July 2022 open access books

Summer is finally here (although we're glad it's no longer 40c!), and we've got some wonderful reading for those of you who are taking a well-earned break (and those who aren't).

The first book we published in July was The Inclusion Illusion: How children with special educational needs experience mainstream schools is a must-read for anyone with an interest in SEN and inclusive education. Based on the UK’s largest observation study of pupils with high-level SEND, The Inclusion Illusion exposes how attendance at a mainstream school is no guarantee of receiving a mainstream education. 

 The latest volume in our FRINGE series, The Ambivalence of Power in the Twenty-First Century Economy: Cases from Russia and beyond, is a highly topical one. 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 just how power and economy are interrelated.

The peer reviewers of Jayaseelan Raj's Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit life in the Indian tea belt were blown away by it. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Peermade and Munnar tea belts, Jayaseelan Raj – himself a product of the plantation system – offers a unique and richly detailed analysis of the profound, multi-dimensional sense of crisis felt by those who are at the bottom of global plantation capitalism and caste hierarchy. As Alpa Shah from the LSE said, not only is this book a 'major contribution to the South Asian literature but also a decolonisation “must read”'.

Last up is 全球智能手机 超越青年科技, a Chinese translation of the popular The Global Smartphone by Miller et al.

As always, stay safe- and don't forget the sun cream!