In this collection of essays about the ways in which over the centuries a region and attached identity were imagined for the people and places now broadly labeled as the Marche (‘Marches’ in English) of Italy east of the Apennines from Umbria, Giorgio Mangani shows that this was often a self-conscious act of promotion and celebration by local and regional elites and local populations alike.

This book’s concision and careful scholarship are all the more impressive when dealing with a thinker like Lefebvre, whose work is so voluminous and ranges across so many different substantive topics. On top of these evident strengths, Butler also reads Lefebvre in just the right way (in my opinion). That is, he understands Lefebvre’s work to be primarily an exploration of the possibility of radical politics.

Cary Wolfe’s "Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in A Biopolitical Frame" is a novel and timely book that challenges the anthropocentric register of mainstream biopolitics. It is an ambitious and generative interweaving of research, ranging from legal theorisations of animal ‘rights’ to neurophysiological accounts of behavioural plasticity.

Part textbook, and part a more fundamental attempt to analyze a number of philosophical and political issues that surround modern security studies, this book begins with an etymological description of the word "catastrophe" as a "reversal of what is expected" or "an overturning." In "Politics of Catastrophe", Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster aim to demonstrate how catastrophes—whether climate change, terrorism, or health outbreaks—shape security and governance practices.

One would not expect a benign-sounding occupation like stream restoration to be associated with “wars,” but rivers are contested objects of public concern. As Rebecca Lave shows, they are also objects of scholarly concern for social and natural scientists alike.

"Geografías de lo imaginario" can thus be claimed to be an expression of this ongoing collective effort to provide a large Spanish-speaking audience with a general framework for making sense of contemporary changes in human geography. Contextualizing such issues within different European academic traditions and trying to put them into dialogue is not an easy task at all. Lindón and Hiernaux must be commended for having somehow helped bridge the gap between these sometimes isolated realms and streams of geographic research.

This collection discusses the well-known epistemological ‘turns’ that the discipline has undergone in the last decades, yet from a South American and European perspective. Featuring some of the scholars who had already contributed to the aforementioned volume, the collection provides an updated mapping of the rhetorical, methodological and conceptual shifts that originated in other social sciences and influenced new geographical approaches.

Maps don’t mirror the landscape. Instead, they actively transform territory in service to certain interests. Across over 500 pages Jerry Brotton explores this theme by focusing on twelve distinct "biographies" of world maps and their makers from a range of time periods.

The focus of Sean Roberts’s excellent "Printing a Mediterranean World" is a single Italian book, a poetic re-rendering of Ptolemy’s "Geography", published in 1482 by the Florentine humanist Francesco Berlinghieri. Roberts is aware that Berlinghieri’s book has normally been framed as an oddity of no great significance. Beautiful, yes, but of dubious worth both as a print artefact and a geographical description.

"What does diversity do?" is a question often left unasked in the academy’s rush "do diversity," but it is precisely that which Sara Ahmed poses in On Being Included: Race and Diversity in Institutional Life.