Author Archives: Alison Fox

What are photographs ‘doing’ in museums? Like the x-ray permeating objects to reveal internal structures, photographs permeate museum practices at all levels – display, collections management, conservation, retail, publicity and exhibition publications, for instance. Photographs inhabit museums in huge numbers. However, these photographs are rarely part of formally accessioned collections: despite their epistemic and historical presence, they are active yet invisible, there but not there. 

Museums are shaped and defined through photographic practices that constitute and reproduce values, hierarchies and knowledge systems, generally with little cognisance of the power of these practices. Such images and their uses are, as Crane has described them, ‘a lowly sort of thing’ that ‘appears or hides in many guises’. Consequently, this book is about the work of the photographs that are not part of a museum’s formal collection, although they might once have been, or might become so. It addresses a range of institutional conditions which exceeds ‘the collection’ as it is officially recognised.

Whether one is considering ‘the collections’ or the material accruals around them, museums are centres of calculation in Bruno Latour’s sense, where accumulated objects, networks, proximities and values become knowledge through an institution’s procedures and devices. Photographs are the unconsidered heart of these processes, as they accumulate and circulate knowledge, even more so in an age when digitally available photographs of objects are at the front line of ‘accessibility’. While it has been argued that museums have, for some time, been post-photographic in their increasing dependence on networked, digital and multimedia realms, it remains that beneath these developments of the last three decades or so, photographs as imaging practices remain central. Since the nineteenth century, photographs have widened the reach of what museums can do and how they can function. They form both the background and the spine of museum practice, from record keeping to questions of decolonisation, from archival accrual to retail source, to the degree that it has been impossible to think about museum function and praxis without encountering photographs.

This mass of photographs can be said to form an ‘ecosystem’: a finely balanced network of dependencies and connective tissue which create and underpin values, hierarchies and knowledge systems and which are present in the museum in dispersed multiple, folded and overlapping layers. The various sites of photographic activity, from the studio through collections management to exhibitions, are nodes in the ecosystem which have their own micro-cultures that mutually inform and conflict. They form massive and shifting bodies of photographic utility and practice which translate objects into certain kinds of things and displays into certain kinds of spaces. Photographs shape the texture and fabric of both internal professional procedures of museums and their external public face. 

They are, in sum, a key organising principle of museums and markers of its ’rhetoric of value’.

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About the Authors

This is an excerpt from the open access book What Photographs Do, edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Ella Ravilious and published by UCL Press/ V&A.

Elizabeth Edwards is Professor Emerita of Photographic History at De Montfort University, Leicester, and also Honorary Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UCL. 

Ella Ravilious is Curator: Architecture and Design in the Art, Architecture, Photography and Design Department at the V&A.  

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!

To mark the BSA Conference 2025 in Manchester, we’ve put together a reading list of essential open access books in Sociology from UCL Press.

If you’re attending, Pat Gordon-Smith, our commissioning editor of sociology, will be there to talk you through our extensive list of titles, and answer questions about how to publish your next open access book with UCL Press.

Join the UCL Press mailing list to find out more about the latest open access titles, or visit our stand!

After a dark, wet Winter, Spring has finally sprung. We’ve had a very busy month on the book front, with a bumper crop of seven new open access titles.

The first title to publish in March, Reading Randomised Controlled Trials investigates the complexities of conducting randomised controlled trials in the field of education. The Flexible Phonics trial is not only an important experiment in improving children’s literacy, but a case study in which the methodology of single randomised controlled trials in education can be considered.

The intriguing William Lawrence and the Organ of Mind explores the historical origins and ideological valence of the conceptualisation of thought and mind as functions of the brain in early nineteenth-century Britain.

Precarious Motherhood is an important ethnography that explores the experiences of racially minoritised mothers who have insecure immigration status and are living with financial hardship in London. It goes beyond the mother-child relationship to consider the impact on mothers’ couple relationships, friendships, adult kin relationships and faith-based networks.

Moving between economic history and the history of medicine, Between Feast and Famine is a comparative history of nutrition across the diverse spaces that make up modern Ghana. At the heart of this story is an analysis of how colonisation and capitalism variously affected the lives of women and children since the end of the nineteenth century.

Ethnographic museums have come under increasing scrutiny. Now is a good time to explore whether new developments in display and cultural politics provide a viable future for ethnographic museums. Authors in Reframing the Ethnographic Museum grapple with the new complexities facing them as curators in the contemporary world.

An Anthropology of Architectural Transformation is a fascinating ethnographic investigation of everyday life in a Romanian apartment block. It provides a unique window into how inhabitants, through everyday creative engagements with their apartments, come to terms with the uncertainties of a rapidly changing society. If you’re interested in an early ‘Easter egg’ from the author, there’s an absorbing on the ‘Resources’ tab of the book’s product page.

A companion to 2019’s Fundamentals of Galaxy Dynamics, Formation and Evolution, Fundamentals of Dark Matter, this open access textbook focuses on pedagogy that guides students through the facts regarding dark matter. The material can be used as the main textbook for a dedicated module on dark matter and to support a general course on extragalactic astrophysics and cosmology.

We’ll be back again next month with a round up of the very best open access books. As always, stay safe!

Last month marked five years since the WHO declared the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic. In commemoration of this moment, the Marjorie Elaine, Lu Liu and Sophia L. Ángeles look back at what has changed and what has remained the same in the USA since the original research for Family Life in the time of COVID was undertaken.

A lot of things have changed in the US in recent months. Looking back, we see roots of the current sociopolitical upheaval in the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. presents an interesting contrast to the scenario that Maria Dobryakova describes in Russia. In the U.S., the populace did not unite against the danger of the virus. Instead, there was a major split between those who complied with and those who rejected public health advice to shelter at home, wear masks, and get vaccinated. And now, five years later, the newly appointed head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a person well known for his skepticism about vaccines, and a leading voice for the “anti-vaxxer” movement, as people who are against mandated vaccinations are known. 

As Dobryakova notes, crises illuminate the powerful social construction of reality, including through the narrated memories we create about them. Dobryoakova suggests that Russians remember cozy days at home with family and friends, with an “undertone of togetherness.” In the US, there is little such public nostalgia. Instead, the country seems to be trying to leave the pandemic behind, to erase a period of divisiveness and confusion, and return to an elusive “normal.”  And yet, the world we have returned to is not normal at all. We are more divided and confused than ever. 

We would do well, we think, to reflect on what we could have learned from the COVID-19 pandemic. The diaries that we gathered from 35 U.S. families are replete with wisdom and insights into all kinds of learning that happened in homes and communities during that time: positive lessons about compassion, kindness, cooperation, protection of the most vulnerable, working together in the face of great uncertainty, reinvigorating intergenerational and transnational connections (using technology as a tool in creative ways), and centering wellness activities such as creative pursuits and being in nature. 

There are also lessons we could learn about how things could have been done differently, or better, to mitigate against the greatest inequities (in which “essential workers” were left to bear the brunt of illnesses and deaths, and children in under-resourced homes and communities were left to flounder without sufficient educational supports). There are powerful lessons that we could have learned, and maybe still can, through careful reflection on what we all thought and experienced as we moved through that time. Our international consortium has the data to facilitate such reflection; the data we gathered may be even more powerful when analyzed at a distance. The U.S. team is working on a new book, tentatively titled Crisis Crossroads: What we could have learned from the COVID-19 pandemic (and maybe still can). We hope we can contribute to collective remembering of all that happened during that time, honouring the voices and perspectives of the people in our study

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About this post

This post originally appeared on https://fact-covid.wixsite.com/study/post/five-years-on-notes-from-the-usa

Last month marked five years since the WHO declared the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic. In commemoration of this moment, the authors of Family Life in the time of COVID look back at what has changed and what has remained the same in their respective countries. In today’s blog, we hear from South Africa, the UK and Russia.

South Africa

In our project chapter (Haffejee et al 2023) focused on the numerous challenges South African families faced during the pandemic as well as the resources they accessed that enabled their resilience. One of the most significant stressors related to economic hardships – the complete lock-down meant the closure of many businesses, and many people lost their jobs. Single, female headed households were the most vulnerable and food insecurity increased. The closure of schools exacerbated the already deep educational divide in the country, and parents shared concerns over their children’s education. Beyond these challenges, there was also the emotional toll of the pandemic – isolation, financial worries, and worry about the pandemic increased feelings of stress and anxiety. Despite the many challenges, there were some positives; with government introducing emergency relief measures, communities organising to assist those in need and in some cases, families drawing closer without the distractions of everyday life.

What’s changed since this time?

The economic challenges that were exacerbated during the pandemic have yet to be resolved. The Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant that was introduced as a temporary measure, has been extended to the 31 March 2025. The SRDG was particularly significant as it was the first grant in South Africa specifically designed for individuals aged 18 to 59 with no source of income, marking a shift in social assistance policy aimed at addressing the country’s high unemployment and poverty rates (Vanleeuw, Zembe-Mkabile, & Atkins, 2022). The grant was recognized as a critical social protection measure and continues to be at the forefront of discussions and has contributed to the calls for a Basic Income Grant. In the 2025 State of the Nation Address the President committed to develop the SRD grant into a more permanent solution, that would alleviate poverty.

Findings from a longitudinal study conducted with children and families in Johannesburg, showed that between 2020 and 2023, unemployment levels remained fairly stable and high, but financial debt increased (Patel et al., 2023). Currently, food insecurity in South Africa remains a critical issue, with many households still struggling to access adequate and nutritious food.

For the most part, schools have resumed their normal functioning. We know however that post the lockdown, there was almost a drop of 50% in school attendance (Anakpo, Nkungwana, Mishi, 2024). The longer-term impacts of this are as yet unknown.  As we move past the immediate effects of the pandemic, the psychological impact on children and adolescents continues to be a significant concern (Sayed et al., 2024). However, Patel et al. (2023) showed a significant drop in caregiver depression between 2020 to 2023 ( 52.6 to 23.5%).

UK

As the lockdown periods came to an end in the UK, in June of 2021, we asked our participants in the UK about their hopes and expectations for the future. At this anniversary of the pandemic, we look back at their reflections and consider to what extent they have been realised.

The major shift identified by participants was the ability to work from home, and most hoped that this would be something that would last beyond the pandemic, giving them more time to spend with family, friends and life beyond work:  

I think what I’d like to remain as it is now is the working from home aspect of life – cutting down commute time, cutting down the mad scramble in the mornings and at nursery-pickup time and then that exhausted feeling at the end of the day only to realise it needs to all happen again the following morning. Zenobia Mum, May 2021

The working from home aspect itself I do like, I don’t think I want to go back ever to go for work full time. I think people have enjoyed having an hour to back every day from work for the working day, seeing friends or going doing exercise or seeing your children and cooking a meal, reading a book, it doesn’t really matter. […] I probably want to keep that forward. Lily Mum

People working from home now and after pandemic, […] and that shows that this life will be changed for some people but I’m working in a frontline so my life will not be changed that much. Ilama Dad

Working from home has the potential to improve gendered equality in paid and unpaid work, through increasing men’s time at home and their participation in domestic work and childcare (Twamley 2024). But as we see with Ilama Dad, not everyone can work from home, and in fact it’s more often women than men, leading to further gendered inequalities in paid and unpaid work (Chung 2022). During the pandemic, gendered inequalities in domestic work and ‘COVID labour (Twamley et al 2023) were further embedded. This appears to have had a lasting legacy: this year the UK was awarded its lowest ranking for workplace gender equality in a decade (see here). Either way, increasingly employers are demanding workers return to their offices (HR magazine) suggesting this desired shift is under threat. 

Russia

It’s five years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and four since lockdowns. Still, every now and then, about once every couple of months, we hear someone in our immediate social circle say, “Oh, I’ve got that nasty COVID again,” or “My sister has it.” But these mentions have become routine, matter-of-fact—no different from the flu. As a societal crisis, COVID-19 in Russia has been replaced by the crisis of war—first in Ukraine, then in Israel (in Russia, roughly every third person has personal ties to either Ukraine, Israel, or both). If we take a step back and analyse it through a cool sociological lens, the most striking difference between these two crises lies in how society responds to them.

During COVID-19, people largely sought to unite and cooperate against an unknown danger. Even those who refused to wear masks were still seen as part of “us” rather than cast into a hostile “them.” Governments, media, and public discourse framed the virus as a common enemy, fostering a shared reality where collective action and cooperation were necessary for survival. Even when disagreements arose—over masks, lockdowns, or government policies—these differences rarely redefined people as fundamentally opposed. The invisible nature of the virus helped sustain a unifying narrative, reinforcing the idea that, despite conflicts, society was in it together.

War, in contrast, has done the opposite. It constructs a reality not of unity, but of division. Instead of a collective struggle against an external threat, war forces people to take sides. People align with one side, often adopting simplified, emotionally charged narratives that justify their position and demonise the other. Unlike the collective response to COVID-19, where differences were often tolerated within the larger group, war tends to force stark distinctions—disrupting relationships, communities, and even shared historical narratives. 

Both crises serve as powerful examples of the social construction of reality and its influence on group behaviour. COVID-19 fostered a sense of collective responsibility, allowing disagreement to coexist within a broader shared purpose. War, by contrast, demands visible allegiance, dividing society into opposing camps. As such, despite its death toll, COVID-19 now seems like a nice and cozy piece of cake—a glimpse of those stay-at-home days with family and friends, when the crisis, for all its fear and uncertainty, still carried an undertone of togetherness.

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References

Anakpo G, Nkungwana S, Mishi S. (2024). Impact of COVID-19 on school attendance in South Africa. Analysis of sociodemographic characteristics of learners. Heliyon. 2024 Apr 1;10(7):e29096. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e29096. PMID: 38601547; PMCID: PMC11004647.

Chung, H. (2022). The Flexibility Paradox: Why flexible working leads to (self-) exploitation. Bristol: Policy Press.

Patel, L., Sello, M., Haffejee, S., Mbowa, S., Sani, T., Graham, L., Gunhidzirai, C., Pillay, J., Henning, E., Telukdarie, A., Norris, S., Ntshingila, N., Raniga, T., Zembe-Mkabile, W., Nyati, L., Nesengani, T.V., Setlhare-Kajee, R., Bezuidenhout, H. How well are children faring? A longitudinal assessment of child wellbeing in the COVID-19 pandemic in selected Johannesburg schools over three waves from 2020 -2022. Johannesburg: Centre for Social Development in Africa, University of Johannesburg. September 2023

Sayed, A. A., El-Gendy, A. A., Aljohani, A. K., Haddad, R. A., Taher, O. H., Senan, A. M., … & Alqelaiti, B. (2024). The effects of COVID-19 on the mental health of children and adolescents: a review. Cureus, 16(3).

Twamley K (2024) Caring is Sharing? Couples navigating parental leave at the transition to parenthood London: UCL Press

Twamley K, Faircloth C, Iqbal H (2023) COVID Labour: Making a ‘livable life’ under lockdown. The Sociological Review 71(1):85-104Haffejee, S., Mwanda, A. and Simelane, T. (2023). South Africa: COVID-19 and family well-being. In K. Twamley, H. Iqbal and C. Faircloth (eds) Family Life in the Time of COVID: International Perspectives. London: UCL Press

Vanleeuw L, Zembe-Mkabile W, Atkins S (2022) Falling through the cracks: Increased vulnerability and limited social assistance for TB patients and their households during COVID-19 in Cape Town, South Africa. PLOS Glob Public Health 2(7): e0000708. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0000708

(https://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/sona-2025-how-the-expanded-social-relief-grant-could-pave-the-way-for-basic-income-in-south-africa-79083e9b-bf51-4bf8-83d0-0d5904e9d651

(https://iej.org.za/blogs/south-africas-fight-for-a-basic-income/).

About this post

 This post originally appeared on the research team’s blog: https://fact-covid.wixsite.com/study/post/five-years-on

Today marks the publication of the open access textbook Fundamentals of Dark Matter by Ignacio Ferreras. This new book focuses on pedagogy that guides students through the facts regarding dark matter, and also encourages questions and critical examination of what is known to date.

In this blog post, Professor Ferreras provides an introduction to the discovery of dark matter and offers some pointers about how dark matter science may develop in future years.

Dark matter is unquestionably one of the most important topics of modern physics. Postulated nearly a century ago to account for the motion of galaxies in clusters, and then to describe the orbits of stars within galaxies, it is now found to pervade the Universe as the dominant component of all matter. In contrast, the “standard stuff”, i.e. matter put together by elements taken from the Periodic Table, amounts to a fraction roughly 16% by mass. The composition of dark matter is thus far unknown, but “ordinary particles” that make up the Standard Model are positively ruled out; even standard neutrinos cannot contribute more than a fraction of the total dark matter budget. The subject of dark matter thus overlaps a wide range of disciplines in astrophysics, cosmology and particle physics. Its elusive detection, along with its important contribution to the Universal mass content nicely exemplifies how science has to deal with such elephants in the room. While critics raise this issue to illustrate the weakness of science, it should be noted that there are numerous examples in the history of science when such situations were faced, and so it represents the strength, rather than the weakness, of the scientific method.

A not too dissimilar example of a gravitational conundrum can be found in our Solar system. The traditional family of five planets* (from Mercury to Saturn) has been known for millennia, due to their visibility to the naked eye and their wandering motion on the celestial sphere. Positional astronomy allowed us to make one of the most fundamental discoveries of humanity, namely the workings of the Solar environment through gravity, and the true nature of Earth as just another planet orbiting the Sun. Astrophysics adds one more step in this understanding of the Universe, by adopting a powerful methodology that compares precise measurements of the Heavens with a mathematically-based model (in this case the inverse square law of gravitational forces). After the discovery of planet Uranus by Sir William Herschel, following a careful investigation of a would-be comet by him and others (Lexell and Bode), astronomers were puzzled with the observations of the orbital motion of Uranus that could not be fully explained by the adopted paradigm of Newtonian gravity. In the nineteenth century, Adams and Le Verrier hypothesised a new planet (Neptune) to explain the observations, that was eventually discovered in 1846. In the decades spanning from the confirmation of Uranus as a major planet to the discovery of Neptune, we could make the case that “dark matter” was present in our Solar system.

On the other side of our planetary system, closer to the Sun, another example illustrates a new approach to tackle a similar problem. It was again Le Verrier, who proposed an additional, inner planet to explain the motion of Mercury. The orbit of Mercury was found to feature a characteristic precession of its perihelion, something that could not be accounted by Newton’s gravity. The search for the new “dark matter” was on, and spurious sightings of planet Vulcan were reported. This time, the true nature of Mercury’s motion was due to a substantial change in the adopted paradigm. Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted a post-Newtonian perturbation in the inner parts of the Solar system that can fully accommodate Mercury’s orbital precession.

These two discoveries show how difficult it is to find definitive solutions to complex problems, and how the unexpected motion of a system can lead either to a new component (say, the dark matter particle), or a change in the working paradigm (say, our understanding of gravity).

My new textbook Fundamentals of Dark Matter, published by UCL Press, is meant to give advanced undergraduates and keen aficionados a general overview of this most elusive case of unexpected gravitational effects over scales ranging from galaxies to the whole Universe. Amazingly enough, the solution to the Dark Matter problem should come at the level of microphysics, in the form of a new particle and/or the modification of our incomplete paradigm based on the Standard Model of particle physics along with General Relativity.

* Plus our own Earth, of course.

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About the Author

Ignacio Ferreras is a staff astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, in Tenerife, Spain and holds an honorary professor position at the Physics and Astronomy department, UCL. He was academic staff at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UCL for eleven years. After obtaining university degrees in theoretical physics in Valladolid, Spain, and Cornell University, USA, he embarked on a career in astrophysics with a PhD in Cantabria, Spain, followed by various research and academic appointments at Oxford, ETH Zürich, UCL, and King’s College London. He was a ‘La Caixa’ fellow and an individual Marie Curie fellow.

In an excerpt for International Women’s Day, Fiona McTaggart explains why she welcomes the first scholarly appraisal of Millicent Garrett Fawcett Fawcett in over 30 years.

As the former chair of the Fawcett Society, I am pleased to welcome Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Selected writings, which brings together many of the writings and speeches of our eponymous predecessor Millicent Fawcett. We aim to continue in the tradition she built of campaigning for equality between women and men, focusing particularly on political power, education and work. Like her, we depend on robust research, clear argument and building alliances with women and men to advance our cause. It is a joy to present this collection, which will increase understanding of the role Millicent Fawcett played, not only in the struggle for the women’s franchise but in the series of other causes which she promoted.

The quality I have always most admired in Millicent Fawcett is persistence. She gathered signatures on the petition for women’s suffrage at the age of 18 in 1866, and she persisted with the cause, becoming its leader for many years, until the women of Britain had achieved her aim of the right to vote on the same terms as men, 62 years later in 1928. The Fawcett Society is the successor to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), which Millicent Fawcett led for many years. We inherited the brooch that appears in pictures reproduced in this volume, which was given to her by members of the society to recognise her leadership. It is engraved on the reverse with the words ‘Steadfastness and Courage’ and is now in the Museum of London.

This scholarly work, peppered with pictures of Millicent, shows her persistence in making the argument for the vote to audiences, many of whom were deeply hostile, and her determination to advance the cause of women through education. When women did gain a limited franchise, she was careful to record how this change had led to many new laws which benefitted women, from protection from forced marriage to the right to join the police. Fawcett’s words on her statue, a comment made relating to the death of Emily Wilding Davison, who was fatally injured by the King’s horse while carrying a banner that demanded votes for women (see Section 46), were a declaration of fact rather than a rallying call. While Fawcett recognised that the militant suffragettes had put the issue on the public agenda (‘They’ve rose the country’, in the words of an audience member at one of her speeches – see Section 25), she was critical of their tactics. And in some ways, the record of her doggedly persistent campaign to advance the cause of women without resorting to the violent tactics of the suffragettes is a lesson for feminists in the twenty-first century.

When I find myself disagreeing with other people who are concerned about issues facing women today, I take inspiration from Millicent. She was often generous in her appreciation of what the militant suffragists had done, while always rejecting their tactics. For universities and public platforms to exclude people because they take one side of a debate is unacceptable in a democratic society. I hope that the middle way which the Fawcett Society adopts can win wider acceptance, so that we can all stop being angry and upset with each other and carry on the dogged work which is still needed to build a society where women and men are truly equal.

The approach to the campaign for votes for women which Millicent Fawcett led has lessons for us today: be clear in your arguments, do not abuse those who disagree with you, build alliances and, above all, be persistent in working towards the changes we need.

About the Author

This is an excerpt from the introduction of Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Selected writings, edited by Melissa Terras and Elizabeth Crawford, with a foreword by Fiona McTaggart.

Fiona Mactaggart was Chair of the Fawcett Society between 2018 and 2021.

Published last month, Lahore in Motion provides a portrait of the Pakistani metropolis by tracing the path of the city’s first metro rail corridor. Construction for this major piece of public infrastructure began in 2015 and, over subsequent years, the nascent ‘Orange Line’ rapidly reconfigured Lahore’s urban landscape – displacing residents and slicing through existing structures along its route, all while offering Lahoris the promise of ‘world-class’ public transportation.

To mark the book’s publication, we are proud to share an extract from the introduction that explains why the stories from a series of walks along the metro’s 27-kilometre path are important in reflecting on the relationship between urban change and belonging in a historic city.

In October 2020, Pakistan’s first rapid transit metro train was inaugurated in Lahore. The ‘Orange Line’, as it is known, has dramatically reconfigured Pakistan’s second largest city. The metro connects the north-east of Lahore to its south-west along a 27-kilometre route dotted with 26 stations. In a city of 13 million, the train has the capacity to accommodate 30,000 passengers per hour. For most of its path across Lahore, the line takes the form of a viaduct, a raised track elevated over existing roadways, casting a shadow on the buildings and lives that fall beneath. For less than 2 kilometres near its midway point, where the line intersects with the old colonial-era thoroughfare of Lahore, the Mall Road, the metro dips briefly underground.

Even before the line was opened to the public, the monumental form of the viaduct was being integrated into the everyday rhythms of the environments it crossed. Its huge pillars provided ample space for posters and advertisements – cheap buses to Islamabad, news of an upcoming political rally. The paved or bricked islands it created in the middle of traffic-filled streets were turned, where they were wide enough, into new spaces for sociality or trade – men playing ludo near Bund Road, cans of paint for sale on Nicholson Road. Some of these islands acquired young gardens, or were planted with small trees, though much of this greenery wilted early on, covered in layers of dust, hidden from the sky by the viaduct and so unable to be refreshed by rain.

This process of incorporation into Lahori life has not been without its frictions. When construction of the Orange Line was announced in 2015, it prompted vocal opposition across a range of interest groups, from civil society activists to party politicians, religious leaders to local residents’ groups. Although never operating as a cohesive coalition, this shifting contingent was nevertheless responsible for a series of street protests, political campaigns and legal challenges over subsequent years. Much of this opposition was linked to the cost and scale of the project and to the nature of its implementation. Financed through a US$1.6 billion soft loan from China, the project was critiqued by many as a costly and unnecessary undertaking, particularly given widespread evidence of underinvestment in areas of health and education in the city. The 27-kilometre route was carved through some of the most densely populated areas of Lahore, and the line’s construction required the destruction of small commercial centres and neighbourhoods, displacing thousands of residents. Poor standards of occupational safety resulted in the deaths of at least 50 workers during the five years of construction. Many were migrant labourers, living and working in precarious conditions.1 Critics also seized on the proximity of the line’s path to several historic sites, from the seventeenth-century paradise garden at Shalamar Bagh to the monumental Mughal gateway Chauburji. Concerns with how official permission was secured to enable construction so close to legally protected built heritage led to a suspension of construction in August 2016, ordered by the Lahore High Court but eventually overturned (with some small concessions) by Pakistan’s Supreme Court in late 2017.

At the heart of civil society opposition to the Orange Line project was a deep unease with the Punjab government’s relentless pursuit of development, particularly as overseen by the popular centre-right political party in the province, the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) and its then-Chief Minister, Shehbaz Sharif. The petition which secured the High Court’s order of suspension characterised the Orange Line as a ‘white elephant’ pursued for ‘cheap publicity’, a prestige object for the ruling party rather than something genuinely needed by Lahore’s residents. Highly visible megaprojects like the Orange Line have been framed plainly by many activists as threats to the city of Lahore – its historic identity, its ways of life and its distinctiveness as an urban centre. The viaduct represented a dramatic example of what some viewed as the ‘Dubai-fication’ of Lahore: the creation of an anonymised, generic space of glass, steel and concrete, following a Gulf model for prosperity rather than something ‘appropriate’ to Lahore’s proud local culture and centuries-old history.

This brand of critique deploys a narrative that will be familiar across a range of twenty-first century urban contexts: neoliberal development, in the shape of large-scale infrastructure projects and associated speculation and commercialisation, is destroying local ways of navigating, knowing and inhabiting a city. But this narrative has its own risks. In framing development as an external imposition following a ‘foreign’ logic of neoliberalism, it can flatten our understanding of the ‘local’, failing to account for the variations in class, ideology and historical experience that shape individual lives in a city. Large-scale projects do, of course, have substantial (and, often, irreversible) impacts, and there does appear to be a shift in the manner and speed in which such developments are taking place. But the ways in which these changes are felt and understood can differ vastly between urban constituencies. They are also frequently contradictory. Many of those dispossessed and displaced by the construction of the Orange Line, for instance, opposed the project entirely. But some readily agreed to leave their homes in the hope that they would resettle in more upwardly mobile neighbourhoods elsewhere in the city. Other affected residents embraced the building of a new mass transit line, but simply wished for their voices to be included in project design and implementation.

Another risk of this narrative is its commitment to an ‘authentic’ Lahore that must be rescued from braying bulldozers and the vulgar aspirations of careerist politicians. The impact of unregulated expansion on the city’s environment – from polluted waterways to shrinking tree coverage to air pollution – certainly demands critical attention. But these processes are not merely symptoms of our neoliberal present. They are in fact constitutive of Lahore’s longer history as an urban space, and certainly since its establishment as the colonial capital of British Punjab in 1849 sparked a population and building boom that continues to this day.4 Earlier rulers had invested lavishly in the city, in particular during the Mughal period (1524–1725) which saw the establishment of many of Lahore’s historic landmarks. But it was in the British period that Lahore started expanding confidently beyond its millennia-old historic centre, the Walled City, absorbing the land and older villages around it. In the 1939 essay Lahore ka Jughrafiya (‘Lahore’s Geography’), the Urdu writer Patras Bokhari joked that ‘once Lahore had surrounding areas, now it is Lahore that surrounds Lahore’.5 In documents from 1941, the Lahore Improvement Trust – a colonial institution founded in 1936 to coordinate urban development – was already noting the ‘extensive purchases of land in the areas surrounding the centre of Lahore’ during the 1920s and 1930s, by residents who hoped to profit from the increase in land values brought about by municipal improvements.6 Change is a quality of urban life. Rather than lamenting a city ‘lost’ through change, it is important to interrogate the different ways change takes place, the inequalities that determine who gains and who suffers, and the political ideas and public imaginaries that frame and mediate interventions into the urban environment.

Lahore in Motion is an attempt to grapple with complexity and contradiction in Lahore’s urban landscape. It does so in a way that is intention- ally multi-vocal; that jumps back and forth across time; that is open to tangents, fragments and impressions as opposed to authoritative statements and comprehensive accounts. We approach the city as a forum of frictions, and the richly generative quality of the Orange Line justifies this concern. In her 2004 ethnography of Indonesia’s rainforests, the anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing argues that capitalist desires for connectivity – the unimpeded flow of goods, ideas and people – ‘come to life in “friction”, the grip of worldly encounter’. For Tsing, ‘friction’ describes those awkward, unstable and creative outcomes produced by attempts to forge links across distance and difference. They might be destructive, they may provoke resistance, but they might also enable new social formations and alter conditions of political or economic possibility.

The chapters in Lahore in Motion trace the Orange Line’s work of connection and the ways this infrastructural project has been awkwardly, unstably and creatively incorporated into the city. Our contributors include academics, artists, activists, architects and more. Some have lived in Lahore for decades, others have made it a home more recently, while several consider it their home but no longer live there. All possess a strong affinity with the city and a deep interest in studying and understanding its histories, politics and everyday transformations. Each contributor was assigned one of the Orange Line’s 26 stations and asked to spend time in their respective area, to walk around the station’s environs, to speak to people and to note their own thoughts, concerns and associations. Rather than a conventional academic account of infra- structural development in a postcolonial city, our aim was to create a collaborative portrait of how change is experienced and felt, and how larger historical events, government policies and the politics of class, caste, gender and ethnicity become entangled with personal memories and everyday processes of place-making. Contributors were urged to resist the familiar framing of the Orange Line as an imposed obstruction and to avoid making judgements around ‘(in)authenticity’ in the city.

Many were open to this challenge; others felt compelled to push back against our exhortations and to defend a particular vision of Lahore. The volume thus reflects the fragmentation that characterises contemporary urban life. As editors, our approach recognised that belonging to and inhabiting Lahore entails traversing familiarity and unease, safety and risk, connection and disconnection.

While our work is grounded in Pakistan, it responds to a wider literature on urban life compiled by historians, anthropologists and geographers, in both the Global South and North. The volume is an experiment in how accounts of the contemporary city might profitably stage difference and contestation. We make no claim to provide a ‘representative’ sample of Lahore’s residents in these pages and are keenly aware of the contingent circumstances that brought this collection of (mostly middle class, mostly cosmopolitan, and primarily academic) contributors together, as well as the limitations this poses. Our aim is rather to model an approach for seeing and writing about the city, one that is simultaneously illuminating and inconclusive, one that grapples with friction in order to understand why urban spaces are so productive for thinking about history, identity, politics and belonging in the modern world.

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About the Editors

Ammara Maqsood is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at UCL.

Chris Moffat is Senior Lecturer in South Asian History at Queen Mary University of London.

Fizzah Sajjad is an urban planner and geographer with research positions at the London School of Economics and the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

This is an excerpt from the introduction of Lahore in Motion.

Image credit: Orange Line Metro Train, Chauburji Station, Lahore by Shahzaib Damn Cruze, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s been another grey, dark, wet month, but we’ve almost been too busy to notice. With six more exciting open access books to read, who can blame us?

The final volume of David Scott’s extraordinary On Learning trilogy (v1, v2) , On Learning, Volume 3: Knowledge, curriculum and ethics published at the start of the month. Like the first two volumes, the book is a response to empiricist and positivist conceptions of knowledge. in which the author challenges detheorised and reductionist ideas of learning that have filtered through to the management of our schools, colleges and universities, over-simplified messages about learning, knowledge, curriculum and assessment, and the denial that values are central to understanding how we live and how we should live.

Postcapitalist Countrysides: From commoning to community wealth building explores the tensions that arise from the established conventions of economic production and private accumulation, as they affect life, wealth and work in rural areas. Find out more about the brilliance of the brilliance of the book’s contributors in an interview with one of the editors.

Revisiting Childhood Resilience Through Marginalised and Displaced Voices: Perspectives from the past and present draws on 10 years of Wendy Sims-Schouten’s research with children, young people and adults from marginalised, disadvantaged and displaced communities. These stories draw critical attention to coping strategies in adversity and oppression, and will inform creative research and policymaking. Read our interview with the author to find out more about her fascinating approach to research.

Lahore in Motion: Infrastructure, history and belonging in urban Pakistan provides a vivid portrait of the Pakistani metropolis by tracing the path of the city’s first metro rail corridor. The volume collects stories from a series of walks along the metro’s 27-kilometre path, bringing together a wide variety of authors to reflect on the relationship between urban change and belonging in a historic city. Interested to find out more? We have an excusive excerpt on the blog.

The latest book in the FRINGE series, Anti-Atlas: Critical Area Studies from the East of the West plays with the politics of the conventional atlas, with its assumptions about knowledge and power, its hierarchies of value, and its simplifications. It provides readers with a diverse series of intellectual resources, asking them to think critically about the ways in which we construct the world by dividing it into pieces.

The final book of the month, A Guide to Performing Systematic Reviews of Health and Disease is a fantastic practical guide to performing systematic reviews in a healthcare context provides a step-by-step approach for students and health professionals. Using free, opensource software to extract data and perform the necessary meta-analyses, this open access guide navigates the process of reviews, from study design and randomised controlled trials to interpreting results and reporting your findings. The author explains why this is an important book for health professionals and students alike in a wide-ranging interview.

We’ll be back again next month with a round up of the very best open access books. As always, stay safe!