This edited collection, which is situated within the environmental humanities and environmental social sciences, brings together utopian and dystopian representations of pandemics from across literature, the arts, and social movements.

Featuring analyses of literary works, TV and film, theater, politics, and activism, the chapters in this volume home in on critical topics such as posthumanism, multispecies futures, agency, political ecology, environmental justice, and Indigenous and settler-colonial environmental relations. The book asks: how do pandemics and ecological breakdown show us the ways that humans are deeply interconnected with the more-than-human world? And what might we learn from exploring those entanglements, both within creative works and in lived reality? Brazilian, Indian, Polish, and Dutch texts feature alongside classic literary works like Defoe's A Journal of a Plague Year (1722) and Matheson's I Am Legend (1954), as well as broader takes on movements like global youth climate activism. These investigations are united by their thematic interests in the future of human and nonhuman relationships in the shadow of climate emergency and increasing pandemic risk, as well as in the glimmers of utopian hope they exhibit for the creation of more just futures.

This exploration of how pandemics illuminate the entangled materialities and shared vulnerabilities of all living things is an engaging and timely analysis that will appeal to environmentally minded researchers, academics, and students across various disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Insightfully exploring the crossroads of communications and authoritarianism, Talking Back to the West illuminates how the Erdogan government and its media allies use history, religion, and identity to pursue complementary agendas and tighten the AKP's grip on power.

A multidisciplinary examination of the role of military forts in the Caribbean during the age of European colonial expansion

A Fortified Sea illuminates the key role of military forts in the greater Caribbean during the long eighteenth century. The historical Caribbean, with its multiple contested boundaries at the periphery of European western expansion, typically has been analyzed as part of an empire. European powers, including Spain, the Netherlands, England, and Denmark, carved up the Caribbean Sea into a cultural patchwork. These varied cultural contexts were especially evident during regional and national conflicts throughout the eighteenth century and prompted the construction of more fortifications to protect imperial interests. The emergence of Anglo-American colonies during the eighteenth century and later the United States gradually altered previous geopolitical balances, redefining the cultural and geopolitical boundaries of the region.

This collection of essays incorporates several historiographical traditions-from Spanish to American-all portraying the borderland as a breakthrough contested cultural, social, economic, and military boundary. A multinational roster of contributors approaches topics through a war studies lens as well as architecturally and historically, enriching a usually monothematic view. As well, discussion of cultural management of the historical remains of forts shows local communities trying to preserve and interpret the role of forts in society.

Part I defines the training of military engineers in Spain. Part II engages with British defensive military plans and settlements in the Caribbean and shows how the British dealt with the rhetorical image of the empire. Part III clarifies the building processes of fortifications in Santiago de Cuba, Cartagena de Indias, Havana, and Veracruz, among other places. Copious period maps complement the prodigious research. The book will appeal to readers interested in the history of the Caribbean, military history, and European imperial expansion.

A History of the Modern Middle East examines the profound and often dramatic transformations of the region in the past two centuries, from the Ottoman and Egyptian reforms, through the challenge of Western imperialism, to the impact of US foreign policies. Built around a framework of political history, while also carefully integrating social, cultural, and economic developments, this expertly crafted account provides readers with the most comprehensive, balanced, and penetrating analysis of the modern Middle East.

The seventh edition has been substantially revised to reflect the significance of the 2011 Arab Uprisings as a major turning point in the modern history of the region. A new chapter considers how regional powers, especially in the Gulf, are now asserting themselves more forcefully, seeking to push their own interests while Russia and China contest America's position. Including an annotated and updated bibliography that offers guidance to readers seeking more in-depth information and incorporating an online companion website featuring quizzes, timelines, and instructor resources, A History of the Modern Middle East remains the quintessential text for courses on Middle Eastern history.

This book explores the critical linkages between indigeneity, marginality, and the state in Bangladesh. Indigeneity is progressively gaining currency in politics and thereby becoming an active force in the larger context of national activism with transnational patronage and international support. Drawing on comprehensive and solid ethnographic accounts, the book offers a broader understanding of the process of marginalisation and the emergence of new leadership among the Khumi, an indigenous group of Bangladesh. It illuminates how the Khumi have realised their position on the margin of the state within the socio-economic, political, and ethnic history of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. It also looks at how kin-based social organisations and non-kin-based social relations become bases of power and authority as well as cooperation and reciprocity in Khumi society.

Lucid and topical, the book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of indigenous studies, anthropology, ethnic studies, sociology, political sciences, international relations, border studies, and South Asian studies, especially those concerned with Bangladesh.

This case study of Botswana focuses on the state-building qualities of biodiversity conservation in southern Africa. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Annette A. LaRocco argues that discourses and practices related to biodiversity conservation are essential to state building in the postcolonial era. These discourses and practices invoke the ways the state exerts authority over people, places, and resources; enacts and remakes territorial control; crafts notions of ideal citizenship and identity; and structures economic relationships at the local, national, and global levels.
The book's key innovation is its conceptualization of the "conservation estate," a term most often used as an apolitical descriptor denoting land set aside for the purpose of conservation. LaRocco argues that this description is inadequate and proposes a novel and much-needed alternative definition that is tied to its political elements. The components of conservation-control over land, policing of human behavior, and structuring of the authority that allows or disallows certain subjectivities-render conservation a political phenomenon that can be analyzed separately from considerations of "nature" or "wildlife." In doing so, it addresses a gap in the scholarship of rural African politics, which focuses overwhelmingly on productive agrarian dynamics and often fails to recognize that land nonuse can be as politically significant and wide reaching as land use.
Botswana is an ideal empirical case study upon which to base these theoretical claims. With 39 percent of its land set aside for conservation, Botswana is home to large populations of wildlife, particularly charismatic megafauna, such as the largest herd of elephants on the continent. Utilizing more than two hundred interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, this book examines a series of conservation policies and their reception by people living on the conservation estate. These phenomena include securitized antipoaching enforcement, a national hunting ban (2014-19), restrictions on using wildlife products, forced evictions from conservation areas, limitations on mobility and freedom of movement, the political economy of Botswana's wildlife tourism industry, and the conservation of globally important charismatic megafauna species.

Acholi Intellectuals draws on the writings of homespun historians, interviews with elderly men and women who remember the last days of colonial rule, and government and missionary archives to illuminate the intellectual and political history of the colonial transition in northern Uganda. The book focuses on Acholiland, a place that has been chronically understudied in comparison to Uganda's rich, fertile, and well-documented south. Southerners there-following the depictions of colonial officials and missionaries-have often regarded northerners as uncultured people lacking ideas. Acholi Intellectuals challenges this prejudice, bringing into view a whole category of men (and a few women) who mediated between indigenous and colonial knowledge systems and inaugurated a new kind of politics.
Patrick William Otim studies a category of people-known as healers, messengers, war leaders, poet-musicians, and diplomats-who possessed prestige and power in an older Acholi political logic and who, in the dawning days of colonial government, came to occupy positions of power in the British administration. Otim argues that these Acholi intellectuals were not simply creatures of British colonial self-interest; neither was their power invented by the coercive logic of indirect rule. He asserts instead that people who held moral and social power in the older system were able to transform that strength, under colonial administration, into a new form of political legitimacy.

Politics and the Pink Tide investigates the ways in which protest varied across five Latin American countries that elected leftist presidents during the Pink Tide.

Kathleen Bruhn compares the differences in protest that occurred under the new leftist governments to their conservative, neoliberal predecessors, offering a wide-angle view into the complex relationships between neoliberalism, political party structures, and protest.

Using individual and event-level data from Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, and Ecuador, Politics and the Pink Tide shows how economic policy choices and the links between leftist parties and social movements affect patterns of protest. For example, although more orthodox neoliberal approaches did motivate more economic protest, the book demonstrates that neither more radical nor more socially linked leftist governments were better able to contain protest-or to do so without resorting to police violence. Politics and the Pink Tide proposes a sweeping exploration of protest, one that is controlled by economic policy and grievances, the social embeddedness of political parties, and the norms surrounding protest tactics within public life.

Around the world each year, millions of citizens turn out to vote but leave their ballots empty or spoil them. Increasingly, campaigns have emerged that promote "invalid" votes like these. Why do citizens choose to cast blank and spoiled votes? And how do campaigns mobilizing the invalid vote influence this decision? None of the Above answers these questions using evidence from presidential and gubernatorial elections in eighteen Latin American democracies. Author Mollie J. Cohen draws on a broad range of methods and sources, incorporating data from electoral management bodies, nationally representative surveys, survey experiments, focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and news sources.

Contrary to received wisdom, this book shows that most citizens cast blank or spoiled votes in presidential elections on purpose. By participating in invalid vote campaigns, citizens can voice their concerns about low-quality candidates while also expressing a preference for high-quality democracy. Campaigns promoting blank and spoiled votes come about more often, and succeed at higher rates, when incumbent politicians undermine the quality of elections. Surprisingly, invalid vote campaigns can shore up the quality of democracy in the short term. None of the Above shows that swings in blank and spoiled vote rates can serve as a warning about the trajectory of a country's democracy.

This edited volume presents an international collection of fieldwork experiences from every stage of the research process with a view to normalising the process of adaptation, modification, and even failure during fieldwork when circumstances interrupt the expected outcomes.

This book aims to address a gap often found in methodology books by including nine full autopsy-like reflection of fieldwork experiences, selected based on researchers' disciplines and fields, the diversity of geographical locations and their differing themes. Its chapters record a swath of experience, from choosing the research themes and hypotheses through to academic presentations and publications, shedding light on an area academic research that is often overlooked.

Documenting experience from anthropologists and sociologists to political scientists and economists, the diversity of the book's approach and its multidisciplinary focus will interest researchers, scholars, and postgraduate students from a range of subdisciplines and levels of fieldwork experience.

Green City Rising is an ethnographic account of collective organizing for environmental justice in an era of growing concern about environmental and climate challenges. The conventional sustainability paradigm promises improved environmental conditions for all, such as fresh air and clean water, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods, green space access, and protection from climate crises. Yet, without particular interventions, the pursuit of such environmental amenities often contributes to displacement and further harm for communities that have historically borne the brunt of land theft, racial capitalism, and toxic industries.

Drawing on the work of an alliance of grassroots organizations called the Portland Harbor Community Coalition (PHCC), Erin Goodling shows how communities have come together across lines of race and class to work for a more just, green future in Portland, Oregon. Green City Rising reveals that the violence of settler colonialism and white supremacy are far from endpoints: a collective vision for a better future is emerging, and ordinary people are building the understanding, skills, and relationships necessary to usher it in.

Biblical Judgments invites readers to consider today's timeless dilemmas of law and government, social justice, and human rights, through the perspective of a text that has helped shape western society: the Hebrew Bible. By focusing on biblical narratives and literature rather than on traditional interpretations of biblical law, Daphne Barak-Erez is able to look beyond specific legal norms to concentrate on what the stories can reveal about the "big" issues. She discusses questions such as: What can modern-day governmental regulation learn from the exercise of food rationing in Egypt as a response to Pharaoh's dream of a future famine? How does social distancing in the time of Covid-19 compare with people sent outside the camp as a precautionary measure against bible-era plagues? What can promoters of social justice glean from the demands made to Moses that daughters should also inherit from their father when biblical law did not recognize inheritance rights of women?

Rather than offering a historical study, Barak-Erez draws upon famous court decisions from around the world to root her analysis in modern law. Organized by subject matter, Biblical Judgments analyzes how the themes of law and government, judging and judges, human rights and social justice, criminal law, private law, and family and inheritance law are presented through a number of different stories. In recounting the compelling narratives of the Hebrew Bible, Biblical Judgments exposes their inherent legal tensions and what we can learn from them and with them about legal dilemmas today.

Great journalism relies on a narrative arc to engage and inform the reader. Stories Can Save Us looks at how the best reporters and writers craft narrative literary journalism. Journalist Matt Tullis uses the material he gathered in the more than seventy-five interviews he conducted with the best narrative and literary journalists in the country through his podcast, Gangrey: The Podcast, to show how these professionals conceive and writesuch compelling stories.

Through his podcast, Tullis interviewed Pulitzer Prizewinners, National Magazine Awardwinners, and many authors of books of narrative journalism, including New York Times best-selling authors. He also spoke with reporters of different races and backgrounds, styles and strengths-journalists who have been published in the most prestigious newspapers and magazines-to ask: How do they find story ideas? How do they reach out to potential story subjects? What are their interviewstrategies? How do they conduct other information gathering? How do they come up with their amazing and enticing leads? How do they develop story structure? How does the story change in the revision process? How do they make their stories great and make them into the types of stories that people read and talk about for years?

Through Tullis's conversations with these top-tier journalists, we are offered a window into their methods and practices as well as the motivations behind great journalism and how it speaks to the cultural climate of its time. Tullis's goal was to expand the power and potential of what amazing reporting and narrative writing can do, believing that it can literally change a reader's mood and, possibly, a reader's life.