Spatterlight
We manage rights for science-fiction and fantasy legend Jack Vane (1916 - 2013) and selected titles by Tanith Lee, Michael Shea, Matthew Hughes, and others.
View Rights PortalWe manage rights for science-fiction and fantasy legend Jack Vane (1916 - 2013) and selected titles by Tanith Lee, Michael Shea, Matthew Hughes, and others.
View Rights PortalSparsile Books is an independent publisher, based in Glasgow, specialising in high quality fiction and non-fiction. We see publishing as an art in itself, and work closely with our authors to ensure that the books we publish give readers a unique vision of the world. Since our beginning in 2018, we have been fortunate to discover some truly exceptional writers, and look forward to developing many more.
View Rights PortalThe edges of cities are increasingly understood as places of dynamism and change, but there is little research on African urban peripheries, the nature of building, growth, investment and decline that is shaping them and how these are lived. This co-authored monograph draws on findings from an extensive comparative study on Ethiopia and South Africa, in conversation with a related study on Ghana. It examines African urban peripheries through a dual focus on the experiences of living in these changing contexts, alongside the logics driving their transformation. Through its conceptualisation and application of five 'logics of periphery', it offers unique, contextually-informed insights into the generic processes shaping urban peripheries, and the variable ways in which these are playing out in contemporary Africa for those living the peripheries.
As human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital media is overlaid onto the urban landscape, The machinic city argues that performance art can help us to understand contemporary urban living. Dias analyses interventions from performance artists such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces for deliberation and reflection on urban life, and speculation on its future. While cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes mediated by technical machines, Dias analyses the performative potential of the aesthetic machine, as it assembles with media, capitalist, human and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban space is examined through its different components - design, city and technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city.
Digital technologies promise efficiency and comfort, but the smoothness of platform services relies on the hidden social labour of those who keep the gig economy running. This book presents a comparative ethnography of young men making a living through digital technologies: selling mobile airtime in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, and app-based delivery riders in Berlin, Germany. These case studies explore the significance of symbolic capital in urban youth's social existence and organisation of livelihood in the digital economy, and the technological mechanisms producing a new form of urban precarity. Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan puts forward an original comparative approach to develop a global urban sociology for the digital era. It provides an innovative analytical toolbox that decentres discussions of precarity from the standard of a normal employment contract. With its focus on symbolic capital, the ethnography shows the consequences of the proliferating gig economy for status struggles among urban youth, and carefully embeds the densification of software and services into the socio-material relations on which these new urban infrastructures are built.
This book aims to examine the nature of and resistance to gendered urban violence among Brazilian women in London and in the favelas of Maré, Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on the conceptualisation of translocational gendered urban violence framework, it highlights the importance of examining direct forms of gender-based violence across private, public and transnational spheres as interlinked with structural, symbolic and infrastructural violence. The book also explores the embodied and spatialised nature of gendered urban violence, explored through artistic engagements and arts-based methods. In developing a translocational feminist tracing methodological and epistemological approach across the social sciences and the arts, the book argues for the importance of a collaborative approach among academic, civil society organisations, artists and creative researchers with a view to engendering empathetic transformation to address gendered urban violence in the long-term.
Civic identity and public space, focussing on Belfast, and bringing together the work of a historian and two social scientists, offers a new perspective on the sometimes lethal conflicts over parades, flags and other issues that continue to disrupt political life in Northern Ireland. It examines the emergence during the nineteenth century of the concept of public space and the development of new strategies for its regulation, the establishment, the new conditions created by the emergence in 1920 of a Northern Ireland state, of a near monopoly of public space enjoyed by Protestants and unionists, and the break down of that monopoly in more recent decades. Today policy makers and politicians struggle to devise a strategy for the management of public space in a divided city, while endeavouring to promote a new sense of civic identity that will transcend long-standing sectarian and political divisions.
Destinations rely on regional strategies to support and enhance the tourism product through regional partnerships and integration. Integrated tourism is defined as tourism that is explicitly linked to the economic, social, cultural, natural and human structures of the region in which it occurs. Integrated tourism has evolved to include numerous meanings and definitions but all of which have a vertical approach. The first of its kind, this book moves away from the vertical approach and provides insight into inclusive regional development strategies that support both the needs of urban and rural areas whilst enhancing the tourist experience, supporting the positive impacts of tourism and mitigating the negative. Regional studies tend to portray either an urban or rural focus without acknowledging that often these spaces constitute joint governance structures, similar historical and cultural roots, and economic dependencies. Sustainable tourism promotes sourcing locally, such as using rural agricultural products in urban tourism experiences. Furthermore, innovative marketing strategies linking tourism heritage, attractions, food and drink trails, and artisans with urban visitors are emerging. Including theoretical and applied research and international case studies, this will be a valuable resource to academics, students and practitioners working in tourism development and regional policy. ; This book provides insight into inclusive regional development strategies that support both the needs of urban and rural areas. Sustainable tourism promotes sourcing locally, such as using rural products in urban experiences, while innovative marketing linking tourism heritage, food and drink trails, and artisans with urban visitors are emerging.
The management and control of pests in the urban environment in the 21st Century faces many challenges. Pest populations adapt to changing conditions brought about by environmental changes caused by global warming, human population growth, and increased pollution. Urban pests are able to expand their ranges, densities, and habitats, sometimes causing large-scale damage and disease. This book provides collective insights from academic and industry experts on perspectives concerning urban pest management and regulatory innovations arising from the rapid onset of recent environmental challenges. Chapter topics address pest biology, advances in urban pest management practices, emerging urban pest control developments, new technologies, and regulations. The book describes new methods of pest control, their impacts on human health and the environment, and strategies for integrated management limiting the use of chemicals. It provides a practical resource for researchers and policy makers in pest management, urban health, medical entomology and environmental science. · An up-to-date and comprehensive resource on environmental urban pest management · Designed to appeal to pest control operators, public health professionals, and a range of field workers, as well as researching academics and graduate students · Brings both academic and industry experts together in one volume
Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.
Urban pests are common all over the world. These include cockroaches, flies, mosquitoes, bed bugs, ticks, fleas, ants, termites, rodents and others. These pests thrive in human structures, where there is food, warmth and places to hide. Urban pests are one of the leading causes of illnesses in humans due to allergies, bites, food contamination and phobias. They can also cause significant damage to property and structures. Knowledge and training in this field is vital for professional and trainee pest managers. This book is specifically intended to provide an aid to such candidates. The book contains 500 multiple-choice questions (and answers) grouped into the following major topic areas: · The history of urban entomology · Household pests · Cockroaches · Flies · Mosquitoes · Bed bugs · Termites · Sporadic pests · Stored product pests · Vertebrate pests · Pesticides and pesticide formulations · Handling pesticides · Integrated Pest Control Produced in a convenient format that can be used at any time in any place, the book allows the reader to learn and revise the subject and much more. Its structure allows the study of one topic area at a time, progressing through a simple introduction followed by key revision questions, many of which require students to use their practical knowledge. The answers to each of the questions are provided at the end with short explanations wherever appropriate.
The imperatives of public health shaped our understanding of the cities of the global north in the first industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are doing so again today, reflecting new geographies of the urban age of the twenty-first. Emergent cities in parts of the globe experiencing most profound urban growth face major problems of economic, ecological and social sustainability when making sense of new health challenges and designing policy frameworks for public health infrastructures. The rapid evolution of complex 'systems of systems' in today's cities continually reconfigure the urban commons, reshaping how we understand urban public health, defining new problems and drawing on new data tools for analysis that work from the historical legacies and geographical variations that structure public health systems.
Crafting identities explores artisanal identity and culture in early modern London. It demonstrates that the social, intellectual and political status of London's crafts and craftsmen were embedded in particular material and spatial contexts. Through examination of a wide range of manuscript, visual and material culture sources, the book investigates for the first time how London's artisans physically shaped the built environment of the city and how the experience of negotiating urban spaces impacted directly on their distinctive individual and collective identities. Applying an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology to the examination of artisanal cultures, the book engages with the fields of social and cultural history and the histories of art, design and architecture. It will appeal to scholars of early modern social, cultural and urban history, as well as those interested in design and architectural history.
This comparative study of urban poverty is the first to chart the irregular pulse of poverty's encounters with officialdom. It exploits an unusual methodology to secure new perspectives from familiar sources. The highly localised characteristics of the welfare economy generated a peculiarly urban environment for the poor. Separate chapters examine the parameters of workhouse life when the preconceptions of contemporaries have been stripped away; the reach of institutional charities such as almshouses, schools and infirmaries; and the surprisingly broad clientele of urban pawnbrokers. Detailed analysis of the poor is achieved via meticulous matching of individuals who fell within the purview of two or more authorities. The result is a unique insight into the survival economics of urban poverty, arising not from a tidy network of welfare but from a loose assembly of options, where the impoverished positioned themselves repeatedly to fit official, philanthropic, or casual templates of the 'deserving'. This book will be essential reading for historians of English poverty and welfare, and eighteenth-century social and economic life. ;
What do we imagine when we imagine Europe and the European Union? To what extent is our understanding of the EU - of its development, its policies and its working processes - shaped by unacknowledged assumptions about what Europe really is? The book constructs a case for re-imagining Europe - not as an entity in Brussels or a series of fixed relations - but as a simultaneously real and imagined space of action which exists to the extent that Europeans and others act in and on it. This Europe is constantly being made in particular spaces, through specific actor struggles, whose interconnections are often ill-defined. We ask how do those concerned with building Europe, with extending and elaborating the EU, think of where they are and what they are doing? The book captures Europeans in the process of making Europe: of performing, interpreting, modelling, referencing, consulting, measuring and de-politicising Europe. ;
The towns of Italy in the later middle ages presents over one hundred fascinating documents, carefully selected and coordinated from the richest, most innovative and most documented society of the European Middle Ages. No other English language sourcebook has the same geographical or chronological range. This collection is carefully structured around the crisis of the fourteenth century and arranged in contrasting groups of texts. By connecting documents in translation to recent scholarship and debates, it addresses five key areas of medieval urban history: the physical environment, civic religion, economy, society and politics. Offers students well-translated and effectively contextualised documents along with some guidance to the secondary work of Italian scholars which is largely inaccessible to undergraduate students.
This book provides a detailed examination of specific issues in urban ecology which are of great interest to professional ecologists, researchers, students and the general public. Written by a team of international experts the book presents a series of issue-based essays and assumes that urban ecology reflects the natural forces in effect in the habitats described and provides important, succinct, and informative introductions to critical topics. Examples of topics included are: Relative Success of Invasive Species in Urban vs. Non-Urban Habitats, Urban Habitats: Who Like Them More; Vertebrates or Invertebrates?, Unintended Consequences in Urban Habitats Compared to Non-Urban Habitats, Protecting Pollinators in the Urban Environment, Climate Change and Urban Environments, How Urban Conditions Influence Ecological Interactions.
There has been growing attention paid to urban agriculture worldwide because of its role in making cities more environmentaly sustainable while also contributing to enhanced food access and social justice. This edited volume brings together current research and case studies concerning urban agriculture from both the Global North and the Global South. Its objective is to help bridge the long-standing divide between discussion of urban agriculture in the Global North and the Global South and to demonstrate that today there are greater areas of overlap than there are differences both theoretically and substantively, and that research in either area can help inform research in the other. The book covers the nature of urban agriculture and how it supports livelihoods, provides ecosystem services, and community development. It also considers urban agriculture and social capital, networks, and agro-biodiversity conservation. Concepts such as sustainability, resilience, adaptation and community, and the value of urban agriculture as a recreational resource are explored. It also examines, quite fundamentally, why people farm in the city and how urban agriculture can contribute to more sustainable cities in both the Global North and the Global South. Key Features: · One of the first volumes to bring together evidence from urban agriculture in the Global North and the Global South · Explores the contribution of urban agriculture to livelihoods, ecosystems and conservation · Numerous case studies examine a very diverse range of urban agriculture systems ; Urban agriculture is crucial to the environmental sustainability of cities, but the issues facing cities in the global north and south have been seen as unlinked. This book brings together evidence from both areas to highlight the interconnectedness and the contribution to social justice. ; 1: Defining and Theorizing Global Urban Agriculture2: A View from the South: Bringing Critical Planning Theory to Urban Agriculture3: Barriers and Benefits of North American Urban Agriculture4: A Survey of Urban Community Gardeners in the United States of America5: Gardens in the City: Community, Politics, and Place in San Diego, California6: “Growing Food is Hard Work:” The Labor Challenges of Urban Agriculture in Houston, Texas7: The Marketing of Vegetables Produced in Cities in Ghana: Implications and Trajectories8: Hunger for Justice: Building Sustainable and Equitable Communities in Massachusetts9: Sustainability’s Incomplete Circles: Towards a Just Food Politics in Austin, Texas and Havana, Cuba10: A Political Ecology of Community Gardens in Australia: From Local to Global Lessons11: Urban Agriculture as Adaptive Capacity: An Example from Senegal12: Intersection and Material Flow in Open-Space Urban Farms in Tanzania13: Relying on Urban Gardens for Survival within the Building of a Modern City in Colombia14: Regreening Kibera: How Urban Agriculture Changed the Physical and Social Environment of a Large Slum in Kenya15: Farm Fresh in the City: Urban Grassroots Food Distribution Networks in Finland16: The Appropriation of Space through ‘Communist Swarms:’ A Socio-Spatial Examination of Urban Apiculture in Washington, DC17: Urban Agriculture and the Re-Assembly of the City: Lessons from Wuhan, China18: The Contribution of Smallholder Irrigated Urban Agriculture Towards Household Food Security in Harare, Zimbabwe19: Community Gardens as Urban Social-Ecological Refuges in the Global North20: Global Urban Agriculture into the Future: Urban Cultivation as Accepted Practice
Despite the intense processes of deindustrialisation around the world, the working class continues to play an important role in post-industrial societies. However, working-class people are often stigmatised, morally judged and depicted negatively in dominant discourses. This book challenges stereotypical representations of workers, building on research into the everyday worlds of working-class and ordinary people in Russia's post-industrial cities. The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia is centred on the stories of local communities engaged in the everyday struggles that occur in deindustrialising settings under neoliberal neo-authoritarianism. The book suggests a novel approach to everyday life in post-industrial cities. Drawing on an ethnographic study with elements of arts-based research, the book presents a new genre of writing about workers influenced by the avant-garde documentary tradition and working-class literature.