Author: Berghahn Author

Helping without Harming and Minding the Balance

Author Emma Kowal explores the “good” that well-meaning White Australians are doing for Indigenous Australians. This path to help is charted in Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia, a recently published book that asks the question: How can one help without harming? Following, Kowal explains the origins and reception of her work studying this group of “White anti-racists.”

 

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‘You’re an anthropologist and you study… White people?’ I regularly receive a puzzled look from people when I tell them what I do. Anthropologists are supposed to study Indigenous tribes in remote locations, aren’t they? Or at least something exciting, like drug addicts or slum dwellers.

 

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Simulated Shelves: Browse March 2015 New Books

We are delighted to present a selection of our newly published March 2015 titles from our core subjects of Anthropology, Colonialism, Education, Global Health, History, Medical Anthropology, Politics, Theory & Methodology in Anthropology, and Urban Studies, along with a selection of our New in Paperback titles.

We are especially excited to announce the publication of the paperback edition of CIVILIZING NATURE edited by Bernhard Gissibl, Sabine Höhler and Patrick Kupper.

“This book makes a unique contribution to the conservation literature by enhancing one’s understanding and appreciation of the cultural meaning of nature conservation through the lens of national park development. […] Highly recommended.” · Choice

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NIMBY IS BEAUTIFUL
Cases of Local Activism and Environmental Innovation Around the World
Edited by Carol Hager and Mary Alice Haddad

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Making-Over Northern Ireland by Changing Facades & Perceptions

Through art, architecture, and “symbolic landscapes,” post-conflict Northern Ireland is changing the “face” it shows the world. Bree T. Hocking explores this new identity in The Great Reimagining: Public Art, Urban Space, and the Symbolic Landscapes of a ‘New’ Northern Ireland. In the following short essay, the author explains some of actual and perceived changes, by way of the words exchanged with a young Protestant man.

 

 

On a recent visit to Northern Ireland, I met a young Protestant man from the Shankill Road heading home after dropping off his daughter at a nearby crèche. It was hardly an extraordinary encounter—save for the fact that the man had just left his toddler at a nursery on the Catholic side of one of Belfast’s largest and oldest peace walls. (These walls, sometimes up to eight metres tall, separate many working-class neighborhoods across the city along ethno-national lines.)

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#MuseumWeek 2015

Museum Week is international: more than 800 museums, galleries and cultural institutions from across the UK, Europe, the Americas, Asia and Oceania — 29 countries in total — are officially participating in this, the first ever international Museum Week on twitter, March 23-29. ‪#‎MuseumWeek‬ 2015!

Happy Museum Week from Berghahn! Read a FREE virtual issue on Museums from Berghahn Journals: http://bit.ly/P0ugcB  

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Berghahn is delighted to present some of the latest Museum Studies titles:

 

Museums and Collections Series: This series explores the potential of museum collections to transform our knowledge of the world, and for exhibitions to influence the way in which we view and inhabit that world. It offers essential reading for those involved in all aspects of the museum sphere: curators, researchers, collectors, students and the visiting public.

 

Forthcoming! Volume 8

MUSEUM WEBSITES AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Issues of Participation, Sustainability, Trust and Diversity
Ana Luisa Sánchez Laws

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Visions of The Other: Swiss & Malagasy See, But Do They Understand?

Where do Switzerland and Madagascar meet, and what do the people of each place think of those in the other? Eva Keller, in her recently published Beyond the Lens of Conservation: Malagasy and Swiss Imaginations of One Another, in seeking to connect these two places winds up highlighting the disconnect between them. Following, the author offers a brief glimpse into the volume from two directions: from a Swiss classroom looking at Madagascar and from a Malagasy man looking at a national park.

 

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Read the following extract of a conversation which took place in a Swiss classroom with pupils aged between 11 and 12. My questions are in italics.

 

 

What do you know about Madagascar?

 

Takschan: I think there are cannibals there, I think, the people, like they eat the flesh.

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Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality

Today (March 18th) is Goddess of Fertility Day, a time when Aphrodite and other gods and goddesses of fertility are honored by pagans throughout the world in celebration of life and fertility.

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Understanding the complex and multifaceted issue of human reproduction has been, and remains, of great interest both to academics and practitioners. Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality series includes studies by specialists in the field of social, cultural, medical, and biological anthropology, medical demography, psychology, and development studies. Current debates and issues of global relevance on the changing dynamics of fertility, human reproduction and sexuality are addressed. Below is a selection of forthcoming & newly published titles within the series:

 

Volume 30 Forthcoming!

THAI IN VITRO
Gender, Culture and Assisted Reproduction
Andrea Whittaker

 

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Roots and Recovery: Anthropologists Study Anorexia from all Angles

How do sufferers of anorexia recover? Richard A. O’Connor and Penny Van Esterik seek answers to this question, first by identifying root causes of the disease and then by sharing the stories of those who have made a full recovery.  From Virtue to Vice: Negotiating Anorexia, the book that resulted from their research, does not look at the affliction of anorexia from behind a glass, in fact, O’Connor’s connection to the work is deeply personal. He explains in his own words below.

 

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Every book has a back story. Mine is no big secret. When my daughter Amorn became anorexic it turned our family upside down. Carolyn [my wife] and I desperately wanted answers. We got a great counselor but nothing worked. The explanations we got made no sense. That wasn’t our daughter. Of course we worried we were in denial—that we just didn’t want to face the truth—and that silenced me at the time. I understood clinicians have to put people in categories and few fit perfectly. So I settled into accepting my daughter was an exception, an outlier. What mattered most was working with her caregivers for recovery.

 

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National Women’s History Month

Women’s History Month is an annual declared month that highlights the contributions of women to events in history and contemporary society. It is celebrated during March in the United States, and across Europe, corresponding with International Women’s Day on March 8. All around the world, National Women’s History Month & International Women’s day present an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of women while calling for greater equality!

 

Berghahn invites you to explore a special issue of Aspasia devoted to International Women’s Day. The year 2010 marked the centennial of International Women’s Day, and the year 2011 marked the centennial of its first celebrations. Inspired by these events, this issue deals with “A Hundred Years of International Women’s Day in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe.” Read more.

 

Berghahn is also pleased to offer a 25% discount on any of our Gender Studies books on orders placed within the next 30 days. At checkout, simply enter the code IWD15.

 

GENDER HISTORY IN A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
Networks, Biographies, Gender Orders
Edited by Oliver Janz and Daniel Schönpflug

 

 

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Supercinematic Projection: Author Looks toward Future of Film Studies

Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age, originally published in May 2013, is now available in paperback. Following, author William Brown reflects on the book as a launching pad for his own studies and what he perceives as the forward trajectory of film studies. This post pairs with his reflection on the book’s initial release, which can be read here.

 

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The argument in Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age is about the depiction and possible meanings of the continuous times and spaces that contemporary mainstream cinema often seems to depict thanks to the aesthetic possibilities opened up to, or at the very least made more easily achievable by, cinema as a result of digital technology.

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In History: Churchill delivers Iron Curtain speech

On March 5th 1946, in one of the most famous orations of the Cold War period, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill condemned the Soviet Union’s policies in Europe and declared, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” Churchill’s speech is considered one of the opening volleys announcing the beginning of the Cold War. Read More

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Berghahn presents a selection of relevant Cold War titles:

 

COLD WAR CULTURES
Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies
Edited by Annette Vowinckel, Marcus M. Payk, and Thomas Lindenberger

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