Slum Travelers


Book Description

Late-nineteenth-century Britain saw the privileged classes forsake society balls and gatherings to turn their considerable resources to investigating and relieving poverty. By the 1890s at least half a million women were involved in philanthropy, particularly in London. Slum Travelers, edited, annotated, and with a superb introduction by Ellen Ross, collects a fascinating array of the writings of these "lady explorers," who were active in the east, south, and central London slums from around 1870 until the end of World War I. Contributors range from the well known, including Annie Besant, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Beatrice Webb (then Potter), to the obscure. The collection reclaims an important group of writers whose representations of urban poverty have been eclipsed by better-known male authors such as Charles Dickens and Jack London.




Slum Travelers


Book Description

Ellen Ross has collected impressions from some of the half a million women involved in philanthropy by the 1890s, most of them active in the London slums. The contributors include Sylvia Pankhurst and Beatrice Webb, as well as many more less well known figures.




Slums


Book Description

More than half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, and a billion of these urban dwellers reside in neighborhoods of entrenched disadvantage—neighborhoods that are characterized as slums. Slums are often seen as a debilitating and even subversive presence within society. In reality, though, it is public policies that are often at fault, not the people who live in these neighborhoods. In this comprehensive global history, Alan Mayne explores the evolution and meaning of the word “slum,” from its origins in London in the early nineteenth century to its use as a slur against the favela communities in the lead-up to the Rio Olympics in 2016. Mayne shows how the word slum has been extensively used for two hundred years to condemn and disparage poor communities, with the result that these agendas are now indivisible from the word’s essence. He probes beyond the stereotypes of deviance, social disorganization, inertia, and degraded environments to explore the spatial coherence, collective sense of community, and effective social organization of poor and marginalized neighborhoods over the last two centuries. In mounting a case for the word’s elimination from the language of progressive urban social reform, Slums is a must-read book for all those interested in social history and the importance of the world’s vibrant and vital neighborhoods.




Slum Tourism


Book Description

This multidisciplinary collection is unique both in its conceptual and empirical breadth.




Giving Women


Book Description

Drawing on novels, poetry, periodicals, and political pamphlets, Giving Women examines the literary expression and cultural consequences of gift exchange among English women from the 1820s until the end of the First World War.




Transnational Social Policy


Book Description

Transnational Social Policy highlights the changing face of social policy and social work against the background of accelerating transnationalization of economies, labour markets, education, social services, and care. The contributions of this book provide unique case examples on the interplay of social policies, mobile populations, and travelling knowledge about welfare within an increasingly asymmetrical global context. This innovative volume also includes historical studies on the transformations of social policies during the last century and reflects the developments of social welfare across the Global North and the Global South. With its emphasis on theoretical assumptions of policy translation, the case studies show the importance of adjustments, negotiations, and participation of various actors in the transnational social field of welfare production. Thus, within ever-shifting contexts of new political agendas promoting the free play of the market and a neoliberal agenda of competition and austerity, this insightful book reveals new transnational forms of social exclusion that function within, across, and in-between nation-states. Presenting a major and much needed addition to current discussions on globalization and the increasing complexity of worldwide social relations, this volume will be of interest to scholars and graduate students interested in fields such as Social Policy, Social Work, Public Administration, Development Studies, Political Science, and Sociology, as well as many interdisciplinary fields including Global Studies, International Development Studies, and Immigration and Settlement Studies.




Tales of Two Cities


Book Description

Paris and London have long held a mutual fascination, and never more so than in the period 1750–1914, when they vied to be the world's greatest city. Each city has been the focus of many books, yet Jonathan Conlin here explores the complex relationship between them for the first time. The reach and influence of both cities was such that the story of their rivalry has global implications. By borrowing, imitating and learning from each other Paris and London invented the true metropolis. Tales of Two Cities examines and compares five urban spaces—the pleasure garden, the cemetery, the apartment, the restaurant and the music hall—that defined urban modernity in the nineteenth century. The citizens of Paris and London first created these essential features of the modern cityscape and so defined urban living for all of us.




Urban Tourism in the Global South


Book Description

This book examines and addresses the particular character of urban tourism occurring in the global South. It presents research essays on tourism in urban areas of South Africa, a country which is associated with big 5 nature tourism but where urban areas are also major tourism destinations. The book contextualizes urban tourism in South Africa as part of ‘the other half of urban tourism’, an overlooked but energetic scholarship which is emerging on urban places in the global South. The volume moves to present a collection of original material variously on national perspectives on urban tourism following by a cluster of city level perspectives. The last three contributions turn to the role of tourism in small towns, the bottom rung in the urban settlement system. Issues of concern include gastronomic tourism, VFR travel, airportscapes, climate change, AirBnb and creative tourism. Finally, as COVID-19 is potentially a defining historical moment for urban tourism, the volume incorporates historical research perspectives in order to address the overwhelming ‘present-mindedness’ of mainstream urban tourism writings. The book highlights the challenges and opportunities for tourism development in the environment of the urban global South and is relevant to scholars of both tourism and urban studies as well as researchers in development studies.




British Women Writers and the Short Story, 1850-1930


Book Description

This book addresses a critically neglected genre used by women writers from Gaskell to Woolf to complicate Victorian and modernist notions of gender and social space. Their innovative short stories ask Britons to reconsider where women could live, how they could be identified, and whether they could be contained.




Topographies of Popular Culture


Book Description

Topographies of Popular Culture departs from the deceptively simple notion that popular culture always takes place somewhere. By studying the spatial and topographic imaginations at work in popular culture, the book identifies and illustrates several specific tendencies that deserve increased attention in studies of the popular. In combining the study of popular texts with a broad variety of geographical contexts, the volume presents a global and cross-cultural approach to popular culture’s topographies. In part, Topographies of Popular Culture takes its cue from recent theorisations of spatiality in the field of critical theory, and from such global transformations as the processes and after-effects of decolonisation and globalisation. It contemplates the spatiality of genre and the interactions between the local and the global, as well as the increasing circulation and adaptation of popular texts across the globe. The ten individual chapters analyse the spaces of popular culture at a scale that extends from an individual’s everyday experience to genuinely global questions, offering new theoretical and analytical insights into the relation between spatiality and the popular.