This book presents a critical and aesthetic defence of “non-place” as an act of cultural reclamation. Through the restorative properties of photography, it re-conceptualises the cultural significance of non-place. The non-place is often referred to as “wasteland”, and is usually avoided. The sites investigated in this book are located where access and ownership are often ambiguous or in dispute; they are places of cultural forgetting. Drawing on the author’s own photographic research-led practice, as well as material from photographers such as Ed Ruscha, Joel Sternfeld and Richard Misrach, this study employs a deliberately allusive intertexuality to offer a unique insight into the contested notions surrounding landscape representation. Ultimately, it argues that the non-place has the potential to reveal a version of England that raises questions about identity, loss, memory, landscape valorisation, and, perhaps most importantly, how we are to arrive at a more meaningful place.

An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computers and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Augé calls "non-space" results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Augé uses the concept of "supermodernity" to describe a situation of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating essay he seeks to establish an intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity.

This books is the product of research conducted in the Brazilian Border with Bolívia in 2013, where a migrant temporary shelter hosted, under a humanitarian visa, hundreds of Haitians that had fled several stages of human insecurity back in their homeland. In order to survive and with the dream of leaving soon, migrants strategise their relationships and harnest social navigation skills. This fieldwork was part of the Master of Social and Cultural Anthropology programa at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, for which the author was granted a VU Scholarship.

For centuries, across nations, dialogue between the domestic and the foreign has affected and transformed architecture. Today these dialogues have become highly intensified. The Domestic and the Foreign in Architecture examines how these exchanges manifest themselves in contemporary architecture, in terms of its aesthetic potential and its practice, which, in turn, are impacted by broad economic, cultural and political issues. This book traces how diverse cultural encounters inevitably modify conventional categories, standards and codes of architecture, such as domestic identity, its political and economic representations and the negotiations with what is deemed foreign. Theoretical reflections by distinguished scholars are accompanied by interviews with some of the most influential architects practicing today, as well as stunning visual presentations by professional photographers.

Reevaluating the significance of location in contemporary film practice and urban cultural theory, Film, Mobility and Urban Space explores the role of moving images in representations and perceptions of everyday urban landscapes. Les Roberts draws on over 1,700 films of Liverpool from 1897 to the present and combines critical spatial analysis, archival research, and qualitative methods to navigate the city's cinematic geographies as mapped across a broad spectrum of film genres, including amateur film, travelogues, newsreels, promotional films, documentaries, and features.

This book discusses Asia’s rapid pace of urbanization, with a particular focus on new spaces created by and for everyday religiosity. The essays in this volume – covering topics from the global metropolises of Singapore, Bangalore, Seoul, Beijing, and Hong Kong to the regional centers of Gwalior, Pune, Jahazpur, and sites like Wudang Mountain – examine in detail the spaces created by new or changing religious organizations that range in scope from neighborhood-based to consciously global. The definition of “spatial aspects” includes direct place-making projects such as the construction of new religious buildings – temples, halls and other meeting sites, as well as less tangible religious endeavors such as the production of new “mental spaces” urged by spiritual leaders, or the shift from terra firma to the strangely concrete effervesce of cyberspace. With this in mind, it explores how distinct and blurred, and open and bounded communities generate and participate in diverse practices as they deliberately engage or disengage with physical landscapes/cityscapes. It highlights how through these religious organizations, changing class and gender configurations, ongoing political and economic transformations, continue as significant factors shaping and affecting Asian urban lives. In addition, the books goes further by exploring new and often bittersweet “improvements” like metro rail lines, new national highways, widespread internet access, that bulldoze – both literally and figuratively – religious places and force relocations and adjustments that are often innovative and unexpected. Furthermore, this volume explores personal experiences within the particularities of selected religious organizations and the ways that subjects interpret or actively construct urban spaces. The essays show, through ethnographically and historically grounded case studies, the variety of ways newly emerging religious communities or religious institutions understand, value, interact with, or strive to ignore extreme urbanization and rapidly changing built environments.

An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computers and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Augé calls “non-space” results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Augé uses the concept of “supermodernity” to describe a situation of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating essay he seeks to establish an intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity.

The concept of Third Culture Kids is often used to describe people who have spent their childhood on the move, living in many different countries and languages. This book examines the hype, relevance and myths surrounding the concept while also redefining it within a broader study of transnationality to demonstrate the variety of stories involved.

Malaysia features some of the most spectacular national parks in the world. The parks - most are hotspots of biodiversity - have become a major attraction for foreign and increasingly domestic tourists. Nature tourism is at the same time a source of revenues and a threat to the environmental integrity of conservation areas. This study - based on the theory of structuration and using a triangulation of methods - analyses (eco)tourism in Malaysian national parks from different angles by asking different groups of tourists and experts about their opinions, experiences and needs. In order to learn more about the often neglected group of domestic tourists a large survey was conducted in Kuala Lumpur. The needs of foreign individual and group travellers were analysed with a questionnaire in Gunung Mulu National Park. And experts of conservation and tourism (i.e. scientists, park managers, tour operators, exponents of NGOs) were asked to assess the state and potential of ecotourism in Malaysian national parks. Results show that the increasing heterogeneity and number of visitors and their different needs can put a strain on the environmental integrity of conservation areas. This study makes recommendations to mitigate such strains and to further sustainable tourism.