By Loren Daniel Glass and Charles Francis Williams.

Over the course of the nineteenth century in both Europe and the United States, the state usurped the traditional authority of the church in regulating sexual expression and behavior. In the same century philosophers of classical liberalism identified that state function as a threat to individual liberty. Since then, liberalism has provided the framework for debates over obscenity around the globe. But liberalism has recently been under siege, on the one side from postmodern thinkers skeptical about its andro- and ethnocentric assumptions, and on the other side from religious thinkers doubtful of the moral integrity of the Enlightenment project writ large. The principal challenge for those who conduct academic work in this realm is to formulate new models of research and analysis appropriate to understanding and evaluating speech in the present-day public sphere. Toward those ends, Obscenity and the Limits of Liberalism contains a selection of essays and interventions by prominent authors and artists in a variety of disciplines and media. These writings, taken as a whole, put recent developments into historical and global contexts and chart possible futures for a debate that promises to persist well into the new millennium.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2011. 181p.

By by Naomi Mandel.

Generation X, comprised of people born between 1960 and 1980, is a generation with no Great War or Depression to define it. Dismissed as apathetic slackers and detached losers, Xers have a striking disregard for the causes and isms that defined their Boomer parents. In Disappear Here: Violence after Generation X, Naomi Mandel argues that this characterization of Generation X can be traced back to changing experiences and representations of violence in the late twentieth century. Examining developments in media, philosophy, literature, and politics in the years Xers were coming of age, Mandel demonstrates that Generation X’s unique attitude toward violence was formed by developments in home media, personal computing, and reality TV. This attitude, Mandel contends, is key to understanding our current world of media ubiquity, online activism, simulated sensation, and jihad. With chapters addressing both fictional and filmic representations of violence, Mandel studies the work of Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Claire Messud, Jess Walter, and Jonathan Safran Foer. A critical and conceptual tour de force, Disappear Here sets forth a new, and necessary, approach to violence, the real, and real violence for the twenty-first century.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2015. 264p.

By Daniel Nettle.

"Nettle’s book presents the results of five years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in two different neighbourhoods of the same British city, Newcastle upon Tyne. The neighbourhoods are only a few kilometres apart, yet whilst one is relatively affluent, the other is amongst the most economically deprived in the UK. Tyneside Neighbourhoods uses multiple research methods to explore social relationships and social behaviour, attempting to understand whether the experience of deprivation fosters social solidarity, or undermines it. The book is distinctive in its development of novel quantitative methods for ethnography: systematic social observation, economic games, household surveys, crime statistics, and field experiments. Nettle analyses these findings in the context of the cultural, psychological and economic consequences of economic deprivation, and of the ethical difficulties of representing a deprived community. In so doing the book sheds light on one of the main issues of our time: the roles of culture and of socioeconomic factors in determining patterns of human social behaviour. Tyneside Neighbourhoods is a must read for scholars, students, individual readers, charities and government departments seeking insight into the social consequences of deprivation and inequality in the West. Nettle’s book presents the results of five years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in two different neighbourhoods of the same British city, Newcastle upon Tyne. The neighbourhoods are only a few kilometres apart, yet whilst one is relatively affluent, the other is amongst the most economically deprived in the UK. Tyneside Neighbourhoods uses multiple research methods to explore social relationships and social behaviour, attempting to understand whether the experience of deprivation fosters social solidarity, or undermines it. The book is distinctive in its development of novel quantitative methods for ethnography: systematic social observation, economic games, household surveys, crime statistics, and field experiments. Nettle analyses these findings in the context of the cultural, psychological and economic consequences of economic deprivation, and of the ethical difficulties of representing a deprived community. In so doing the book sheds light on one of the main issues of our time: the roles of culture and of socioeconomic factors in determining patterns of human social behaviour. Tyneside Neighbourhoods is a must read for scholars, students, individual readers, charities and government departments seeking insight into the social consequences of deprivation and inequality in the West. "

Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2015. 148p.

Edited by Maria Isabel Romero-Ruiz and Pilar Cuder-Domínguez.

A Mediterranean Approach to the Anglosphere. This Open Access book considers the cultural representation of gender violence, vulnerability and resistance with a focus on the transnational dimension of our contemporary visual and literary cultures in English. Contributors address concepts such as vulnerability, resilience, precarity and resistance in the Anglophone world through an analysis of memoirs, films, TV series, and crime and literary fiction across India, Ireland, Canada, Australia, the US, and the UK. Chapters explore literary and media displays of precarious conditions to examine whether these are exacerbated when intersecting with gender and ethnic identities, thus resulting in structural forms of vulnerability that generate and justify oppression, as well as forms of individual or collective resistance and/or resilience. Substantial insights are drawn from Animal Studies, Critical Race Studies, Human Rights Studies, Post-Humanism and Postcolonialism.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2022. 241p.

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.

Edited by Marta Pérez-Escolar and José Manuel Noguera-Vivo.

This timely volume offers a comprehensive and rigorous overview of the role of communication in the construction of hate speech and polarization in the online and offline arena. Delving into the meanings, implications, contexts and effects of extreme speech and gated communities in the media landscape, the chapters analyse misleading metaphors and rhetoric via focused case studies to understand how we can overcome the risks and threats stemming from the past decade’s defining communicative phenomena. The book brings together an international team of experts, enabling a broad, multidisciplinary approach that examines hate speech, dislike, polarization and enclave deliberation as cross axes that influence offline and digital conversations. The diverse case studies herein offer insights into international news media, television drama and social media in a range of contexts, suggesting an academic frame of reference for examining this emerging phenomenon within the field of communication studies.

London; New York: Routledge, 2022. 279p.

By Shakuntala Banaji and Ramnath Bhat.

Using expert interviews and focus groups, this book investigates the theoretical and practical intersection of misinformation and social media hate in contemporary societies. Social Media and Hate argues that these phenomena, and the extreme violence and discrimination they initiate against targeted groups, are connected to the socio-political contexts, values and behaviours of users of social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, ShareChat, Instagram and WhatsApp. The argument moves from a theoretical discussion of the practices and consequences of sectarian hatred, through a methodological evaluation of quantitative and qualitative studies on this topic, to four qualitative case studies of social media hate, and its effects on groups, individuals and wider politics in India, Brazil, Myanmar and the UK. The technical, ideological and networked similarities and connections between social media hate against people of African and Asian descent, indigenous communities, Muslims, Dalits, dissenters, feminists, LGBTQIA communities, Rohingya and immigrants across the four contexts is highlighted, stressing the need for an equally systematic political response. London;

New York: Routledge, 2022. 140p.

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 Terah J. Stewart.

Sex Work On Campus examines the experiences of college students engaged in sex work and sparks dialogue about the ways educators might develop a deeper appreciation for—and praxis of—equity and justice on campus. Analysing a study conducted with seven college student sex workers, the book focuses on sex work histories, student motivations and how power (or lack thereof) associated with social identity shapes experiences of student sex work. It examines what these students learn because of sex work, and what college and university leaders can do to support them. These findings are combined in tandem with analysis of current research, popular culture, sex work rights movements, and exploration of legal contexts. This fresh and important writing is suitable for students and scholars in sexuality studies, gender studies, sociology, and education.

London; New York: Routledge, 2022. 219p.