SOCIAL SCIENCES

The Silent Culture of Australia’s remotest Aboriginal communities By Tadhgh Purtill An in-depth look at the odd and alternative world of Australia’s Western Desert.

The Ngaanyatjarra Lands, deep in Western Australia, are home to Australia’s most remote Aboriginal communities. The region remains obscure because of its detachment from mainstream Australia in distance and culture, but also its peculiar operational culture. This study takes in psychological, economic, political and anthropological aspects of its community system, and reveals a self-sustaining and possibly unreformable situation, suggesting the region has surpassed the merely ‘dysfunctional’: it has become a disturbing independent society characterised by a negative coherency and a dystopian functionality.

Australian Scholarly Publishing • 9781925333862 • Paperback 284 pages • January 2020 • £30.00

Heart of Violence

Why People Harm Each Other By Paul Valent

Explores how we can understand violence, from the individual to the international. Violence is the plague of our civilisation. It threatens us daily through its many tentacles: domestic violence, criminal violence, sexual abuse, terrorism, state violence, revolution, war, and genocide. The recently evolved discipline of traumatology has amply described commonalities in the consequences of violence. But there was no corresponding discipline of violentology, which explained why violence occurred in the first place. This book takes the leap from healing the minds of victims to trying to understand the minds of perpetrators.

Australian Scholarly Publishing • 9781925984057 • Paperback 344 pages • January 2020 • £30.00

Psychoanalytical Notes on the Origin of Money

By Fabio Benini

Explores the potential origin of the coin in relation to the body. In the ancient world, many units of measurement were based, approximately, on some parts of the human body: arm, cubit, span, inch, foot; or on their functions: pace, half hour, league. This treatise examines the origin of the antique measurement of half a siqlum or half a giĝ (4.25g), its symbolic relation to the discarded foreskin, its connection to forgotten traditions of jewellery rings worn on or in the body, and as the potential origin of the coin.

Notes for a Disability History By Massimo Fioranelli Illustrates how disability has been defined through time.

When Dante visited the nine circles of hell, he he found no trace of the disabled, although at the time they were considered the bearers of sin, the physical and mental non-conformists to the paradigm of the human species. Over the centuries, the perceived meaning of disability has often been akin to guilt and sin, uselessness, and sometimes even crime. This book illustrates how disability was viewed and defined at different points in time, and how it is viewed and defined today.

Mimesis International • 9788869772979 • Paperback 210 x 140mm • 157 pages • September 2020 • £17.99

Bad Cities

By Ugo Rubeo Examines urban violence through the lens of contemporary American literature.

From Larry Kramer's New York to Roth's Newark and Colla's Baghdad, this collection of 15 essays explores how American contemporary literature tackles the issue of urban violence, its relationship with the forerunners of the genre, and how its main features evolved over time.

Mimesis International • 9788869772818 • Paperback 210 x 140mm • 270 pages • October 2020 • £22.99

Future Humanism

By Anna Maria Rufino A treatise on humanism and freedom as a common value in our society.

The theme of this pamphlet is knowledge, examined in its own origins and in the transformations of a world where deep meaning appears to be lost in the conscious awareness. Societal risks, fears and conflicts seem to affect the sense and memory of humanistic culture, making us forget the meaning of freedom as a common value. This is not an academic text book, but an imagining of the world as it could be.

By Anna Maria Rufino

An exploration of uncertainty and violence in our society. The uncertainty of our continued existence—individually, socially, institutionally and economically—disrupts the social system in the immediacy of the hereand-now, and often encourages the expression of words, images and gestures through violence. This pamphlet looks behind these phenomena to examine the state of modern society and the question of its future.

Mimesis International • 9788869772856 • Paperback 170 x 110mm • 70 pages • December 2020 • £8.99

Choose Decide Change

By Anna Maria Rufino Examines our choices and how we make them.

Choosing, deciding, and changing constitute the common basis of everything that we want and do. But what choices are we really making? Heterogeneity and social conditioning seem to have become the norm, with individuals accustomed to passively accept input from unidentifiable sources. This book analyses the new social and political geographies of our word which self-perpetuate, separating our will and our capacity to truly choose.

Mimesis International • 9788869772863 • Paperback 170 x 110mm • 70 pages • December 2020 • £8.99

Steppe Dreams

Time, Mediation, and Postsocialist Celebrations in Kazakhstan By Margarethe Adams Series: Central Eurasia in Context

The significance of temporality and how time is experienced in contemporary Kazakhstan.

Steppe Dreams concerns the political significance of temporality in Kazakhstan, as manifested in public events and performances, and its reverberating effects in the personal lives of Kazakhstanis. Adams examines the political, public aspects of temporality and the personal and emotional aspects of these events, providing a view into how time, mighty and unstoppable, is experienced in Kazakhstan.

By Efram Sera-Shriar Series: Science & Culture in the Nineteenth Century Explores the beginnings and development of British anthropology.

Victorian anthropology has been derided as an "armchair practice," distinct from the scientific discipline of the twentieth century. But the observational practices that characterised the study of human diversity developed from the established sciences of natural history, geography and medicine. This book argues that anthropology at this time went through a process of innovation which built on scientifically grounded observational study. Far from being an evolutionary dead end, nineteenth-century anthropology laid the foundations for the field-based science of anthropology today.

University of Pittsburgh Press • 9780822966487 • New in Paperback 229 x 152mm • 272 pages • December 2020 • £26.50

Literacy in the Mountains

Community, Newspapers, and Writing in Appalachia By Samantha NeCamp Series: Place Matters: New Directions in Appalachian Studies Combines literacy and journalism studies to tackle negative stereotypes about Appalachia.

After the 2016 presidential election, popular media branded Appalachia as “Trump Country,” decrying its inhabitants as ignorant fearmongers voting against their own interests. And since the 1880s, there have been many, including travel writers and absentee landowners, who have framed mountain people as uneducated and hostile. Attacking these misrepresentations head on, this book reclaims the long history of literacy in the Appalachian region.

University Press of Kentucky • 9780813178851 • Hardback 2 tables • 229 x 152mm • 146 pages • January 2020 • £37.50

The Arthurdale Community School

Education and Reform in Depression Era Appalachia By Sam F. Stack Series: Place Matters: New Directions in Appalachian Studies Examines the successes and failures of this famous progressive experiment.

The first of many homestead communities designed during the rollout of the New Deal, Arthurdale, West Virginia, was a bold experiment in progressive social planning. At the centre of the settlement was the school, which was established to improve the curriculum offered to Appalachian students. The first book-length study of the well-known educational experiment, The Arthurdale Community School illuminates the institution's history, influence, and impact.

Love, Mutuality, and Divorce in the Upper South during the Civil War By Allison Dorothy Fredette Series: New Directions in Southern History New perspectives on the institution of marriage and its impact on the social fabric of the US.

Not quite the Cotton Kingdom or the free labour North, the nineteenth century border South was a land in between. Here, the era’s clashing values—slavery and freedom, city and country, industry and agriculture—met and melded. Drawing on court records, personal correspondence, and prescriptive literature, this book follows border southerners into their homes to examine how changing divorce laws in the border regions of Kentucky and West Virginia reveal surprisingly progressive marriages throughout the antebellum and post-war Upper South.

University Press of Kentucky • 9780813179155 • Hardback • 2 maps, 1 fig., 7 tables • 229 x 152mm • 296 pages • March 2020 • £45.00

Irish Working Lives

By Mary Louise O'Donnell and Eric Luke Stunning stories and images about Ireland’s workers.

In a series of impassioned, remarkably diverse vignettes, Marie Louise relates her travels across the length and breadth of the country, engaging with a selection of committed Irish men and women whose work forms the lifeblood of Ireland. Whether spending a day on the road with a postman in Co Wicklow or meeting the Galway gardener who has used her own experience of personal tragedy to help others heal, Marie Louise’s assiduity and innate curiosity enlivens each and every encounter.

Veritas Books • 9781847308344 • Hardback • 230 x 230mm 224 pages • Available now • £22.00

Women and Peace

A New Training Model for a Culture of Inclusion Edited by Angelo Romeo and Maria Caterina Federici Examines prospects for women as expert teachers of mediation and integration processes.

This book reports not only a didactic experience but also research, offering a training model on peace mediation. The female protagonists of this research experience the role of trainers of other compatriots through a new didactic model. Compared to other books, the volume proposes for the first time a reflection of research—action on the themes of peace, security of the female gender.