UCL Press Archives

Inclusion, Diversity and Innovation in Translation Education

Through examples of literary and audiovisual translation teaching practices, Inclusion, Diversity and Innovation in Translation Education places a novel emphasis on equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) synergising the latest research advancements in EDI and translation curricula.

The contributors revisit how languages and translation are currently taught and explore the relevance of EDI values from an interdisciplinary perspective. The chapters contain proposals of best teaching practices and teacher training guidance alongside examples of research-led teaching scenarios. There is a twofold rationale behind this volume: firstly, identifying links between literary and audiovisual translation teaching practices, which often demand great creativity inside and outside the classroom; and, secondly, placing greater emphasis on EDI-focused methods and themes. Following this approach, readers are invited to consider pressing societal issues such as (media) accessibility, intersectionality, LGBTQI+ and race, among others, and to embed them in their language and translation teaching practices.

Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction

Although Brazil is the largest Afro-descendant country outside of Africa, the literature produced by Black Brazilians is mostly unknown both in Brazil and abroad. There is a growing worldwide demand for Afro-descendant literature and a demand for decolonial practices and content, especially within Lusophone literature and literature across the Americas.

Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction emerges from a UCL-sponsored collaborative translation project, bridging Afro-Brazilian literature with a global audience to respond to the worldwide call for Afro-diasporic narratives. This unique compilation of 21 short stories includes both established and emerging Afro-Brazilian voices. The anthology is bilingual, fostering cross-cultural understanding and affirming the legitimacy of pretoguês as a literary language. The texts are presented with three insightful contributions by Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva (UCL), Julio Ludemir (Flup) and Maria Aparecida Andrade Salgueiro (UERJ). The introductions not only contextualise the short stories, but also engage in theoretical debates, shedding light on the role of literary translation in language teaching and the impact of the Literary Festival of the Peripheries (Flup) in forming a new generation of Black Brazilian writers.

Early Civilization and the American Modern

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a particular story about the United States’ role in the long history of world civilization was constructed in public spaces, through public art and popular histories. This narrative posited that civilization and its benefits – science, law, writing, art and architecture – began in Egypt and Mesopotamia before passing ever further westward, towards a triumphant culmination on the American continent.

Early Civilization and the American Modern explores how this teleological story answered anxieties about the United States’ unique role in the long march of progress. Eva Miller focuses on important figures who collaborated on the creation of a visual, progressive narrative in key institutions, world’s fairs and popular media: Orientalist and public intellectual James Henry Breasted, astronomer George Ellery Hale, architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, and decorative artists Lee Lawrie and Hildreth Meière. At a time when new information about the ancient Middle East was emerging through archaeological excavation, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia appeared simultaneously old and new. This same period was crucial to the development of public space and civic life across the United States, as a shared sense of historical consciousness was actively pursued by politicians, philanthropists, intellectuals, architects and artists.

Contraband Cultures

Contraband Cultures presents narratives, representations, practices and imaginaries of smuggling and extra-legal or informal circulation practices, across and between the Latin American region (including the Caribbean) and its diasporas. Countering a fetishizing and hegemonic imaginary (typically stemming from the Global North) of smuggling activity in Latin America as chaotic, lawless, violent and somehow ‘exotic’, this book reframes such activities through the lenses of kinship, political movements, economic exchange and resistance to capitalist state hegemony.

The volume comprises a broad range of chapters from scholars across the social sciences and humanities, using various methodological techniques, theoretical traditions and analytic approaches to explore the efficacy and valence of ‘smuggling’ or ‘contraband’ as a lens onto modes of personhood, materiality, statehood and political (dis)connection across Latin America. This material is presented through a combination of historic documentation and contemporary ethnographic research across the region to highlight the genesis and development of these cultural practices whilst grounding them in the capitalist and colonial refashioning of the entire region from the sixteenth century to the present day.

Travel Behaviour Reconsidered in an Era of Decarbonisation

The transport system is central to our lives as our means to travel, but also has major impact on our environment. This has become most salient in recent years through its contribution to climate change. However, this perspective has only had a minor impact on the conventional economic analysis and modelling of transport investments, creating a dissonance between the traditional objectives of investment and the strategic need to reduce carbon emissions to Net Zero by 2050.

Travel Behaviour Reconsidered in an Era of Decarbonisation argues that our transport networks are mature, and the objective should be to improve operational efficiency. Over the past half century, large public expenditures in roads and railways were justified by an analytic approach to the benefits of investment, primarily the value of the time saved through faster travel, to both business and non-business users of the networks. However, average travel time has not changed over this period. People have taken the benefit of faster travel as better access to people, places, activities and services, with the ensuing enhanced opportunities and choices. This book argues that the basis of orthodox transport economic analysis has been misconceived and a fresh perspective on economic analysis is now needed.

Structural Injustice and the Law

In developing her conception of structural injustice, Iris Marion Young made a strict distinction between large-scale collective injustice that results from the normal functions of a society, and the more familiar concepts of individual wrong and deliberate state repression. Her ideas have attracted considerable attention in political philosophy, but legal theorists have been slower to consider the relation between structural injustice and legal analysis. While some forms of vulnerability to structural injustice can be the unintended consequences of legal rules, the law also has potential instruments to alleviate some forms of structural injustice.

Structural Injustice and the Law presents theoretical approaches and concrete examples to show how the concept of structural injustice can aid legal analysis, and how legal reform can, in practice, reduce or even eliminate some forms of structural injustice. A group of outstanding law and political philosophy scholars discuss a comprehensive range of interdisciplinary topics, including the notion of domination, equality and human rights law, legal status, sweatshop labour, labour law, criminal justice, domestic homicide reviews, begging, homelessness, regulatory public bodies and the films of Ken Loach. Drawn together, they build an invaluable resource for legal theorists exploring how to make use of the concept of structural injustice, and for political philosophers looking for a nuanced account of the law’s role both in creating and mitigating structural injustice.

How the World Changed Social Media

How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and explores the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet?

Supported by an introduction to the project’s academic framework and theoretical terms that help to account for the findings, the book argues that the only way to appreciate and understand something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how people all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences.

The Hipster Economy

Today, being authentic has become an aspiration and an imperative. The notion of authenticity shapes the consumption habits of individuals in the most diverse contexts such as food and drinks, clothing, music, tourism and the digital sphere, even leading to the resurgence of apparently obsolescent modes of production such as craft. It also significantly transforms urban areas, their local economies and development. The Hipster Economy analyses this complex set of related phenomena to argue that the quest for authenticity has been a driver of Western societies from the emersion of capitalism and industrial society to today.

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.

Geographies of Solar Energy Transitions

Solar energy is emerging as the world’s largest growing source of power. In recent years, its rollout and growth have produced effects far beyond electricity generation, including a series of cognate challenges and conflicts in diverse geographies of energy transition.

Geographies of Solar Energy Transitions focuses on how solar energy governance (both state-based regulations and more market-driven modes of governance) is evolving to address these conflicts in diverse empirical settings. Chapters and case studies by leading energy scholars explore various issues such as formulating new place-specific solar energy visions and strategies, financing specific deployment scales, expanding or replacing electricity infrastructure, accessing land, resolving conflicts surrounding competing land uses, incorporating charging technologies for transport and storage, adopting flexible energy production/consumption relationships, displacing fossil fuel energy production with renewables, enabling new energy ownership models, and addressing the many environmental and social injustices across the value chain of solar expansion including upstream extractivism and downstream waste.

Scholarship typically frames these challenges as tangential to the governance of solar energy transitions. By placing them front and centre, the book draws necessary attention to the many wider changes in society that are continuously developing due to the worldwide adoption of solar power.

Ageing with Smartphones in Japan

Older adults in Japan, one of the most ageing countries in the world, are starting to adopt the smartphone. What does this mean for friendship, gendered labour, multigenerational living, internal migration, health and indeed purpose in life (ikigai)? Based on 16 months of ethnographic research in urban Kyoto and in rural Kōchi Prefecture, Ageing with Smartphones in Japan follows people as they navigate social and personal shifts post-retirement.

Examining how older women and men negotiate oppressive structures within society, the smartphone emerges as both challenging and perpetuating gender-based norms around care. In witnessing the response of older adults to the wider context of societal ageing and the various forms of precarity that it can engender, this book observes how people creatively navigate the challenges and opportunities of later life to define their own experience of ageing.

The rise of digital visual communication among people in their 50s and older opens new possibilities for sociality and proximity among friends and family. It also presents a methodological challenge for researchers. This book responds with a series of graphic methodological experimentations, including co-created comics, participant drawings, and the author’s own fieldwork sketches and imaginative illustrations, to explore this fundamental shift in communication towards digital images.