Social groups

This book provides an introductory overview to the concept of ‘urban informality’, taking an international perspective across the global North and South. It explores theoretical understandings of the term, and looks at how it affects ways of living, such as land use, housing and basic services, working lives and political informality.

This book explores the connections between race, place and space, and their role in maintaining racial hierarchies. Focusing on White residents in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, it employs interviews, participant observation and content analysis to unveil the enduring racial inequality in this supposedly progressive area.

Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. The gender pay gap is economically irrational and yet stubbornly persistent. Focusing on the finance industry which is known for its gender pay disparity, this book explores the efforts being made to fix gendered inequities in the workplace and the factors stalling progress for the future.

‘Desistance’ - understanding how people move away from offending – has become a significant policy focus in recent years, with desistance thinking transplanted from the adult to the youth justice system in England and Wales. This book is the first to critique this approach to justice-involved children.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Guangdong, China, this book explores the various tactics queer people employ to have children and to form queer or ‘rainbow’ families. It unpacks people’s experiences of cultivating, or losing, kinship relations through their negotiation with biological relatives, cultural conventions and state legislations.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence digitally

This book explores the link between government debt and women's rights. Experts highlight how economic policies worsen gender inequalities and propose a feminist approach to debt issues. It is an essential resource for comprehending the intricate connection between economics and gender.

Uncomfortably Off reveals that those generally considered to be the most affluent feel anxious about the future and struggle to keep up, or even to stay put., but reducing income inequality will benefit everyone, even those quite near the top.

Drawing on 20 years of ethnographic and policy research in South Africa, Brazil and India, this book highlights the value of understanding the embodied and political dimensions of health policy and reveals the networked threads that weave women’s precarity into the governance of technologies and the technologies of governance.

A deep exploration on how questions of time and its organisation affect planning practice, this book questions ‘project speed’: where time to think, deliberate and plan has been squeezed. The authors demonstrate the many benefits of slow planning for the key participants, multiple interests and planning system overall.

This book examines law’s troubled relationship with racial justice. Both a lawyer’s guide to anti-racism and an anti-racist’s guide to legal action, it unites these perspectives to help both groups understand how to use the law to tackle racial injustices.

This book offers a theory of trafficking and modern slavery with implications for policy. Going beyond polarised debates on the sex trade, this book shows the importance of coercion and the societal complexities that perpetuate modern slavery.

EPDF and EPUB are available open access under CC BY NC ND licence. This publication was supported by University of Essex's open access fund.

Peter Appleton builds on research interviews with care-experienced young adults, and on cross-disciplinary theories of planning and of emotions, to develop a model of planning for young people leaving care.