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.

Casey High

Translating worlds, defending land : collaborations for indigenous rights and environmental politics in Amazonia

Stanford University Press, 2025

Available as an eBook via SOLO

Book Overview

This book is a result of long term fieldwork in Amazonian Ecuador, the author critically explores collaboration as a method for engagement with indigenous communities. It expands on the scholarly debates around engaged anthropology and who ethnography is for. This ethnography is a key contribution to the understanding of the process of anthropological research and the communities they engage with. 

Reviews

“Casey High offers us a brilliant ethnography in the form of fluid and intimate writing, which makes the book a page turner. What we see in these pages is the inauguration of a new line of anthropological reflection, in which collaboration between anthropologists and Indigenous people ceases to be a simple method and becomes the very object of analysis.”

Aparecida Vilaça, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

“In this thought-provoking meditation on the dynamics of collaboration, Casey High explores what it means for anthropology and anthropologists when our epistemic partners start doing ethnography their own way, for their own ends.”

Stuart Kirsch, University of Michigan

“Narrating in Waorani lands (that are also Ecuadorian), this strong and delicate ethnography also narrates us. Relentlessly written from a ‘complex we’ the stories it tells make it clear that ‘we’ have interlocutors and are interlocutors and that therefore, ‘we’ tell stories about ‘them’ that are also about ‘us’… ethnographic relations as moebius strip!”

Marisol de la Cadena, University of California, Davis

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.

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

Humans versus nature

Daniel R. Headrick

Oxford University Press, 2020

GF75.HEA 2020

This book examines the adversarial relationship between the human and natural worlds and how the unintended consequences of human actions threaten humanity and the Earth. It shows how this relationship has been in existence since the stone age and that the development of technologies in recent centuries has accelerated the human impact on the environment.

Book Overview

Daniel R. Headrick shows how environmental changes–epidemics, climate shocks, and volcanic eruptions–have moulded human societies and cultures, sometimes overwhelming them. At the same time, he traces the history of anthropogenic changes in the environment–species extinctions, global warming, deforestation, and resource depletion–back to the age of hunters and gatherers and the first farmers and herders. He shows how human interventions such as irrigation systems, over-fishing, and the Industrial Revolution have in turn harmed the very societies that initiated them. Throughout, Headrick examines how human-driven environmental changes are interwoven with larger global systems, dramatically reshaping the complex relationship between people and the natural world. In doing so, he roots the current environmental crisis in the deep past.

Reviews

“…the ultimate reference work on global environmental history.”

Eric L. Jones, University of Buckingham, EH.net

“Headrick’s book is the most comprehensive global environmental history in existence. It synthesizes vast knowledge from several scholarly disciplines into a coherent story of the 300,000-year human adventure on — and with — Earth. If one has time to read only one environmental history book, this should be the one.”

J.R. McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World

“Humans versus Nature is a gift to students and teachers of environmental history: a single volume that captures the vast scope and scale of nature’s role in human history and humanity’s accelerating impact on the natural world.”

Sam White, author of A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America

How can I access it?

We have two lending copies of this book. One is currently located on our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk) and the other copy can be found on our open shelves at shelfmark is GF75.HEA 2020.

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.

February’s Book of the Month was selected by John Southall, Bodleian Data Librarian and Subject Consultant for Economics and Sociology.

Uneven odds: social mobility in contemporary India

Divya Vaid

Oxford University Press, 2018

HN690.Z9.SOC 2018

It was chosen because of the way it uses national-level datasets and advanced quantitative methods, to gain new insights and enrich the sociological as well as the anthropological literature.

Book Overview

This work addresses questions and approaches towards social mobility through interactions between social class, caste, and gender while adopting a rural-urban perspective, capturing changes over time, and the implications of social mobility on a national scale. Vaid successfully applies the class schematic approach to social mobility developed by John H. Goldthorpe amongst others. This neo-Weberian approach defines social class as similar positions embedded in market and work situations, characterizing common life chances.

This author plugs in crucial gaps in the research on social mobility, which has been marked by the lack of precision regarding the extent of mobility in contemporary India. Using a broad lens of both caste and class, this up-to-date statistical analysis enriches our understanding of Indian society, while also locating it within the larger context of social mobility research in the industrialized and industrializing world.

Reviews

“Uneven Odds is not only remarkable because it is the first book to really analyse class mobility in India, it is also a model of thorough quantitative analysis. It definitely opens the way for further quantitative research in social stratification as indicated in the book’s conclusion.”

Mathieu Ferry, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal

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 HN690.Z9.SOC 2018. 

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.

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.