Belittled Citizens

Exploring the intersection between Thai politics, urban poverty, religion, and global humanitarianism from the perspective of “slum children” in Bangkok, this fascinating, engaging and illuminating study offers startling new insights into how ideas of “parenthood” and “infantilization” shape Thai political culture.

Anthropologists working in Italy are at the forefront of scholarship on several topics including migration, far-right populism, organised crime and heritage. This book heralds an exciting new frontier by bringing together some of the leading ethnographers of Italy and placing together their contributions into the broader realm of anthropological history, culture and new perspectives in Europe.

In Subversive Archaism, Michael Herzfeld explores how individuals and communities living at the margins of the modern nation-state use nationalist discourses of tradition to challenge state authority under both democratic and authoritarian governments. Through close attention to the claims and experiences of mountain shepherds in Greece and urban slum dwellers in Thailand, Herzfeld shows how these subversive archaists draw on national histories and past polities to claim legitimacy for their defiance of bureaucratic authority. Although vilified by government authorities as remote, primitive, or dangerous—often as preemptive justification for violent repression—these groups are not revolutionaries and do not reject national identity, but they do question the equation of state and nation. Herzfeld explores the political strengths and vulnerabilities of their deployment of heritage and the weaknesses they expose in the bureaucratic and ethnonational state in an era of accelerated globalization.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. Revising established research, this handbook equips readers with an understanding of the complex interplay between local and global and public and private contexts in the development of young people in Asian countries.

This cutting-edge and authoritative Handbook covers a broad spectrum of social movement research methodologies, offering expert analysis and detailed accounts of the ways by which research can effectively be carried out on social movements and popular protests. Addressing practice-oriented questions, this Handbook engages with both theoretical and political considerations, unpacking the multidimensional nature of social movement research.

Spain After the Indignados/15M Movement explores how the aftershocks of the 2007 Great Recession restructured Spain’s political sphere and political imaginary. It brings together a representative sample of Spain’s leading progressive voices, including two of the five founding members of the Podemos party. The essays herein explore the areas of economics, politics, ecology, social change, media, and cultural politics in order to present a broad, critical account of contemporary Spain, with a special emphasis on emerging forms of sociopolitical contestation, self-organizing, democratic participation, and radical politics. The edited volume argues that Spanish cultural studies—which originally gravitated toward celebratory accounts of capitalist modernization, the cultural Movida and the advent of a postmodern Spain—must continue to build a new cultural politics that not only challenges the accepted narrative of the Spanish Transition to democracy, but that is committed to confronting the civilizatory challenges currently faced.

This edited volume brings together interdisciplinary scholarship on children’s everyday leisure from across the globe, addressing key questions around children’s agency, rights, child-adult relations, and social change. It is positioned to inaugurate a new frontier of research within leisure studies. Leisure theory has historically been adult-centric and based in the global north, and consequently, children’s lived experiences of leisure have remained marginal to theory-building exercises within leisure studies since its inception. As the call for decolonizing leisure studies grows, this book champions a cross-cultural and social justice agenda that does not privilege global north childhoods but acknowledges the multiplicity of lived childhoods across the globe and their inter-connections. By drawing attention to children’s leisure – across multiple genres such as organized leisure, sports, play, and digital leisure among others, this edited volume drives a new wave of research that speaks simultaneously to leisure studies and childhood studies and thereby advances the intellectual remit of global leisure studies.