Polity Press

The rise of the far-right, the impacts of Covid-19, and the mediated evidence of racist police violence have challenged the dominant complacency in liberal democracies that racism was a thing of the past. We are now witnessing the renewed anti-racist commitment of social movements and the rising authoritarianism that seeks to suppress it. This ongoing tension provides important opportunities for reflection and intervention in how institutions deal with the problem of racism, including media institutions. Rather than making media "less racist", how can media systems, policies and practices be transformed in ways that actively challenge the production of racism? What should a truly anti-racist media look like?
 
Anamik Saha, Francesca Sobande and Gavan Titley address these important and timely questions to outline the essential steps for working towards an anti-racist media future. Revealing how the media are implicated in racism, the authors consider how systems, policies and practices can be transformed to confront and prevent it. Focusing on the problems of impartiality, the limits of diversity and representation, and the contradictions of digital culture, this manifesto embraces anti-racism's collectivist roots. Ultimately, the book illuminates key strategies and suggestions to move us closer to an anti-racist media future for everyone.
The Anti-Racist Media Manifesto is a must-read for students, scholars, media workers and activists in the fields of journalism, media, policy, and sociology, as well as general readers.

The rise of the far-right, the impacts of Covid-19, and the mediated evidence of racist police violence have challenged the dominant complacency in liberal democracies that racism was a thing of the past. We are now witnessing the renewed anti-racist commitment of social movements and the rising authoritarianism that seeks to suppress it. This ongoing tension provides important opportunities for reflection and intervention in how institutions deal with the problem of racism, including media institutions. Rather than making media "less racist", how can media systems, policies and practices be transformed in ways that actively challenge the production of racism? What should a truly anti-racist media look like?
 
Anamik Saha, Francesca Sobande and Gavan Titley address these important and timely questions to outline the essential steps for working towards an anti-racist media future. Revealing how the media are implicated in racism, the authors consider how systems, policies and practices can be transformed to confront and prevent it. Focusing on the problems of impartiality, the limits of diversity and representation, and the contradictions of digital culture, this manifesto embraces anti-racism's collectivist roots. Ultimately, the book illuminates key strategies and suggestions to move us closer to an anti-racist media future for everyone.
The Anti-Racist Media Manifesto is a must-read for students, scholars, media workers and activists in the fields of journalism, media, policy, and sociology, as well as general readers.

What if our civilization were to collapse? Not many centuries into the future, but in our own lifetimes? Most people recognize that we face huge challenges today, from climate change and its potentially catastrophic consequences to a plethora of socio-political problems, but we find it hard to face up to the very real possibility that these crises could produce a collapse of our entire civilization. Yet we now have a great deal of evidence to suggest that we are up against growing systemic instabilities that pose a serious threat to the capacity of human populations to maintain themselves in a sustainable environment. In this important book, Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens confront these issues head-on. They examine the scientific evidence and show how its findings, often presented in a detached and abstract way, are connected to people's ordinary experiences - joining the dots, as it were, between the Anthropocene and our everyday lives. In so doing they provide a valuable guide that will help everyone make sense of the new and potentially catastrophic situation in which we now find ourselves. Today, utopia has changed sides: it is the utopians who believe that everything can continue as before, while realists put their energy into making a transition and building local resilience. Collapse is the horizon of our generation. But collapse is not the end - it's the beginning of our future. We will reinvent new ways of living in the world and being attentive to ourselves, to other human beings and to all our fellow creatures.

In this new book, Pottier provides an incisive account of food production and famine in the world today. Drawing on the work of anthropologists and other sources, he offers a wide-ranging account of the methods used to produce and distribute food in a variety of cultural and historical contexts, from India to sub-Saharan Africa.

Pottier examines the way that interested parties such as multinational food companies, governments and NGOs intervene in the practices of food production throughout the world. He shows the dangerous gap which often exists between the everyday struggles of farmers and the actions of policy makers. Development goals and scientific principles can themselves contribute to unreliable food supply, and agricultural officials too often ignore the knowledge and expertise of those whose sources of food are unstable. They displace local practices, producing a loss of diversity and security.

Anthropology of Food examines in detail the viewpoints of people whose food resources are insecure, exploring their perceptions of the value of land, of farm labor organization, of the way markets operate, of famine relief campaigns, and of the shape and impact of agrarian development policies. He compares these views with the impact of theories adopted by policy-makers, and reflects on the direction of future empirical research and policy-making, stressing that it is the moral responsibility of researchers to be aware of the social dynamics of food security.

This book will appeal to second- and third-year undergraduates and postgraduates in the fields of anthropology, development studies, human nutrition, human geography, and public policy studies. It will also be of great interest to policy makers responsible for rural development and food security.

This new book by Beate Rössler is a work of real quality and originality on an extremely topical issue: the issue of privacy and the relations between the private and the public.

Rössler investigates the reasons why we value privacy and why we ought to value it. In the context of modern, liberal societies, Rössler develops a theory of the private which links privacy and autonomy in a constitutive way: privacy is a necessary condition to lead an autonomous life. The book develops a theory of freedom and autonomy which sees the ability to pose the "practical question" of how one wants to live, of what a person strives to be, at the centre of the modern idea of autonomy.

The question of privacy is emerging as an increasingly important topic in social and political theory and is central to many current debates in law, the media and politics. The Value of Privacy will be widely recognised to be a classic contribution to the subject.

In this highly original book the author addresses the question of how we are to conceive of human reasoning in a situation where there are no global, privileged points of view.

Drawing on the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Vattimo proposes a conception of thought based on 'difference' - a conception which accepts the fragmentation of knowledge and renounces the quest for totality. He also argues for an 'ontology of decline' - a conception of being which renounces all the strong characteristics attributed to it by traditional metaphysics and which instead, following Heidegger, links being to time, life and the rhythm of birth and death.

In this engaging new book, Katrin Flikschuh offers an accessible introduction to divergent conceptions of freedom in contemporary liberal political philosophy. Beginning with a discussion of Isaiah Berlins seminal distinction between negative and positive liberty, the book goes on to consider Gerald MacCallums alternative proposal of freedom as a triadic concept. The abiding influence of Berlins argument on the writings of contemporary liberal philosophers such as Robert Nozick, Hillel Steiner, Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz, is fully explored in subsequent chapters.

Flikschuh shows that, instead of just one negative and one positive freedom tradition, contemporary liberal thinkers articulate the meaning and significance of liberal freedom in many different and often conflicting ways. What should we make of such diversity and disagreement? Should it undermine our confidence in the coherence of liberal freedom? Should we strive towards greater conceptual and normative unity? Flikschuh argues that moral and political disagreement about freedom can often be traced back to differences in underlying metaphysical presuppositions and commitments. Yet these differences do not show liberal freedom debates to be confused or incoherent. On the contrary, they demonstrate the centrality of this philosophically elusive idea to the continued vitality of liberal political thinking.