New open access books published in April 2025

Posted on 6th May, 2025

Another busy month for the UCL Press books team, with 5 brilliant new open access titles spanning everything from architecture to COVID-19, classics and race to children’s play.

The first book published was Labour, Nature and Capitalism: Exploring labour-environmental conflicts in Kerala, India, ehich traces how the alliance between labour and capital manifests in the form of conflicts between organised trade unions and a local environmental movement in the context of the much-acclaimed Kerala model of development. It explores the history of the area’s local industrialisation, the presence of varied economic interests and exposes the barriers to forming solidarity networks among the working classes.

The fascinating Playing the Archive: From the Opies to the digital playground. This open access book investigates the vast collection of play experiences accumulated by Iona and Peter Opie in the 1950s and 1960s. It shares new stories and games gathered from today’s children, and compares the accounts told at these two points in time. Children are seen as creative, agentive and engaged participants in their play cultures.

Our third publication was Classics and Race: A historical reader. This important book provides scholars and students with an exploratory intellectual history of the various and complex relationships between Classics and racist and anti-racist thought-systems and politics.

The latest volume of the Culture and Health series was next up. Covid’s Chronicities: From urgency to stasis in a pandemic era is a fascinating account of the shifts that have occurred in the face of the pandemic, the state and community responses to it, its continuing toll on health services, economies, and communities and its compounding effects on people’s health, lives and livelihoods.

The final book to publish in April was Space Syntax: Selected papers by Bill Hillier, which provides a canon of works that reflect the progression of Hillier’s ideas from the early publications of the 1970s to his most recent work, published before his death in 2019.

As always, stay safe! We’ll see you next month!