The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

January’s Book of the Month was selected by Sarah Rhodes, Subject Consultant for International Development and Forced Migration

Authoritarian practices and humanitarian negotiations

Edited by Andrew J Cummingham

Routledge, 2024

JC480.AUT 2024

It was chosen to highlight the challenges faced by humanitarian organisations in negotiating access to people in authoritarian states.

Book Overview

Utilising a wide variety of perspectives and examining a range of contexts, this book considers how humanitarians assess and engage with authoritarian practices and negotiate access to populations in danger.

Reviews

‘Delivering vital aid to crisis-affected people often hinges on complex humanitarian negotiations. By combining concrete operational examples with political theory, [this book] offers a deeper understanding and sharper analytical lens for aid practitioners and scholars grappling with these issues.’

Dr. Abby Stoddard, Founding partner of Humanitarian Outcomes.

How can I access it?

We have one lending copy of this book, which is located on our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is JC480.AUT 2024. It is also available as an eBook which can be accessed from a Bodleian Library computer or use it remotely, by logging on to SOLO with your SSO.

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.

The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

December’s Book of the month is:

Cryones: Збірка зовсім недитячих дитячих історій / A collection of not-at-all childish children’s stories

The children involved in Gen.Ukrainian

Kyiv: Gen.Ukrainian, 2024

Shelfmark: HQ792.U38.CRY 2024

The Book of the Month for December will be distressing for some. It manifests the lived experience of war for children, in their own pictures, stories and words. Cryones came out of Gen.Ukrainian, a project to help Ukraine’s children heal through art. It presents pictures and stories from contemporary Ukrainian children.

Book Overview

The title ‘Cryones’ is a mixture of the English words ‘crayon’, and ‘cry ones’. It refers to Gen.Ukrainian’s rehabilitation of Ukrainian children who have suffered psychological trauma, through art therapy. Gen.Ukrainian is a non-governmental organisation that was set up in 2022: it strives to heal children who have experienced the horrors of the Russian invasion first-hand. Cryones was published as a testament both to the creativity of Ukrainian children, and the reality of their suffering. Oksana Lebedieva, one of the project’s leaders, emphasises that the book’s authors and artists are the children who came to Gen.Ukrainian: the adults only organised the material and production.

Cryones offers a series of stories in pictures, drawings, collages and texts, made by their child-authors. One of these authors is Katya, a talented gymnast from Maripol’, known to the father she lost as людина пружина, or ‘the little human spring’. Another is Luka, consoled by a new friendship with a dog called Red. The children tell profoundly tragic stories – and yet they finish the book with their visions of a bright, peaceful future. Ukrainian texts are translated into English, while the pictures speak for themselves.

How can I access it?

You can currently find this book around the corner from our Issue Desk, above our New Books display. This title is for library use only and its shelfmark is HQ792.U38.CRY 2024

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.

The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

November’s Book of the Month was selected by Jo Gardner, Subject Consultant for Bodleian Social Science Librarian and Subject Consultant for Politics and International Relations.

Liberalism against itself: Cold War intellectuals and the making of our times

Samuel Moyn

Yale University Press

JC574.MOY 2023

It was chosen because the author provides a set of intertwined profiles of six scholars of the Cold War, and in doing so he offers some insight into the evolution of liberalism and the cause of the Red Scare.

Book Overview

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. In this book Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era -among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling – transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time.

Reviews

“A fascinating and combative intellectual history of what Moyn calls ‘cold war liberalism”
Gideon Rachman, Financial Times

“Moyn has written a masterful interconnected intellectual biography of Cold War liberals.”
Atreyee Majumder, LSE Review of Books

“A striking, poignant account of how liberalism lost its way. Through a set of fascinating intellectual portraits, Samuel Moyn prompts us to confront liberalism’s Cold War capitulation to a reactionary pessimism, and invites us to imagine a liberalism oriented toward emancipation.”
Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex

How can I access it?

We have one lending copy of this book, which is located on our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is JC574.MOY 2023. It is also available as an eBook which can be accessed from a Bodleian Library computer or use it remotely, by logging on to SOLO with your SSO.

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.

The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

October’s Book of the Month was selected by Helen Worrell, Subject Consultant for Anthropology.

A short history of the blockade: giant beavers, diplomacy, and regeneration in Nishnaabewin

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

University of Alberta Press, 2021

Available as an eBook via SOLO

Simpson uses four Nishnaabeg stories as an illustration of the politics of blockades in Canada. These stories build on Simpsons theories on generative resistance and Audra’s Simpson’s theory on ethnographic ‘refusal’. This book will be of interest to Anthropology, Sociology, Indigenous Studies, and Geography.

Book Overview

In A Short History of the Blockade, award-winning writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson uses Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg stories, storytelling aesthetics, and practices to explore the generative nature of Indigenous blockades through our relative, the beaver—or in Nishnaabemowin, Amik. Moving through genres, shifting through time, amikwag stories become a lens for the life-giving possibilities of dams and the world-building possibilities of blockades, deepening our understanding of Indigenous resistance as both a negation and an affirmation. Widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation, Simpson’s work breaks open the intersections between politics, story, and song, bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity. A Short History of the Blockade reveals how the practice of telling stories is also a culture of listening, “a thinking through together,” and ultimately, like the dam or the blockade, an affirmation of life. Introduction by Jordan Abel.

Reviews

“Simpson, a celebrated Indigenous storyteller, artist, and scholar, offers four Nishnaabeg stories from the wisdom of the beaver nation and the foundational teachings of their blockades (dams) as an established practice of world-building resistance. Together, the stories are also a commentary on current issues of social media, lateral violence, binary thinking, and surveillance that house the potential to hinder the generative, relational, and reciprocal nature of Indigenous resistance.”

Morgan Mowatt, University of Toronto Quarterly, August 2023

How can I access it?

This title is available as an eBook which can be accessed from any Bodleian Library computer or used remotely, by logging on to SOLO with your SSO.

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.

The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

September’s Book of the Month was selected by Andy Kernot, Subject Consultant for Geography, Social Policy & Intervention, Public Policy, and Internet Studies.

The map in the machine: charting the spatial architecture of digital capitalism

Luis F. Alvarez Leon

University of California Press, 2024

GV109.4 ALV 2024

Digital technologies have changed how we shop, work, play, and communicate, reshaping our societies and economies. To understand digital capitalism, we need to grasp how advances in geospatial technologies underpin the construction, operation, and refinement of markets for digital goods and services. In The Map in the Machine, Luis F. Alvarez Leon examines these advances, from MapQuest and Google Maps to the rise of IP geolocation, ridesharing, and a new Earth Observation satellite ecosystem.

Book Overview

In this book Luis F. Alvarez Leon develops a geographical theory of digital capitalism centered on the processes of location, valuation, and marketization to provide a new vantage point from which to better understand, and intervene in, the dominant techno-economic paradigm of our time. By centering the spatiality of digital capitalism, Alvarez Leon shows how this system is the product not of seemingly intangible information clouds but rather of a vast array of technologies, practices, and infrastructures deeply rooted in place, mediated by geography, and open to contestation and change.

Reviews

“The Map in the Machine deconstructs the spatial architecture of the new digital economy, uncovering its deeply geographical foundations. Synthesizing geographical political economy and critical approaches to information technology, Luis Alvarez Leon offers an original framework for understanding processes of location, valuation, and marketization across the variegated worlds of digital capitalism.”

Jamie Peck, Professor of Geography, University of British Columbia

“Despite the persistence of abstract, fluffy metaphors like the cloud and Ethernet, The Map in the Machine conclusively demonstrates that digital information is–and always has been–intimately intertwined with our physical and material world. This is a must-read book for anyone looking to understand the place-based underpinnings of digital capitalism.”

Catherine D’Ignazio, Associate Professor and Director of the Data + Feminism Lab, MIT, and coauthor of Data Feminism

How can I access it?

We have one lending copy of this book, which is located on our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is GV109.4 ALV 2024. It is also available as an eBook which can be accessed from a Bodleian Library computer or use it remotely, by logging on to SOLO with your SSO.

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.

The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

July’s Book of the Month was selected by Sarah Rhodes, Subject Consultant for International Development and Forced Migration

Measuring global migration: towards better data for all

Frank Laczko, Elisa Mosler Vidal and Marzia Rango

Routledge, 2024

JV6019.LAC 2024

It was chosen to highlight the technical and political challenges associated with the collection of comprehensive global migration data.

Book Overview

This book focuses on how to improve the collection, analysis and responsible use of data on global migration and international mobility. While migration remains a topic of great policy interest for governments around the world, there is a serious lack of reliable, timely, disaggregated and comparable data on it, and often insufficient safeguards to protect migrants’ information. Meanwhile, vast amounts of data about the movement of people are being generated in real time due to new technologies, but these have not yet been fully captured and utilized by migration policymakers, who often do not have enough data to inform their policies and programmes. The lack of migration data has been internationally recognized; the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration urges all countries to improve data on migration to ensure that policies and programmes are “evidence-based”, but does not spell out how this could be done.

Reviews

‘Measuring Global Migration is an essential read, which explores the use of new and non-traditional data for understanding contemporary migration. It offers students and researchers concrete examples, and a balanced view of the potential benefits of using big data, as well as highlighting the ethical concerns and limitations involved, making it a comprehensive guide for all those in the migration field.’

Dr. Stefaan Verhulst, Co-Founder of the GovLab (New York) and the Data Tank

How can I access it?

We have one lending copy of this book, which is located on our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is JV6019.LAC 2024. It is also available as an eBook which can be accessed from a Bodleian Library computer or use it remotely, by logging on to SOLO with your SSO.

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.

The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

June’s Book of the month is:

Місяць війни. Хроніка подій. Промови та звернення Президента України Володимира Зеленського

Misi͡at͡sʹ viĭny : Khronika podiĭ : Promovy ta zvernenni͡a prezydenta Ukraïny Volodymyra Zelensʹkoho

The Month of War: A Chronicle of Events: Speeches and Announcements by the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Compiled by Oleksandr Krasovyt͡sʹkyĭ and V.M. Voronin.

Kharkiv: Folio, 2022

This title is available to request from the Bodleian Closed Stacks and can be taken out on loan from the library.

It was chosen because it offers a blow-by-blow account of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, interspersed with President Zelenskyy’s daily speeches and announcements. Readers can use this book to chart the invasion as it unfolded, along with the international response.

Book Overview

Misiats’ Viiny sets out the main events of each day from the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, until 24 March 2022. It is in fact the first book in an ongoing series, which continues to present a day-by-day chronicle of each month’s events. The Bodleian is collecting the consequent editions of this series, either as print books, or as ebooks on East View’s ebook platform. Each daily account includes the day’s speeches and announcements from Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The book’s main compiler, Oleksandr Krasovits’kyi, is one of Ukraine’s leading publishers, editors and writers. He seems to have been working with President Zelenskyy’s office, which is one of the Copyright owners. Hence, as we might expect, the book strongly supports Zelenskyy, and his decisions. This does not mean that the book presents an inaccurate account: instead, we see how Zelenskyy and his office worked to frame events as they unfolded. The book series is itself part of the Ukrainian government’s effort to establish a narrative of the war, in part to combat the flagrant misinformation issued by Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine.

Misiats’ Viiny and the subsequent editions of the series are an important reminder of the sheer violence of Russian aggression in Ukraine, and its senselessness. Zelenskyy’s speeches demonstrate the close historical connections between Russia and Ukraine, and their peoples. For example, he switched into Russian during his address to the population immediately after the first attacks, to call on the Russian population to demonstrate their opposition to the war. This speech also starts with a reference to Ukraine and Russia’s shared Soviet history, before asserting Ukraine’s right to move forward on its own, independent path: he insists that the Iron Curtain will fall on Russia’s border, rather than encompassing Ukraine.

Zelenskyy’s speeches also reveal the complex international response to the invasion, as it slowly shifted into an acknowledgement that the Putin administration has to be fought, rather than placated. Many of these speeches were addressed to international leaders; for example, we read Zelenskyy’s speech to the UK’s Parliament on March 8. His words reflect the mix of support and scepticism Ukraine has met since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Meanwhile the ongoing series reminds us and the international community at large that Russian terrorism in Ukraine is continuing: a shopping centre in Kharkiv was bombed on May 25, for example. The world cannot afford to forget the threat, violence and tragedy of Russian terrorism.

How can I access it?

This title is available to request from the Bodleian Closed Stacks and can be taken out on loan from the library.

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.

The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

May’s Book of the Month was selected by Jo Gardner, Bodleian Social Science Librarian and Subject Consultant for Politics and International Relations.

Politics and expertise: how to use science in a democratic society

Zeynep Pamuk

Princeton University Press, 2021

JA80.PAM 2021

It was chosen because it has been described as ground-breaking, erudite and wise.

Book Overview

The author’s first book examines the relationship between science and democracy, from funding scientific research to its use in decision-making and its applications in new technologies. It has received the American Political Sciences Association’s Foundations of Political Theory Section First Book Award.

Reviews

“In a post-COVID world where contestation of both science and public institutions is on the rise, Pamuk’s book will remain a central point of reference for institutional theorists in the years to come.”

Mikołaj Szafrański, LSE Review of Books

“Science is vital for political decision making. Yet scientific expertise can be uncertain, incomplete, contradictory, and, sometimes, dangerous. In this ground-breaking book, Pamuk makes a powerful case for the democratic scrutiny of science. This is an incisive, erudite, and wise intervention, made all the more urgent by the recent Covid crisis.”

Cécile Laborde, University of Oxford

“Moving seamlessly from philosophical debates to pragmatic realities, Politics and Expertise deserves the attention of policymakers and concerned citizens alike.”

Peter Hall, Harvard University

How can I access it?

We have one lending copy of this book, which is located on our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is JA80.PAM 2021

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.

The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

April’s Book of the Month was selected by Helen Worrell, Subject Consultant for Anthropology.

Unruly speech: displacement and the politics of transgression

Saskia Witteborn

Stanford University Press, 2023

DS731.U4.WIT 2023

It was chosen as it is a multi-sited transnational ethnography that encompasses a variety of anthropological topics.  It is relevant to those studying migration and displacement, language and social interaction, advocacy and digital surveillance, and a transnational China.

Book Overview

Unruly Speech explores how Uyghurs in China and in the diaspora transgress sociopolitical limits with “unruly” communication practices in a quest for change. Drawing on research in China, the United States, and Germany, Saskia Witteborn situates her study against the backdrop of displacement and shows how naming practices and witness accounts become potent ways of resistance in everyday interactions and in global activism.

Reviews

“Based on a rigorous, multi-sited ethnography conducted in Xinjiang and within diasporas in Germany and the United States, Unruly Speech is a thorough inquiry into transgressive spaces of testimony and advocacy under digital surveillance in totalitarian regimes. It provides an important contribution to the anthropology of resistance.”

Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Study and the Collège de France

“In Unruly Speech, Saskia Witteborn provides a clever ethnography of communication practices and processes in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of China and in the Uyghur diasporas in Germany and the United States…. This way, Witteborn builds a conceptual bridge between the material process of displacement and the symbolic dislocation of meaning.”

Andrew Fallone, International Affairs

“Unruly Speech is itself a testimonio to the strength and resilience of Uyghur communities who have been enduring severe political, social, and cultural dispossessions over the past two decades. The book bridges anthropology and communication studies through its ethnographic methodology of communication and critical self-reflexivity. It contributes to migration literature, language and social interaction literature, and the study of contemporary China and Uyghur lifeworlds from a global perspective. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in delving into a hopeful world of transgressive possibilities.”

Jing Wang, American Ethnologist

How can I access it?

We have one lending copy of this book, which is located on our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is DS731.U4.WIT 2023

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.

The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

March’s Book of the Month was selected by Andy Kernot, Subject Consultant for Geography, Social Policy & Intervention, Public Policy, and Internet Studies.

Taming the flood: rivers, wetlands and the centuries-old battle against flooding

Jeremy Purseglove

William Collins, 2015

GB1399.PUR 2015

It was chosen because it is regarded as a standard work on flood alleviation, nature conservation and river management.

Book Overview

In recent years the Somerset Levels suffered from the worst flooding in over twenty years, and more recently, flooding in Cumbria and other parts of Britain have reached new levels of severity. Taming the Flood analyses many of the conflicting demands made on rivers and wetlands, offering practical solutions which aim to protect, rather than destroy, these important ecological habitats.

Exploring the old arguments and new solutions raised over the last 400 years, this completely updated edition of the classic Taming the Flood reveals how harnessing nature, rather than attempting to repress it, is the only answer to the environmental disasters we are faced with today.

Reviews

Taming the Flood most deserves its status as a classic […] for its evocation of place […] the descriptions of wetlands are exquisitely written. This fine book calls for, and takes, a longer view.

The Sunday Times

Jeremy Purseglove has a gift that is increasingly rare in these days of scientific specialisation of joining practical wisdom about working with nature and the land to an imaginative appreciation of their place in our history and culture.

Richard Mabey

A most authoritative book which appears at a very appropriate time. It will give rise to new attitudes in an extremely important aspect of conservation, and new hope to those who are fighting for a more enlightened approach to wetlands.

Sir Peter Scott

How can I access it?

We have two lending copies of this book. One of our copies is currently located in our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is  GB1399.PUR 2015

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.