Humanity, the editors argue, is neither pre-given through biology, nor learned through culture, but instead fashioned through the processes of life itself. In making these claims, the book aims to question and counteract entrenched divisions between cultural and biological anthropology, developing a unified approach to understanding social and biological dimensions of human life beyond the somewhat ingrained dualisms of biology-culture within evolutionary biology and biological anthropology itself.

On the Wrong Side of the Track situates the Olympics moment in longue durée tracing the depictions of the East End as the locus of Victorian gothic imaginary, a place inhabited by truculent locals long indifferent to national popular injunctions.

This book explores the transformation of the Middle West Side of Manhattan (1894-1914) through the lens of the sociospatial dialectic. In particular, it examines how this area of the city was conceived by reformists and government officials, lived by constrained residents, and altered through the deviating perceptions and practices of different people operating in and through this space.

Biotechnology and the post-Fordist regime of accumulation present a fundamental challenge to Marxist conceptions of the valorization of labor—a challenge that requires empirically grounded and theoretically creative engagement. Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby provide such a contribution in their book Clinical Labor.

Novak begins by considering the rise of noise over the past thirty years and focusing on the initial forays of Japanese experimental musicians in urban centres in the 1980s. According to the author, ‘Japa-Noise' is what results from the mediated feedback between two spaces in particular, Japan and America, the latter being the country where the sub-genre was in fact ‘discovered’.

Matthew Carr sets out to recount a personal adventure, describing his encounters with migrants and embellishing each chapter with scenic details of Europe’s different borderscapes. Fortress Europe is not an academic undertaking but a timely product of investigative journalism, rich in empirical material.

An important aspect of the book is that it allows one to understand that space is a result of practices which imbue it with sense and meaning. In "The Common Place", abstract space thus turns into a landscape; it becomes symbolic and founded on an aesthetics that is temporally as finite as it is dynamic.

Macdonald’s "Memorylands" is an ambitious synthesis of a very wide range of literatures from multiple disciplines relating to the intersections between heritage, memory, place and identity in contemporary Europe. It is one of those books you read with a pad of paper and pencil at your side, hastily scribbling down articles and essays that you’ve not encountered before but are sure – from Macdonald’s reportage – you simply must read.

The central task of Irus Braverman’s Zooland is to understand how biopolitics take form within a relation of pastoral care in the zoo. Across nine empirical chapters, each devoted to a particular technology of governance, from naming to naturalizing to reproducing, Braverman sets out to examine North American zoos from the "inside out." In doing so she eschews the politically forceful but shrill and fundamentalist discourse of animal rights: this is a welcome maneuver.

As a political geographer, Yeh traces People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) state and nation building projects in Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) during the past six decades, focusing on the Chinese state’s territorialisation of Tibet’s landscape and people, and the consequent changes in state/society and interethnic relations.