This essay collection focuses on enclosure, deception and secrecy in three spatial areas – the body, clothing and furniture. It contributes to the study of private life and explores the micro-history of hidden spaces. The contents of pockets may prove a surer index to their owner’s real thoughts than anything they say; a piece of furniture with ingenious mechanisms created to conceal secrets may also reveal someone’s attempts to break in and thus give away as much as it holds. Though the book’s focus is on particular material or imagined objects, taken as a whole it exemplifies a range of interdisciplinary encounters between history, literary criticism, art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, criminology, archival studies, museology and curating, and women’s studies.

When “revolution” becomes a recurring theme in mainstream culture, where do we look for the tools for a critical engagement with the present? Addressing the link between allegory and cultural critique in contemporary culture and resisting the thematic abstraction of sexy, fast, revolutionary content, this book suggests that one way is to pay attention not so much to content as to form. Culture Control Critique provides an analysis of how representations of political systems in contemporary mainstream culture may be understood not so much by looking at their apparent critical message but by shifting our critical gaze to an underlying and recurring political logic that controls the desire for political change.

Paul Newland’s illuminating study explores the ways in which London’s East End has been constituted in a wide variety of texts – films, novels, poetry, television shows, newspapers and journals. Newland argues that an idea or image of the East End, which developed during the late nineteenth century, continues to function in the twenty-first century as an imaginative space in which continuing anxieties continue to be worked through concerning material progress and modernity, rationality and irrationality, ethnicity and 'Otherness', class and its related systems of behaviour. The Cultural Construction of London’s East End offers detailed examinations of the ways in which the East End has been constructed in a range of texts including BBC Television’s EastEnders, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men, Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights, Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, films such as Piccadilly, Sparrows Can’t Sing, The Long Good Friday, From Hell, The Elephant Man, and Spider, and in the work of Iain Sinclair.

This book demonstrates the value of ethnographic theory and methods in understanding space and place, and considers how ethnographically-based spatial analyses can yield insight into prejudices, inequalities and social exclusion as well as offering people the means for understanding the places where they live, work, shop and socialize. In developing the concept of spatializing culture, Setha Low draws on over twenty years of research to examine social production, social construction, embodied, discursive, emotive and affective, as well as translocal approaches. A global range of fieldwork examples are employed throughout the text to highlight not just the theoretical development of the idea of spatializing culture, but how it can be used in undertaking ethnographies of space and place. The volume will be valuable for students and scholars from a number of disciplines who are interested in the study of culture through the lens of space and place.

Modern-day Namibian history has largely been shaped by three major eras: German colonial rule, South African apartheid occupation, and the Liberation Struggle. It was, however, not only military conquest that laid the cornerstone for the colony, but also how the colony was imagined, the ‘dream’ of this colony. As a tool of discursive worldmaking, literature has played a major role in providing a framework in which to ‘dream’ Namibia, first from outside its borders, and then from within. In Fictioning Namibia as a Space of Desire, Renzo Baas employs Henri Lefebvre’s city–countryside dialectic and reworks it in order to uncover how fictional texts played an integral part in the violent acquisition of a foreign territory. Through the production of myths around whiteness, German and South African authors designed a literary space in which control, destruction, and the dehumanisation of African peoples are understood as a natural order, one that is dictated by history and its linear continuation. These European texts are offset by Namibia’s first novel by an African, offering a counter-narrative to the colonial invention that was (German) South West Africa.

Science fiction - one of the most popular literary, cinematic and televisual genres - has received increasing academic attention in recent years. For many theorists science fiction opens up a space in which the here-and-now can be made strange or remade; where virtual reality and cyborg are no longer gimmicks or predictions, but new spaces and subjects. Lost in space brings together an international collection of authors to explore the diverse geographies of spaceexploring imagination, nature, scale, geopolitics, modernity, time, identity, the body, power relations and the representation of space. The essays explore the writings of a broad selection of writers, including J.G.Ballard, Frank Herbert, Marge Piercy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mary Shelley and Neal Stephenson, and films from Bladerunner to Dark City, The Fly, The Invisible Man and Metropolis.

This is the third major revision of a text first published in 1982 with the title Urban Geography: A First Approach and in 1990 as Cities in Space: City as Place. The study of urban geography remains an important part of the geographical curriculum both in schools and in higher education. This book analyses life in an urban society and in a world which is being transformed by the processes of urbanization: to study urban geography is to study environments and phenomena significant to our everyday lives. This is an introductory text which aims to present both more traditional and newer approaches to urban geography in an accessible and educational way.

This compelling new book offers a unique global perspective on children’s lives throughout the world. It shows how the notion of childhood is being radically re-shaped, in part as a consequence of globalization. Taking an engaging historical and comparative approach, the book discusses wide-ranging issues such as children and war, child labour and young people’s activism around the globe. Important themes considered include: How children are constituted as raced, classed and gendered subjects; How family policy results in some kinds of family being labelled as normal and others as deviant, and how this impacts in children; How children’s involvement in war is connected to the globalization of capitalism and organised crime; How school and work operate as sites for the governing of childhood. This book will be of great value to students and scholars in the fields of sociology, social policy and development studies. It will also be a valuable companion to practitioners of international development and social work, as well as to anyone interested in childhood in the contemporary world.

This 2001 book discusses the changing uses, regulations and representation of the sea from 1450 to now.