Navigating Austerity addresses a key policy question of our era: what happens to society and the environment when austerity dominates political and economic life? To get to the heart of this issue, Laura Bear tells the stories of boatmen, shipyard workers, hydrographers, port bureaucrats and river pilots on the Hooghly River, a tributary of the Ganges that flows into the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean. Through their accounts, Bear traces the hidden currents of state debt crises and their often devastating effects.

Taking the reader on a voyage along the river, Bear reveals...

Navigating Austerity addresses a key policy question of our era: what happens to society and the environment when austerity dominates political and economic life? To get to the heart of this issue, Laura Bear tells the stories of boatmen, shipyard workers, hydrographers, port bureaucrats and river pilots on the Hooghly River, a tributary of the Ganges that flows into the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean. Through their accounts, Bear traces the hidden currents of state debt crises and their often devastating effects.

Taking the reader on a voyage along the river, Bear reveals...

Somalis are one of the most chastised Muslim communities in Europe. Depicted in the news as victims of female genital mutilation, perpetrators of gang violence, or more recently, as radical Islamists, Somalis have been cast as a threat to social cohesion, national identity, and security in Britain and beyond.

Somali, Muslim, British shifts attention away from these public representations to provide a detailed ethnographic study of Somali Muslim women's engagements with religion, political discourses, and public culture in the United Kingdom.
The book chronicles the...

Contingent Citizens examines the ambiguous state of South Africa's public sector workers and the implications for contemporary understandings of citizenship. It takes us inside an ethnography of the professional ethic of nurses in a rural hospital in KwaZulu-Natal, shaped by a deep history of mission medicine and changing forms of new public management. Liberal democratic principles of 'transparency', 'decentralization' and 'rights', though promising freedom from control, often generate fear and insecurity instead. But despite the pressures they face, Elizabeth Hull shows that...

Work, Sleep, Repeat is a fascinating account of the work regime of German management consultants. Examining one of the most sought-after - and secretive - graduate professions, the book provides a first-hand account of the boardroom culture of Europe's strongest economy.

Analyzing how knowledge and power operate in this sector, Felix Stein explores a number of paradoxes. For example, while it is the job of management consultants to analyse the activities of other employees, they actually spend most of their time in luxurious seclusion away from them. In addition, despite...