Recent books - Durham University

Recently published books

Here is a selection of recent book publications either by or contributed to by our academics and research colleagues.

An Atmospheric History of Smoking in Modern Britain

This book studies the historiography of smoking in modern Britain, with a focus on the social, cultural, and emotional aspects of the practice.

Centring on four specific moments in modern British history; the turn of the 20th century, the Second World War, the 1980s, and the mid-2000s, An Atmospheric History of Smoking not only traces the history of tobacco use, but explores the cultural significance of - and attitudes toward – smoking. Markovic combines oral histories with archival research and artefact analysis, in order to evoke the unique social atmospheres surrounding smoking at each of these key periods within British history.

Ivan Marković

Heatwaves: Causes, Consequences and Responses

Distinctively, this book brings together an end-to-end understanding of heatwaves, that is, a consideration of their causes, consequences for human and natural systems and societal responses to them in the form of adaptation and mitigation actions. It advocates for recognizing "the heatwave imperative" and emphasizes that “heatwaves matter”. Together, the individual chapters make the point that “knowing heatwaves” from a holistic interdisciplinary perspective will assist with efforts towards heatwave risk reduction and building resilience to what is probably the most pervasive of a range of climate hazards.

Glen McGregor

Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man's Land

A firsthand look at the lives of those who reside in no man’s land—the violence they endure and their immense resilience. “No man’s land” invokes stretches of barren landscape, twisted barbed wire, desolation, and the devastation of war. But this is not always the reality. According to Noam Leshem in Edges of Care, the term also reveals radical abandonment by the state. From the Northern Sahara to the Amazon rainforests, people around the world find themselves in places that have been stripped of sovereign care. Leshem is committed to defining these spaces and providing a more intimate understanding of this urgent political reality.

Noam Leshem

Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife

Sanitation is fundamental to urban public life and health. We need Sanitation for All.

In an age of pandemics the relationship between the health of the city and good sanitation has never been more important. Waste and the City is a call to action on one of modern urban life's most neglected issues: sanitation infrastructure. The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the devastating consequences of unequal access to sanitation in cities across the globe. At this critical moment in global public health, Colin McFarlane makes the urgent case for Sanitation for All.

Colin McFarlane

Neoextractivism and Territorial Disputes in Latin America: Social-ecological Conflict and Resistance on the Front Lines

Latin American development models continue to prioritise extractivism: the intensive exploitation and exportation of nature in its primary commodity form. This constant expansion of the extractive frontier into new territories leads to forms of place-based resistance, negotiation and struggle in which competing territorial projects and claims are at stake. This book uncovers the underlying trends and dynamics of these ‘territorialities in dispute’, and the socio- ecological resistance movements that are emerging as marginalized communities struggle to reclaim their territorial rights and defend and protect their right of access to the global commons. A focus on territorialities in dispute renders visible the unsustainable expansion of extractivist territories and opens up new horizons to learn from these processes and to consider post-extractivist/post-development imaginings of another world and alternate futures – as well as the challenges to their realisation.

Penelope Anthias

The Other of Climate Change: Racial Futurism, Migration, Humanism

If the predictions are correct, climate change will force millions of people from their homes, threatening a future of humanitarian crises, political violence, and strife. In The Other of Climate Change, Andrew Baldwin intervenes in the international political debate about climate change and human migration to tell a different story. He argues that international attempts to govern those who stand to be displaced by climate change are as much or more to do with resuscitating European humanism at a moment in which geophysical phenomena like climate change and the Anthropocene threaten to extinguish the human altogether. Through detailed interpretations of the figure of the climate migrant/refugee, Baldwin traces the contours of an emerging form of planetary racial rule – racial futurism - unfolding in the context of the climate change crisis.

Andrew Baldwin

The Routledge Handbook of Ocean Space

Invisible as the seas and oceans may be for so many of us, life as we know it is almost always connected to, and constituted by, activities and occurrences that take place in, on and under our oceans. The Routledge Handbook of Ocean Space provides a first port of call for scholars engaging in the ‘oceanic turn’ in the social sciences, offering a comprehensive summary of existing trends in making sense of our water worlds, alongside new, agenda-setting insights into the relationships between society and the ‘seas around us’.　 Accordingly, this ambitious text not only attends to a growing interest in our oceans, past and present; it is also situated in a broader spatial turn across the social sciences that seeks to account for how space and place are imbricated in socio-cultural and political life.

Philip Steinberg

Postcolonialism, Decoloniality and Development

Postcolonialism, Decoloniality and Development is a comprehensive revision of Postcolonialism and Development (2009) that explains, reviews and critically evaluates recent debates about postcolonial and decolonial approaches and their implications for development studies. By outlining contemporary theoretical debates and examining their implications for how the developing world is thought about, written about and engaged with in policy terms, this book unpacks the difficult, complex and important aspects of the relationships between postcolonial theory, decoloniality and development studies.

Cheryl McEwan

Robin

The robin is a small bird with a distinctive ruddy breast, at once a national treasure and a bird with a global reputation. In this superbly illustrated account, Helen F. Wilson looks at many aspects of the cherished robin, from its status as a harbinger of seasonal change and icon of Christmas, to its place in fairy tales, environmental campaigns and scientific discovery. In moving between cultural and natural histories, Robin asks wide-ranging questions: how did the robin’s name travel the world? Why is the robin so melancholy? Who was Cock Robin? And how has the history of the colour red shaped the robin’s ambivalent associations and unusual origin stories?

Helen Wilson

Systems of Suffering: Dispersal and the Denial of Asylum

Of the many state-enacted cruelties to which refugees and asylum seekers are subjected, detention and deportation loom largest in popular consciousness. But there is a third practice, perpetrating a slower violence, that remains hidden: dispersal. Jonathan Darling provides the first detailed account of how dispersal - the system of accommodation and support for asylum seekers and refugees in Britain - both sustains and produces patterns of violence, suffering and social abjection. He explores the evolution of dispersal as a privatised process, from the first outsourced asylum accommodation contracts in 2012 to the renewed wave of outsourcing pursued by the Home Office today. Systems of Suffering is a vital tool in the arsenal of those fighting to hold the government to account for the violence of its asylum policy and practice.

Jonathan Darling

Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others

In Cloud Ethics Louise Amoore examines how machine learning algorithms are transforming the ethics and politics of contemporary society. Conceptualizing algorithms as ethicopolitical entities that are entangled with the data attributes of people, Amoore outlines how algorithms give incomplete accounts of themselves, learn through relationships with human practices, and exist in the world in ways that exceed their source code.

In these ways, algorithms and their relations to people cannot be understood by simply examining their code, nor can ethics be encoded into algorithms. Instead, Amoore locates the ethical responsibility of algorithms in the conditions of partiality and opacity that haunt both human and algorithmic decisions. To this end, she proposes what she calls cloud ethics—an approach to holding algorithms accountable by engaging with the social and technical conditions under which they emerge and operate.

Louise Amoore

Geopolitics and Development

Geopolitics and Development examines the historical emergence of development as a form of governmentality, from the end of empire to the Cold War and the War on Terror. It illustrates the various ways in which the meanings and relations of development as a discourse, an apparatus and an aspiration, have been geopolitically imagined and enframed.

The book traces some of the multiple historical associations between development and diplomacy and seeks to underline the centrality of questions of territory, security, statehood and sovereignty to the pursuit of development, along with its enrolment in various (b)ordering practices.

Marcus Power

Virtual Library: Other forms of publication

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Creative Media

Our research community publish their research in multiple formats including films and podcasts.

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Creative media

Our research community uses a variety of creative media to communicate the research we do.

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Research and Impact

We are a large department of human and physical geographers conducting world-leading research that addresses pressing socio-economic, political and environmental challenges.

Research and Impact