in Gothic literature, film, television and video games. This book includes seventeen specially commissioned chapters from key international scholars that explore the graveyard's Gothic significance from the eighteenth century to the present day, and ranges far beyond British culture to consider representations from the US, Mexico, Japan, Australia, India and Eastern Europe. It offers unparalleled historical and geographical scope and engages a number of theoretical frameworks, including the historical, material, colonial, political and religious. Chapters on key texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frame the graveyard as a site of solace and metaphysical speculation that nevertheless exemplified the emerging Gothic mode by offering both supernatural potential and a reminder of the links between past and present. The book then traces the journey of the graveyard trope as it became more complex and spread across cultures, languages and continents throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contributors focus on its role in war Gothic, YA novels, weird fiction, poetry and non-fiction prose, as well as a vast array of novels and audiovisual texts. Important chapters demonstrate how film and TV in particular were responsible for enduring visual tropes that still shape our sense of the graveyard's Gothic identity. With its vast geographical scope, the book is also able to reveal the graveyard as a space of both oppression and resistance in texts that depict colonial conquest and exploitation. With a critical introduction offering a platform for further scholarship and a coda mapping possible future critical and cultural developments, Graveyard Gothic establishes the graveyard as a quintessential Gothic chronotope and, in the process, defines a new area of Gothic Studies.

Exhibiting Irishness traces constructions of Irish identity in national and international displays between the 1850s and 1960s. Exhibitions were a global phenomenon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As sources of entertainment and education, they were enmeshed in the politics of nationalism, trade and tourism. The book explores how the politics of display influences the production of Irish identity according to a host of contexts. It considers how the practices of display were shaped by issues of funding, organisers' motives, and the larger purpose of the event itself. This in turn fed back into Irish understandings of themselves politically, economically, socially or culturally. The chapters examine exhibitions in Ireland, the British Empire and the United States. As a valuable contribution to scholarship, each exhibition is placed in the wider political, economic and cultural locale of its time. By thinking transnationally, the book explores how Irishness worked itself out through gender, capitalism and race in a larger network of empire and whiteness from the 1850s to the 1960s. A saleable Irishness emerged in historic exhibits and are now the product of a lucrative global phenomena of Irish culture. Tourism today offers the Irish landscape, the Irish people, and Irish products. Exhibiting Irishness tells the story of how an international Irish identity has always been about selling Irishness - an Irish identity always on sale.

Resisting Olympic evictions examines the mobilisation of space to resist removals in favelas in the run-up to the 2016 Olympic Games. The ethnographic account follows the resistance to evictions in Vila Autódromo focusing particularly on a series of events known as Occupy Vila Autódromo which sought to mobilise the space of the favela as a tool for resistance. In constructing the space as welcoming, friendly and safe, these events challenged the myth of marginality underpinning the attempts to evict the community. Beyond this, the liminal nature of the events crystalised this idea clearly for activists who participated in them, allowing this idea to spread around the world through both social and traditional media in the glare of the Olympic media spotlight. Ultimately, residents constructed an alternative vision of what a favela could be, memorialising this in a museum of evictions to serve as an example in the ongoing struggle for housing rights. In doing so, the book offers a significant contribution to debates around integrating informal communities with formal urban structures in a democratic, participatory way and the conflicts over urban space that this ignites, experienced in cities around the world.

Public Information Films were one of the responses by the British Government to the communication challenges of a mass electorate. This book explores its somewhat tortuous progress in the 1930s and 1940s by examining the Government's own attempts at filmmaking through the film units of the Empire Marketing Board, the General Post Office and, eventually the Ministry of Information's Crown Film Unit. These Units enabled many who regarded themselves as documentarists to develop their skills and techniques over the course of two decades. Whilst acknowledging that Grierson, Jennings and others made significant contributions to the Public Information Film this book takes a slightly different perspective. Its focus is upon the entire film catalogue produced by the Government Film Units from 1930 to 1952 rather than the personalities. From this perspective it is possible to identify significant themes in the films and consider whether they addressed the demands of their sponsors or reflected more widespread national concerns and anxieties. To achieve that the impact of these films is further explored by assessing their reception amongst contemporary audiences. The overall success of the film units was such that they developed a template for Public Information Film production which was used until the 1970s. The book makes a significant contribution to the understanding of Government communication by film and its responses to the issues facing the British public in the 1930s and 1940s.

This is the first English translation of Hariulf's History of St Riquier, which describes the history of an important monastic community in northern France from its foundation in the seventh century until the closing years of the eleventh century. Writing in a period of intense religious and political change, Hariulf presents the history of his house as he would like it remembered, as a source of social and political stability and a centre of monastic excellence. Under the protection of its founder and patron, Richer, whose miracles recur throughout the history, Hariulf portrays his brothers in religion at work and worship. He recounts the support the community received from the emperor Charlemagne in building the great monastic church and his work is important for the description of the treasures, both material and spiritual, accumulated by the monks. In his pages we see the creation of a great monastic estate, the problems of maintaining it and the complexities of its management as experienced by a succession of abbots. The seizure in the tenth century of the relics of the community's patron and their recovery during the many conflicts that took place as the Carolingian empire collapsed reveal the political as well as the religious importance of relics. Hariulf's is a long and sweeping narrative with a cast of many characters; this new translation offers the opportunity to consider the work as an exercise in the writing of history, the creation and representation of the past, and how a community's history might be presented to foster a communal identity in a changed and changing society.

Italian graphic design explores the emergence and articulation of graphic design practice in Italy from the interwar period to the 1960s. It offers a much-needed critical and historical analysis of the role that graphic design has played in Italian design culture. As such, it contributes to a more diverse, inclusive and contextualised understanding of Italian design and visual culture. Drawing attention to everyday design practices, education, networks, organisational strategies, mediating channels and discourses on modernism, the book addresses the struggle for graphic designers to define their practice and its adaptation to shifting political and cultural environments, as well as changing design discourses. It traces the lineage of graphic design back to typography, tackles its problematic relation with advertising and addresses graphic designers' efforts to negotiate their professional identity with industrial designers. It problematises and shows new evidence on Italian design during and following fascism, addressing the grey area between alignment and resistance. A series of case studies brings to light neglected actors of Italian design: the vocational schools Scuola del Libro and Cooperativa Rinascita, and the professional body Aiap. They also offer new perspectives on protagonists of the historiographical canon: the Studio Boggeri, the Milan Triennale and the industrial design organisation ADI. This book will serve as a standard reference for students from undergraduate level upwards, as well as scholars working on Italian design and cultural history and those interested in the development of graphic design internationally.

Courteous Exchanges demonstrates the importance of courtesy as a discourse shaping reader and audience experiences in the English Renaissance. It focuses on significant correspondences between the works of Spenser and Shakespeare, but it also considers how Castiglione's Book of the Courtier provided these two authors with a rich mine of concepts and vocabulary and a predecessor in the art of encouraging reader engagement in these terms of analysis.Wareh analyses Love's Labour's Lost, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, and The Winter's Tale in tandem with The Faerie Queene, examining how such topics as education, gender, religion, race, and aristocratic identity are offered up to reader and audience interpretation. She suggests that Renaissance audiences and readers, through the reflections and responses provoked by this process, were led into a recognition of their overlapping roles as judges of texts and people. The habits of thought they thus developed supported a critical evaluation of the cultural fiction of inherited gentility and the social performance of courtesy that supports it. The works of Spenser and Shakespeare contributed to the social construction of Renaissance aristocratic identity, but they also provided tools for its critique.

Thomas Nashe is typically regarded as an urban author and a University wit, but his writings are inflected and shaped by regional travel, 'non-literary', non-elite works, and oral culture. The essays in this collection address Nashe's use of the past, his engagement with the Elizabethan present, and his textual legacy. As an instigator of debate and a defender of tradition, a man of letters and a popular hack, a writer of erotica and a spokesman for bishops, an urbane metropolitan and a celebrant of local custom, the various textual performances of Nashe elicit and continue to provoke a range of contradictory reactions. Nashe's often incongruous authorial characteristics suggest that, as a 'King of Pages', he not only courted controversy but also deliberately cultivated a variety of public personae, acquiring a reputation more slippery than the herrings he celebrated in print. This book questions early modern conceptions of authorship and textual transmission through assessing Nashe's self-representation, authorial legacy, and literary celebrity: it traverses the mercurial way in which Nashe characterized himself as a messenger in print; addresses news and Nashe's denunciations of uncritical news-reading; examines Nashe's engagement in the Marprelate controversy and its resonances into the seventeenth century; assesses his ghostly influence on later writers and discusses the conscious materiality of Nashe's writing and its consumption. Collectively, the essays in this book illustrate how Nashe not only excelled at textual performance, but that his personae also became a contested site as readers actively participated and engaged in the reception of Nashe's image.

Romantic nationalism has profoundly shaped the contours of Syrian identity under Baathist rule, creating deeply rooted habits of thought that continue to impact the lives of Syrians today. Far from being an indigenous construct, this specific ideal of national identity has roots in 18th- and 19th-century French and German social philosophy, which was closely studied and championed by the Baathist "founding fathers." This vision of the national community included, among other features, a novel view of gender roles in public life, emphasizing the muscularity of patriarchal protectors and the adoration of supporting women. Gender, passion, and nation in Baathist Syria is the first book to address these European borrowings in Baathism and to document how the associated gender ideologies filtered down to impact the everyday lives of Syrian women and men. Tracing the concepts of Romantic, muscular nationalism from the writings of the Baathist founders, to political and legislative implementations, and ultimately to impacts on everyday popular culture, the book demonstrates how a new regime of Romantic gendered identity became central in Baathist efforts to unify the country's heterogenous religious and ethnic communities. Continuing up to the current day, the final chapters of the book address how this gendered nationalism has contributed to violent conflict in Syria and how it is being challenged by new concepts of civic pluralism.

A neoliberal revolution? examines the Thatcher government's attempt to privatise and individualise Britain's pension system, thereby transforming workers into risk-taking savers with a stake in capitalism. The book explains why this revolution failed and charts the malign legacy left by the evolutionary reforms which ministers salvaged from it. -- .

What should we do with heritage damaged in conflict? Instead of succumbing to the tempting response of 'reconstruct it, just as it was!', British Iraqi archaeologist, Dr Zena Kamash, invites readers to think first and foremost about what might be most beneficial to the local communities of Syria and Iraq.Charting a path through the colonial histories of, and into the trauma of war in, Syria and Iraq, this book examines the projects and responses currently on offer and explores their flaws and limitations, including issues of digital colonialism, technological solutionism, geopolitical manoeuvring, media bias and community exclusion. By drawing on current research into the psychology and neuroscience of trauma and trauma recovery, as well as inspiration from artists and creative thinkers who challenge the status quo, readers are encouraged to reflect on how we might use heritage to promote healing and wellbeing for Syrian and Iraqi communities. In so doing, this book asks us to envisage gentler, ethically-driven ways to respond to heritage damaged in conflict that recentres people, and their hopes, dreams and needs, into the heart of these debates.

Drawing from both past and present, using the interdisciplinary hermeneutics of theatre, politics, and performance, this collections explores: how to do activism, make theatre, and be in the world through the Leftist paradigms and ethos? What are the political, cultural, personal, and collective dramaturgies through which to recuperate the Leftist care for commons for our time? The Left is framed here as a large umbrella term for a range of progressive cultural and political practices, as well as a way of living/being in the world. The focus on plural cultural Lefts draws attention to different histories of Leftist political and cultural practices and to the dialectics between official and unofficial Lefts--between the totalising ideological framework and its smaller-scale manifestations. The conceptual focus is on the dialectics of the macro- and the micro-plane of the Leftist histories, legacies, and current forms of resistance as they occur through different dramaturgies of activism, but also through theatre and everyday life.In our times of political confusion--when Leftist agendas and struggles often collapse or become appropriated by Right--the necessity of recovering the Leftist ethos of solidarity, social justice, and care for the commons seems more urgent than ever. How to grapple with the complexities of the Left: its theatres and theatricalities, its modes of activism, its subjects and subjectivities?

This book systematically explores how the politics of memory impacts peace in societies transitioning from a violent past. The book argues that the quality of peace is affected by the entanglement of memories. It develops an original theoretical framework that connects sites, agency, narratives, and events in memory politics. Memorials, monuments, and museums are sites that demonstrate the materiality of memory, agents drive memory politics, narratives of memory reflect the power of language, and commemorative events illustrate the importance of performativity. This framework is used to analyse mnemonic formations that function as 'diagnostic sites' in the study of peace. The empirical investigations demonstrate the strength with which memories of past violence affect the quality of peace in the present. The power of the past is evident from the comparative analysis of the mnemonic formations of nationalisms dividing the island of Cyprus, the lingering legacies of colonialism in South Africa, contestations regarding the use of human remains in Cambodia, the unsettled memory of the siege of Sarajevo in the Bosnian memoryscape, and on-going controversies around the role of internationals in the Rwandan genocide. The analysis shows that three elements of memory politics - inclusivity, pluralism, and dignity - play a key role in the construction of a just peace. The book generates original and important findings on how memory politics affects the quality of peace and contributes new and timely knowledge about societies that grapple with the painful legacies of the past.

Peace processes around the world are not sustainable unless they take young people-who have the most to lose from continued conflict-seriously. The recent global Youth, Peace, and Security Agenda (YPS) officially recognised the "positive" role that young people can play in peacebuilding processes, which means that the time is ripe to consider exactly how youth are or are not "inclusively represented", do and do not undertake "meaningful participation", and are recognized-or fail to be recognized-in the in the institutions and practices of global peacebuilding. The contributors to this volumeexplore the significance of YPS and use case studies from around the world-from South Sudan to the Asia-Pacific region, from Colombia to the USA-to assess the current state of young people's participation, inclusion and innovation in peacebuilding. They argue that states are often afraid of the potential revolutionary power of their young people, which lead them to systematically marginalise their youth. When formal "youth participation" becomes a way of safely invisibilizing young people in official peace processes, it falls far short of the contributions young people need to make to ensure that peace is sustainable. Youth often find more success working outside of official systems to create and nurture peace on their own terms.The contributors offer guidance for ways to bridge the disconnect that exists between institutional assumptions and expectations for youth as peacebuilders and the actual sustainable peace leadership of youth.

Peace processes around the world are not sustainable unless they take young people-who have the most to lose from continued conflict-seriously. The recent global Youth, Peace, and Security Agenda (YPS) officially recognised the "positive" role that young people can play in peacebuilding processes, which means that the time is ripe to consider exactly how youth are or are not "inclusively represented", do and do not undertake "meaningful participation", and are recognized-or fail to be recognized-in the in the institutions and practices of global peacebuilding. The contributors to this volumeexplore the significance of YPS and use case studies from around the world-from South Sudan to the Asia-Pacific region, from Colombia to the USA-to assess the current state of young people's participation, inclusion and innovation in peacebuilding. They argue that states are often afraid of the potential revolutionary power of their young people, which lead them to systematically marginalise their youth. When formal "youth participation" becomes a way of safely invisibilizing young people in official peace processes, it falls far short of the contributions young people need to make to ensure that peace is sustainable. Youth often find more success working outside of official systems to create and nurture peace on their own terms.The contributors offer guidance for ways to bridge the disconnect that exists between institutional assumptions and expectations for youth as peacebuilders and the actual sustainable peace leadership of youth.

This book offers a new analytical framework for the multi-layered processes of politicising and gendering care for older people, understood as an inherently political and gendered condition of human existence. It brings together contributions that focus on different manifestations and interpretations of these processes in several European settings and at various societal and political levels. It investigates how care for older adults varies across time and place and aims to provide an in-depth comprehension of how it becomes an arena of political struggle and the object of public policy and political intervention. The book comprises multidisciplinary research stemming from gender studies, history, political science, public policy, social anthropology, social work, and sociology. These analyses examine the issue of care for older people as a political concern from many angles, such as problematising care needs, long-term care policies, home care services, institutional services and family care. The book's contributions reveal the diversity of situations in which the processes of politicising and gendering care for older adults overlap, contradict or reinforce each other while leading to increased gender (in)equalities on different levels - familial, professional, and societal. Both caring for older adults or being taken care of when becoming old(er) or frail are potentially a feature of any personal trajectory, which is always contextually situated. Therefore, this book is an invitation to reflect upon care for older people as an issue particularly significant at any time and relevant at any societal level or socio-political sphere.

Sexual politics in revolutionary England explores the sudden appearance of graphic sex-talk in polemical print during the English Revolution. This was a novel development, for prior to 1640, explicit sexual language in England was largely confined to subversive oral and scribal forms. Yet after the collapse of press licensing that accompanied the outbreak of civil war, it rapidly evolved into a vital component of mid-century public culture. By the Stuart Restoration, sexual politics had become a routine element of English political life.This book tells that story for the first time in a sweeping narrative account. Drawing on print and manuscript sources from dozens of archives, it traces the evolution of explicit sex-talk from its pre-war underground roots into a premier mode of public politicking during the 1640s and 1650s. In those years, contemporary ideas about sex and the body invaded crucial mid-century debates over religious toleration, sectarian radicalism, and patriarchal kingship to dramatic effect. In the process, the book shows, sex-talk became a key tool of partisan identity formation and military mobilization, as contemporaries repeatedly portrayed themselves as morally upright patriarchs and their enemies as promiscuous lechers. By 1660, twenty years of increasingly visible sexual politics had laid formative groundwork for the libertine antics of Charles II's courtiers as well as the caustic slanders levelled against the Restoration court by its godly critics. This book therefore offers an important new context for approaching the history of late Stuart sexual culture - and through it, that of Western sexuality more broadly.

This collection brings together a range of methodological approaches to analyse textual and visual representations of premodern royal and elite sexualities to push beyond what has in the past and in some instances continues to be a binarized approach to sexualities whether described as heterosexual or homosexual; licit or illicit; queer or straight and so on. The contributors to this collection present fresh theories and approaches to the consideration of premodern sexualities and aim to lay down durable foundations for further research and study. Being the richest source for the investigation of premodern sexualities and their representations, the primary source base for the collection rests upon chronicles, archival materials, artistic production, and literary texts. Building upon previous work in the field of royal and elite sexualities, it is anticipated that these primary sources will be signposts to further exploration in the fields of royal and monarchical studies while also advancing wider analyses and interdisciplinary conversations around intersectionality and sexualities more broadly imagined.