Social Sciences

Advertising Shits in Your Head calls adverts what they are – a powerful means of control through manipulation – and highlights how people across the world are fighting back. It diagnoses the problem and offers practical tips for a DIY remedy. Faced with an ad-saturated world, activists are fighting back, equipped with stencils, printers, high-visibility vests, and utility tools. Their aim is to subvert the adverts that control us. With case studies from both sides of the Atlantic, this book showcases the ways in which small groups of activists are taking on corporations and states at their own game: propaganda. This international edition includes an illustrated introduction from Josh MacPhee, case studies and interviews with Art in Ad Places, Public Ad Campaign, Resistance Is Female, Brandalism, and Special Patrol Group, plus photography from Luna Park and Jordan Seiler. This is a call-to-arts for a generation raised on adverts. Beginning with a rich and detailed analysis of the pernicious hold advertising has on our lives, the book then moves on to offer practical solutions and guidance on how to subvert the ads. Using a combination of ethnographic research and theoretical analysis, Advertising Shits in Your Head investigates the claims made by subvertising practitioners and shows how they impact their practice.

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3000. That’s the number of marketing messages the average American confronts on a daily basis from TV commercials, magazine and newspaper print ads, radio commercials, pop-up ads on gaming apps, pre-roll ads on YouTube videos, and native advertising on mobile news apps. These commercial messages are so pervasive that we cannot help but be affected by perpetual come-ons to keeping buying. Over the last decade, advertising has become more devious, more digital, and more deceptive, with an increasing number of ads designed to appear to the untrained eye to be editorial content. It’s easy to see why. As we have become smarter at avoiding ads, advertisers have become smarter about disguising them.

Mara Einstein exposes how our shopping, political, and even dating preferences are unwittingly formed by brand images and the mythologies embedded in them. Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know® helps us combat the effects of manipulative advertising and enables the reader to understand how marketing industries work in the digital age, particularly in their uses and abuses of “Big Data.’ Most importantly, it awakens us to advertising’s subtle and not-so-subtle impact on our lives–both as individuals and as a global society. What ideas and information are being communicated to us–and to what end?

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Assessing prospective adoptive parents, foster carers, kinship carers and special guardians is an extremely complex task, and one that happens within a pressurized time frame.

Currently, assessments draw substantially on interviews, which can generate a lot of information but little analysis to enable professionals to establish a meaningful understanding of parenting capacity. Children with histories of trauma, loss and hurt need to join families in which parents exhibit the ability to be good at relationships, are able to manage their own stress and bond with the child in their care. Now fully updated and expanded to cover the assessment of kinship carers and special guardians, this book combines the latest findings from neuroscience with research on what makes good assessments and provides guidance and tools for making thorough, analytical and effective assessments.

With contributions from leading experts including Dan Hughes, Jonathan Baylin, Kim Golding and Julie Selwyn, it will provide you with the information you need to ensure the best possible chance of placement success.

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THE NO.1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

‘Bravely revealing’ BERNADINE EVARISTO

‘Funny, moving, helpful and true, Friendaholic deserves a massive audience’ SATHNAM SANGHERA

‘This book is brilliant’ JO ELVIN

‘Essential reading… admirably candid and well-crafted’ GUARDIAN

As a society, there is a tendency to elevate romantic love. But what about friendships? Aren’t they just as – if not more – important? So why is it hard to find the right words to express what these uniquely complex bonds mean to us? In Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict, Elizabeth Day embarks on a journey to answer these questions.

Growing up, Elizabeth wanted to make everyone like her. Lacking friends at school, she grew up to believe that quantity equalled quality. Having lots of friends meant you were loved, popular and safe. She was determined to become a Good Friend. And, in many ways, she did. But in adulthood she slowly realised that it was often to the detriment of her own boundaries and mental health.

Then, when a global pandemic hit in 2020, she was one of many who were forced to reassess what friendship really meant to them – with the crisis came a dawning realisation: her truest friends were not always the ones she had been spending most time with. Why was this? Could she rebalance it? Was there such thing as…too many friends? And was she really the friend she thought she was?

Friendaholic unpacks the significance and evolution of friendship. From exploring her own personal friendships and the distinct importance of each of them in her life, to the unique and powerful insights of others across the globe, Elizabeth asks why there isn’t yet a language that can express its crucial influence on our world.

From ghosting and frenemies to social media and seismic life events, Elizabeth leaves no stone unturned. Friendaholic is the book you buy for the people you love but it’s also the book you read to become a better friend to yourself.

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Drawing on empirical research, this fascinating new book explores the embodied experiences of ‘gym goers’ and the fitness cultures that are constructed within gyms and fitness spaces.

Gym Bodies offers a personal, interactive, ethnographic account of the multiplicity of contemporary gym practices, spaces and cultures, including bodybuilding, CrossFit and Spinning. It argues that gym bodies are historically constructed, social, sensual, emotional and political; that experience intersects with multiple embodied identities; and that fitness cultures are profoundly important in shaping the body in wider contemporary culture.

This is important reading for students, tutors and researchers working in sport and exercise studies, sociology of the body, health studies, leisure, cultural studies, gender and education. It is also a valuable resource for policy makers and practitioners within the fields of sport, leisure, health and education.

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Is transracial adoption a positive choice for kids?
How can children gain their new families without losing their birth heritage?
How can parents best support their children after placement?

Inside Transracial Adoption is an authoritative guide to navigating the challenges and issues that parents face in the USA when they adopt a child of a different race and/or from a different culture. Filled with real-life examples and strategies for success, this book explores in depth the realities of raising a child transracially, whether in a multicultural or a predominantly white community. Readers will learn how to help children adopted transracially or transnationally build a strong sense of identity, so that they will feel at home both in their new family and in their racial group or culture of origin. This second edition incorporates the latest research on positive racial identity and multicultural families, and reflects recent developments and trends in adoption.

Drawing on research, decades of experience as adoption professionals, and their own personal experience of adopting transracially, Beth Hall and Gail Steinberg offer insights for all transracial adoptive parents – from prospective first-time adopters to experienced veterans – and those who support them.

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You know him as the founder of Microsoft; the philanthropic, kind-hearted billionaire who has donated endless funds to good causes around the world. But there’s another side to Bill Gates.

We might like to think of the Gates Foundation as an innocent charity giving away money, collaborating with stakeholders, and listening to the desires of the populations it hopes to help, but is that how it works in practice?

Combining rich storytelling and ground-breaking reporting, The Bill Gates Problem offers readers a provocative and timely counter-narrative about one of the world’s most widely recognized individuals – a true global celebrity with international reach. But more than that, this book speaks to a vital political question around economic inequality and the erosion of democratic institutions – why should the super-rich be able to transform their wealth into political power, and just how far can they go?

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Dom Joly sets off on his travels again, immersing himself in the strange world of conspiracies. On his journeys he meets conspiracy theorists galore in destinations all over the world, some famous, some rather less so.

Conspiracy theories used to be fun, a bit of laugh. Did we really land on the moon? Was Paul McCartney cloned? Nowadays, however, in the aftermath of Donald Trump, a global pandemic and the ever-increasing influence of social media algorithms, they are part of the body politic and a massive cause of division and mistrust.

In The Conspiracy Tourist Dom Joly sets out on a global journey to find out what’s going on. His travels see him meeting followers of QAnon, hunting for UFOs in Roswell, chasing Alex Jones of Info Wars around Austin, trying to prove that Finland exists and taking a flat-earther to the edge of the world.

On the way Dom inevitably finds the funny and the quirky, but he also tries to understand what makes people so drawn to conspiracy theories. What if those he has long dismissed as crazed loonies actually have a point? What if we are the sheeple and they’ve been right all along?

Join a wide-eyed, slightly jaded, adventurous tourist on a very different kind of sight-seeing trip.

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The Politics of Everybody examines the production and maintenance of the terms ‘man’, ‘woman’, and ‘other’ within the current political moment; the contradictions of these categories; and the prospects of a Marxist approach to praxis for queer bodies. Few thinkers have attempted to reconcile queer and Marxist analysis. Those who have propose the key contested site to be that of desire/sexual expression. This emphasis on desire, Lewis argues, is symptomatic of the neoliberal project and has led to a continued fascination with the politics of identity. By arguing that Marxist analysis is in fact most beneficial to gender politics within the arena of body production, categorization and exclusion, Lewis develops a theory of gender and the sexed body that is wedded to the realities of a capitalist political economy. Boldly calling for a new, materialist queer theory, Lewis defines a politics of liberation that is both intersectional, transnational, and grounded in lived experience.

With a new preface, Lewis discusses the argument for an explicitly Marxist understanding of trans rights – an understanding grounded in solidarity and materialist/scientific queer analysis. She also discusses the new wave of Marxist Social Reproduction Theory that has emerged since the first edition, family abolition, and the complexities of building an internationalist Marxist movement that is in solidarity with queer and trans struggles, attentive to women’s realities, and one that refrains from imposing Western definitions (particularly American/Anglo definitions) onto global movements for liberation.

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