From this premise, the book advances multiple original contributions. First, it explains why and how authenticity has become a fundamental value orienting consumers’ taste in late modern capitalism; second, it proposes a novel conceptualisation of the aesthetic regime of consumption; third, the book constitutes the first detailed analysis of the resurgence of the neo-craft industries, their entrepreneurs, and the economic imaginary of consumption underpinning them, and fourth, it analyses how the hipster economy is impacting the urban space, favouring new logic of urban development with contrasting outcomes.

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With helpful, full-colour diagrams throughout, each chapter includes learning objectives, introduction to concepts and themes, exercises and review sections, to guide students through the book.

The textbook is ideal for teaching environmental engineering and science, as well as interdisciplinary environmental programmes.

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Departing from general propositions about post-growth to delineate pathways to prosperity, the volume emphasises that visions of the good life are diverse and require empirical work co-designed with local communities and stakeholders to drive change. It is essential reading for policymakers who are stuck, local government officers who need new tools, activists who wonder what is next, academics in need of refreshment, and students and people of all ages who want a way forward.

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Offering much needed nuance to commonplace descriptions of Mongolia’s post-socialist transition, this study presents rich ethnographic detail through the eyes and voices of the state’s most geographically marginalized. It is of interest not only to experts of political-economy and post-socialist transition, but also to non-academic readers intrigued by the interplay of value(s) and capitalism.

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Based on field research conducted in the Washington D.C. area, Navigating the Cultures of Health Care and Health Insurance takes a mixed methods, qualitative and quantitative approach to the study of foreign patients’ utilization and assessment of health care in the US. Through interviews with both health care providers and patients, attitudes towards US health insurance and medical treatment are compared for migrants from three countries with very different cultural backgrounds and health insurance systems: Germany, India and Japan.

Combined with an in-depth literature review, historical and contemporary surveys of health care across countries and analysis of health-related terms in the media, the results of this research indicate that foreign patients’ barriers to good health care persist despite access to health care services and insurance coverage, and reveal recurring transnational care seeking patterns, such as bringing medicines from abroad, delaying treatment for medical visits, insurance juggling and more. By describing their difficulties in integrating into the US health care system, the migrants in this study show the challenges and the potential for improvements in providing the care that migrants need in their new home.

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The diverse analyses of power at the macro, meso or micro levels allow the volume to highlight the complexity of political economy in the twenty-first century. Each chapter addresses key elements of that political economy (from the ambivalence of the cases of former communist countries that do not conform with the grand narratives about democracy and markets, to the dual utility of new technologies such as face-recognition), thus providing mounting evidence for the centrality of an understanding of ambivalence in the analysis of power, especially in the modern state power-driven capitalism.

Anchored in economic sociology and political economy, this volume aims to make ‘visible’ the dimensions of power embedded in economic practices. The chapters are predominantly based on post-communist practices, but this divergent experience is relevant to comparative studies of how power and economy are interrelated.

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By profiling existing action by credit unions and community organisations, alongside bold proposals for the future, with contributions from artists, activists and academics, the book shows how we can rethink the validity and inevitability of many contemporary forms of debt through organising debt audits, promoting debt cancellation and expanding member-owned co-operatives. The authors set out legal and political methods for changing the rules of the system to provide debt relief and reshape economies for more inclusive and sustainable flourishing. The book also profiles community-based actions that are changing the role of debt in economic, social and political life – among them, participatory art projects, radical advice networks and ways of financing feminist green transitions.

While much of the research and activism documented here has taken place in London, the contributors show how different initiatives draw from and generate inspiration elsewhere, from debt audits across the global south, creative interventions around the UK and grassroots movements in North America. Financing Prosperity by Dealing with Debt moves beyond critique to present a wealth of concrete ways to tackle debt and forge the prosperous communities we want for the future.

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Cash Flow provides a new academic study of the menstrual corporate landscape that links its twentieth-century origins to the current ‘menstrual moment’. Drawing on a range of previously unexplored archival materials and interviews with industry insiders, each chapter examines one key company and brand: Saba in Norway, Essity in Sweden, Tambrands in the Soviet Union, Procter & Gamble in Britain and Europe, Kimberly-Clark in North America, and start-ups Clue and Thinx. By engaging with these corporate collections, the book highlights how the industry has survived as its consumers continually change.

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Subjective Lives and Economic Transformations in Mongolia details this complex story through the intimate lives of five women. Building on long-term friendships, which span over 20 years, Rebecca documents their personal journeys in an ever-shifting landscape. She reveals how these women use experiences of living a ‘life in the gap’ to survive the hard reality between desired outcomes and their actual daily lives. In doing so, she offers a completely different picture from that presented by economists and statisticians of what it is like to live in this fluctuating extractive economy.

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In The State, Popular Mobilisation and Gold Mining in Mongolia, Dulam Bumochir aims to avoid the pitfalls of this debate by adopting an alternative theoretical approach. He focuses on the indigenous representations of nature, environment, economy, state and sovereignty that have triggered nationalist and statist responses to the mining boom. In doing so, he explores the ways in which these responses have shaped the apparently ‘neo-liberal’ policies of twenty-first century Mongolia, and the economy that has emerged from them, in the face of competing mining companies, protest movements, international donor organizations, economic downturn, and local and central government policies.

Applying rich ethnography to a nuanced and complex picture, Bumochir’s analysis is essential reading for students and researchers studying the environment and mining, especially in Central and North East Asia and post-Soviet regions, and also for readers interested in the relationship between neoliberalism, nationalism, environmentalism and state.

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