Edited by Vincent Buskens, RenseCorten, and Chris Snijders.

Theory, Experiments, and Field Studies. . The book identifies conditions for trust and cooperation. It highlights unintended consequences of individually rational behavior, and shows how trust and cooperation change dependent on social embeddedness. Such analyses inspire experimental tests in lab conditions, but also tests through empirical applications in field studies. The results of this mixed-method approach can in turn be used to inspire further theoretical work.

Berlin; Boston: de Gruyter, 2020. 557p.

Edited by Tiina Mäntymäki, Marinella Rodi-Risberg, and Anna Foka.

Cultural, Linguistic and Literary Approaches to Narratives of Femininity. This multidisciplinary collection of articles illuminates the ways in which the concept of female deviance is represented, appropriated, re-inscribed and refigured in a wide range of texts across time, cultures and genres. Such a choice of variety shows that representations of deviance accommodate meaning-making spaces and possibilities for resistance in different socio-cultural and literary contexts. The construct of the deviant woman is analysed from literary, sociolinguistic and historical-cultural perspectives, revealing insights about cultures and societies. Furthermore, the studies recognise and explain the significance of the concept of deviance in relation to gender that bespeaks a contemporary cultural concern about narratives of femininity.

Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2014. 242p.

By S. Wittendorp, R. de Bont, J.H. de Roy van Zuijdewijn and E. Bakker.

This report offers an understanding of counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation policies in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Its emphasis is on developments following the 11 September 2001 attacks, and addresses the phenomenon referred to as jihadism. The report identifies three developments: 1) the development of counterterrorism and counterradicalisation as actual policy domains, 2) increased coordination of policy and initiatives for information-sharing, 3) unclear demarcation of the policy domain.

Leiden: Leiden University, 2017. 114p.

By J. Bouje and M.E. de Bruijn.

Ordinary social violence, - i.e. recurrent mental or physical aggression occurring between closely related people - structures social relationships in Africa, and in the world. Studies of violence in Africa often refer to ethnic wars and explicit conflicts and do not enter the hidden domain of violence that this book reveals through in-depth anthropological studies from different parts and contexts in Africa. Ordinary violence has its distinctive forms embedded in specific histories and cultures. It is gendered, implicates witchcraft accusations, varies in rural and urban contexts, relates to demographic and socio-economic changes of the past decades and is embedded in the everyday life of many African citizens. The experience of ordinary violence goes beyond the simple notion of victimhood; instead it structures social life and should therefore be a compelling part of the study of social change.

Leiden: African Studies Centre,, 2014. 190p.

By J.C. Both, M.C. Mouguia and M.E. de Bruijn.

In this report we elaborate on the historical dimensions of young people’s enrolment and use in armed groups or armed forces in the Central African Republic (CAR). While this phenomenon, also understood as the enlistment and use of child soldiers, is often seen as a recent phenomenon, the report aims to show that children and adolescents have historically been involved in self-defence groups or were forcefully recruited in what is currently the territory of CAR. In the past, they were not called child soldiers; they may not even have always been seen as children due to different cultural definitions of childhood. However, the phenomenon is not new as will be shown in this report.

Leiden: African Studies Centre, 2020. 81p.

By Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp .

Affective Strategies in Transnational Media. Extreme Cinema examines the highly stylized treatment of sex and violence in post-millennial transnational cinema, where the governing convention is not the narrative but the spectacle. Using profound experiments in form and composition, including jarring editing, extreme close-ups, visual disorientation and sounds that straddle the boundary between non-diegetic and diegetic registers, this mode of cinema dwells instead on the exhibition of intense violence and an acute intimacy with the sexual body. Interrogating works such as Wetlands and A Serbian Film, as well as the sub-culture of YouTube ‘reaction videos’, Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp demonstrate the way content and form combine in extreme cinema to affectively manipulate the viewing body.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. 188p.

By Asbjørn Grønstad.

This book explores the figuration of screen violence, as well as its historical and institutional contexts, in a number of metaviolent films both celebrated and vilified, and attempts thereby to forge a new understanding of a phenomenon whose defining feature seems to be perpetually elusive. As Transfigurations grapples with a series of issues that at times may seem only tenuously interrelated, I shall here take the liberty to summarize and pinpoint its major preoccupation. The objective is to re-establish an awareness of the transtextual opacity of film fiction, an awareness long occluded both by theoretical fallacies and by the petrification of our acquired ways of seeing.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008. 278p.

Edited by: Vicki Luker, Sinclair Dinnen.

Papua New Guinea has a complex ‘law and order’ problem and an entrenched epidemic of HIV. This book explores their interaction. It also probes their joint challenges and opportunities—most fundamentally for civic security, a condition that could offer some immunity to both.

Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2010. 356p.

By Anita Hardon.

Navigating Uncertainty in Search of the Good Life. Situates chemical enhancement in terms of the challenges that young people face in managing a range of expectations and pressures. Uses ethnographic material from young people across the globe, including The Netherlands, USA, Indonesia and the Philippines. Examines how young people view the risks of using chemical substances, confronting the uncertainty of the practice while also attending to the perceived benefits.

Cham: Springer, 2021. 335p

By Samantha Caslin.

The title of this book is taken from a statement made by a Liverpool based women’s refuge, the House of Help, in 1918. Having offered its services to women for two decades, the House of Help looked towards the end of the First World War with the hope that their organization could be part of the ‘building’ of a ‘new world by helping to save the womanhood of our country’.1 Their work providing temporary shelter to women who found themselves lost, stranded or penniless in Liverpool was just one element of local, social purity inspired philanthropic efforts to save young, typically working-class, women from the supposedly corrupting effects of urban life and the temptation to earn money via prostitution. This was a moral war, waged around the docks, the city’s main train station at Lime Street, in city centre entertainment districts and in working-class neighbourhoods. Many of the women who stayed at the House of Help had been directed or brought there by women patrollers from the Liverpool Vigilance Association (LVA) and the local Women Police Patrols. Together, the activities of these patrollers and moral welfare workers proliferated a gendered sense of urban space that was predicated upon the idea that some women required moral guidance in order to deter them from the temptations of vice and sexual immorality.

Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. 248p.

By Anthony McEnery and Helen Baker.

Corpus linguistics has much to offer history, being as both disciplines engage so heavily in analysis of large amounts of textual material. This book demonstrates the opportunities for exploring corpus linguistics as a method in historiography and the humanities and social sciences more generally. Focussing on the topic of prostitution in 17th-century England, it shows how corpus methods can assist in social research, and can be used to deepen our understanding and comprehension. McEnery and Baker draw principally on two sources – the newsbook Mercurius Fumigosis and the Early English Books Online Corpus. This scholarship on prostitution and the sex trade offers insight into the social position of women in history.

London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 271p.

Edited by Mark Maguire, Catarina Frois, and Nils Zurawski.

Perspectives from the Frontline of Policing, Counter-terrorism and Border Control. Anthropology is a discipline based upon in-depth ethnographic works that deal with wider theoretical issues in the context of particular, local conditions – to paraphrase an important volume from the series: large issues explored in small places. This series has a particular mission: to publish work that moves away from an old-style descriptive ethnography that is strongly area-studies oriented, and offer genuine theoretical arguments that are of interest to a much wider readership, but which are nevertheless located and grounded in solid ethnographic research. If anthropology is to argue itself a place in the contemporary intellectual world, then it must surely be through such research. We start from the question: ‘What can this ethnographic material tell us about the bigger theoretical issues that concern the social sciences?’ rather than ‘What can these theoretical ideas tell us about the ethnographic context?’ Put this way round, such work becomes about large issues, set in a (relatively) small place, rather than detailed description of a small place for its own sake. As Clifford Geertz once said, ‘Anthropologists don’t study villages; they study in villages.

London: Pluto Press, 2014. 225p.

By Catherine Robinson.

This book reveals the ways in which intense chains of disadvantage, incorporating homelessness, are triggered by very early experiences of violence. Drawing on biographic interviews with six men and six women, the book bears witness not only to horrendous repeated experiences of physical and sexual violence, but discusses what may be understood as related multi-dimensional vulnerability in areas such as physical and mental health, education, employment and social connectedness. A picture of the long-term cycles of violent victimisation and homelessness, and their compounding traumatising effects, are made clear and the importance of trauma-informed service delivery is outlined as a key way forward Sydney:

UTS ePress, 2010. 70p.

By Eirini Avramopoulou and Irene Peano.

Porno-Graphics and Porno-Tactics asks whether, and how, it is possible to re-appropriate pornography and think through it critically and creatively for a project of liberation. In the different contributions which make up this deliberately heterogeneous collection of short, non-canonical essays, such a quest proceeds by re-articulating the aporias of desire, intimacy, touch and seduction. It also relates them to claims of visibility, visions of emancipation and its failures, as well as to the politics of violence that we get exposed to through circulating images and affects. This is an attempt to exceed the limits set by and for ourselves in relation to how we connect to our own bodies, to the bodies of our lovers and to the bodies of the theories we live with, sleep with and dream about – in short, to all that we get attached to. The editors and contributors of this collection do not claim the euphoric potentiality of pornography as necessarily subversive and emancipatory, but are nevertheless open to the possibilities of re-shaping it (in textual, contextual, intertextual, but also affective and embodied forms) through different graphic and tactical/tactile inscriptions. On the one hand, authors reflect on definitions and practices of pornography as a genre adopting specific codes and canons, whether it is concerned with sex acts and the industry of porn or with other predominant forms of representation and the structures of power underlying them. On the other hand, chapters relate to the more affective, libidinal, synaesthetic and inter/subjective dimensions of pornography, and on the capacity of different reappropriations to subvert its limits.

Punctum books. (2016)

Edited by A.L. Beier and Paul Ocobock.

Throughout history, those arrested for vagrancy have generally been poor men and women, often young, able-bodied, unemployed, and homeless. Most histories of vagrancy have focused on the European and American experiences. This is the first book to consider global laws, homelessness, and the historical processes they accompanied. Vagrancy and homelessness are used to examine the migration of labor, social and governmental responses, poverty through charity, welfare, and prosecution. Cast Out includes discussions of the lives of the underclass, strategies for surviving and escaping poverty, the criminalization of poverty by the state, the rise of welfare and development programs, the relationship between imperial powers and colonized peoples, and the struggle to achieve independence after colonial rule.

Athens, OH : Ohio University Press, 2008 409p.

By Lesley Gill.

Popular Struggle, Counterinsurgency, and Human Rights in Colombia. In A Century of Violence in a Red City Lesley Gill provides insights into broad trends of global capitalist development, class disenfranchisement and dispossession, and the decline of progressive politics. Gill traces the rise and fall of the strong labor unions, neighborhood organizations, and working class of Barrancabermeja, Colombia, from their origins in the 1920s to their effective activism for agrarian reforms, labor rights, and social programs in the 1960s and 1970s. Like much of Colombia, Barrancabermeja came to be dominated by alliances of right-wing politicians, drug traffickers, foreign corporations, and paramilitary groups. These alliances reshaped the geography of power and gave rise to a pernicious form of armed neoliberalism. Their violent incursion into Barrancabermeja's civil society beginning in the 1980s decimated the city's social networks, destabilized life for its residents, and destroyed its working-class organizations. As a result, community leaders are now left clinging to the toothless discourse of human rights, which cannot effectively challenge the status quo. In this stark book, Gill captures the grim reality and precarious future of Barrancabermeja and other places ravaged by neoliberalism and violence.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. 302p.

By Steve Ratuva.

Reconceptualising Security in the Pacific. Contested Terrain provides a cutting-edge, comprehensive and innovative approach to critically analysing the multidimensional and contested nature of security narratives, justified by different ideological, political, cultural and economic rationales. This is important in a complex and ever-changing situation involving a dynamic interplay between local, regional and global factors. Security narratives are constructed in multiple ways and are used to frame our responses to the challenges and threats to our sense of safety, wellbeing, identity and survival but how the narratives are constructed is a matter of intellectual and political contestation. Using three case studies from the Pacific (Fiji, Tonga and Solomon Islands), Contested Terrain shows the different security challenges facing each country, which result from their unique historical, political and socio-cultural circumstances. Contrary to the view that the Pacific is a generic entity with common security issues, this book argues for more localised and nuanced approaches to security framing and analysis.

Canberra: National Australian University Press, 2019. 304p.

By Marianne Inéz Lien, Jørgen Lorentzen

. This book is based on a three-part study of violence against men in intimate relationships in Norway. Funded by the Det norske Barne-, ungdoms- og familiedirektoratet, Bufdir (Norway’s Children Youth and Family Directorate), the study was conducted by researchers Marianne Inéz Lien (University of Oslo) and Jørgen Lorentzen (The Hedda Foundation and Claes Ekenstam, Borås University), in collaboration with Proba Research. The study includes a literature review of Nordic prevalence studies of violence against men over the age of 18; a survey of public awareness of the prevalence of violence against men and the help available; and a qualitative interview study of men who have experienced various forms of violence in close relationships. The interviewees were all current or former users of the Norwegian family protection office, crisis centres and centres for incest and sexual abuse.

Cham, SWIT: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 174p.

By Patrick W. Galbraith.

Lines and Life in a Tokyo Neighborhood. Based on ongoing fieldwork in the Akihabara neighborhood of Tokyo, specifically a targeted subproject from 2014 to 2015, this book explores how and to what effect lines are drawn by producers, players and critics of bishōjo games. Focusing on interactions with manga/anime-style characters, these adult computer games often feature explicit sex acts. Noting that the bishōjo, or “cute girl characters,” in these games can appear quite young, legal actions have been taken in a number of countries to categorize and prohibit the content as child abuse material. In response to the risk of manga/anime images encouraging underage sexualization, lawmakers are moved to regulate them in the same way as photographs or film; triggered by images, the line between fiction and reality is erased, or redrawn to collapse forms together. While Japanese politicians continue to debate a similar course, sustained engagement with bishōjo game producers, players and critics sheds light on alternative movement. Manga/anime-style characters trigger an affective response in interactions with their creators and users, who draw and negotiate lines between fiction and reality. Interacting with characters and one another, bishōjo gamers draw lines between what is fictional and what is “real,” even as the characters are real in their own right and relations with them are extended beyond games; some even see the characters as significant others and refer to them using intimate terms of commitment such as “my wife.” This book argues for understanding the everyday practice of insisting on lines, or drawing a line between humans and nonhumans and orienting oneself toward the drawn lines of the latter, as demonstrating an emergent form of ethics. Occurring individually and socially in both private and public spaces, the response to fictional characters not only discourages harming human beings, but also supports life in more-than-human worlds. For many in contemporary Japan and beyond, interactions and relations with fictional and real others are nothing short of lifelines.

Stockholm, SWE: Stockholm University Press, 2021. 358p.

By Sana Ashraf.

In "Finding The Enemy Within," author delves into the complexities of human nature, exploring the internal struggles that shape our actions and decisions. This captivating book takes readers on a reflective journey to uncover the hidden adversaries that dwell within us all. Through thought-provoking anecdotes and insightful analysis, the author challenges us to confront our inner demons, confront our fears, and ultimately find peace within ourselves. A must-read for those seeking to understand the intricacies of the human psyche and embrace the transformative power of self-discovery.

ANU Press (2021) 270 p.