Dr Olivia Sheringham, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at QMUL Geography, has written a book with Professor Robin Cohen, entitled Encountering Difference (Polity Press, 2016). As the summary of the book explains: “In the face of the destructive possibilities of resurgent nationalisms, unyielding ethnicities and fundamentalist religious affinities, there is hardly a more urgent task than understanding how humans can learn to live alongside one another. This fascinating book shows how people from various societies learn to live with social and cultural diversity, and considers how the concepts of identity formation, diaspora and creolization shed light on the processes and geographies of encounter.
Professor Cathy McIlwaine's most recent book Cities, slums and gender in the Global South: towards a feminised urban future (Routledge, 2016), co-authored by Sylvia Chant, revolves around conceptualisation of the ‘gender-urban-slum interface’ which explains key elements to understanding women’s experiences in slum environments. It has a specific focus on the ways in which gender inequalities are can be entrenched but also alleviated. Included is a review of the demographic factors which are increasingly making cities everywhere ‘feminised spaces’, such as increased rural-urban migration among women, demographic ageing, and rising proportions of female-headed households in urban areas. Discussions focus in particular on education, paid and unpaid work, access to land, property and urban services, violence, intra-urban mobility, and political participation and representation.
Articulations of Capital: Global Production Networks and Regional Transformations (Wiley-Blackwell RGS-IBG Book Series, 2016) offers an accessible, grounded, yet theoretically-sophisticated account of the geographies of global production networks, value chains, and regional development in post-socialist Eastern and Central Europe. The book proposes a new theorization of global value chains as part of a conjunctural economic geography. It develops a set of conceptual and theoretical arguments concerning the regional embeddedness of global production; draws on longitudinal empirical research from over 20 years in the Bulgarian and Slovakian apparel industries; as well as makes a major intervention into the debate over the economic geographies of European integration and EU enlargement. The book is written by John Pickles and QMUL Geography’s Professor Adrian Smith (with Robert Begg, Milan Bucek, Poli Roukova and Rudolf Pástor).
Inequality is the defining issue of our time. But it is not just a problem for the rich world. It is the global 1% that now owns fully half the world’s wealth - the true measure of our age of inequality. In this historical tour de force, Dr Simon Reid-Henry, Reader in Geography, rewrites the usual story of globalization and development as a story of the management of inequality. Reaching back to the eighteenth century and around the globe, The Political Origins of Inequality (University of Chicago Press, 2016) foregrounds the political turning points and decisions behind the making of today’s uneven societies. As it weaves together insights from the Victorian city to the Cold War, from US economic policy to Europe’s present migration crisis, a true picture emerges of the structure of inequality itself.
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