This powerful and reflective book explores the losses encountered during social research—of people, communities and environments—collectively referred to as The Lost. Drawing on the contributors’ varied research experiences, it gives voice to lives marked by marginalisation, trauma or quiet disappearance. Stories emerge from women who didn’t survive domestic abuse to those displaced by ‘natural’ disasters, or affected by homelessness. Through deeply personal and ethical reflections, each c...

This book documents the intimate lives of Ukrainians as they fled their homeland in search of a safe and stable place to stay. The critical memoirs follow the lives of 16 Ukrainian families in a small Spanish town near Madrid and the local families that volunteered to host them during a time of limited state support and an absence of a clear EU plan for the refugees.Through first-hand testimonies, social media messages and photographs, the book reveals the scarring realities of the...

Based upon global data and following on from Lockdown: Social Harm in the COVID-19 Era, this book discusses the rise of surveillance capitalism and new forms of control and exclusion throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. It particularly addresses the use of vaccine passports, mandates and the new forms of capital extraction and political control that emerged throughout the pandemic. The book also explicates how the ‘vaccine hesitant’ became marginalized in both mainstream discourse an...

This book asks whether the decision to lock down the world was justified in proportion to the potential harms and risks generated by the Covid-19 virus. Drawing on global, empirical data, it explores and exposes the social harms induced by lockdowns, many of which are 'hidden', including joblessness, mental health problems and an intensification of societal inequalities and divisions. It offers data-driven case studies on harms such as domestic violence, child abuse, the distress of being ...

In challenging social science’s established orthodoxies, this first in a series of books is a call for its disciplines to embrace new theoretical paradigms and research methods to better understand the reality of life in a post-COVID world.By offering a detailed insight into the harmful effects of neoliberalism before the pandemic, as well as the intervallic period the world is currently living through, the authors show how it is more important than ever for social science to evolv...

Climate Changed is an honest, humane account about the rapid downsizing of the world’s natural resources and the consequences this has for millions of people who, year after year, are displaced from their home countries because of politically-instigated and economically-justified war and conflict.Based on interviews with 110 refugees who arrived into Europe from 2015 to 2018 and observations of refugee camps, border crossings, inner-city slums, social housing projects, NGO...

This book explores various forms of highly skilled mobility in the European Union, assessing the potential for this movement to contribute to individual and societal development. In doing so, the authors illustrate some of the issues arising from the opening up of Europe’s borders, and exposing its education systems and labour markets to international competition. While acknowledging the potentially positive aspects of mobility, they also reveal many of the negative consequences arising fr...

“Julia” nervously emerges from her shabby tent in the suburban wastelands on the outskirts of Madrid to face another day of survival in one of Europe’s most problematic ghettos: she is homeless, wanted by the police, and addicted to heroin and cocaine. She is also five months pregnant and rarely makes contact with support services.Welcome to the city shadows in Valdemingómez: a lawless landscape of drugs and violence where the third world meets the Wild West. Briggs and Monge enter...

The years 2008 to 2013 saw a new generation of political protestors take to the streets. Riots disrupted many Western cities and new protest movements emerged, keen to address a bleak context of economic collapse and austerity politics.In this groundbreaking new study, Winlow, Hall, Briggs and Treadwell push past the unworldly optimism of the liberal left to offer an illuminating account of the enclosure and vacuity of contemporary politics. Focusing on the English riots of 2011, t...

From Facebook, Twitter, BlackBerry and gossip to hard facts, research and empirical investigation, this outstanding collection looks at the nature and causes of the English Riots of 2011 one year after they occurred.

Crack cocaine users have significant health problems, and place a significant burden on social services, the criminal justice system and drug treatment agencies. Among policymakers, professionals and the wider section of society, they are the most poorly understood drug-using group and have the worst retention rate in prison drug programmes and community drug agencies.This book is about their addictions and the realities of their lives. Based on ethnographic research (observation a...

During the first years of the pandemic, the political mainstream agreed that ‘following the science’ with hard lockdowns and vaccine mandates was the best way to preserve life. But social science reveals the true human cost of this policy.The Covid Consensusprovides an internationalist-left perspective on the world’s Covid-19 response, which has had devastating consequences for democratic rights and the poor worldwide. As the fortunes of the richest soared, nationwide shut...