Wherever you are in the world and whatever you’re interested in, our ‘Books of the Month’ features a broad sample of different recent releases authored by University of Liverpool staff. From architecture to business, photography to tourism, there’s something for everyone.
The University of Liverpool Library has curated a reading list for Book of the Month which is available and searchable for University of Liverpool staff and students. The newest titles are added at the top of the list for visibility and further information can be found in the notes area.
If you are a member of University staff and would like your new or recent (2023 or 2024) publication to be featured, please email the details to the Research Communications Team at rescomms@liverpool.ac.uk.
The Criminalization of Violence Against Women: Comparative Perspectives
Editors: Heather Douglas, Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Leigh Goodmark, Sandra Walklate (University of Liverpool)
Published: 2023
This book explores the extent nations have adopted criminal legal reforms to address violence against women, the consequences of implementation of those laws and policies, and who bears those consequences most heavily. It examines the need for both more and less criminalization, whether we should think differently about criminalization, and explores the tensions that emerge when criminal law, civil law, and social policy speak or fail to speak to each other. Drawing on criminalization approaches from across the globe, a comparative approach to assess the scope, impact of, and alternatives to criminalization in the response to violence against women is provided.
Sandra Walklate is the Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology, at the School of Law and Social Justice, in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Liverpool.
Digital Inclusion International Policy and Research
Editors: Simeon Yates (University of Liverpool), Elinor Carmi
Published: 2024
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our relationship with digital technologies for the foreseeable future. Many people’s main channels of communication were transferred to digital services, platforms, and apps to adhere to the guidance to ‘stay at home’. Everything ‘went online’: our families, friends, partners, health, work, news, politics, culture, arts and protesting. Yet access to digital technologies remained highly unequal. This brought digital inclusion policy and research to the fore, highlighting to policymakers and the public the ‘hidden’ challenges and impacts of digital exclusion and inequalities.
This collection presents policy and research that address digital inequalities, access, and skills, from multiple international perspectives, as well as from academia and civic organizations. Offering research findings and policy case studies that explore digital inclusion from the provision of basic access to digital, via education and digital literacy, and on to issues of gender and technology, the collection is based on the 2021 Digital Inclusion, Policy and Research Conference.
This is an open access book.
Simeon Yates is Professor of Digital Culture, Communication and Media, at the School of the Arts, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Liverpool.
Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice
Editors: Christine Schwöbel-Patel (ex-University of Liverpool) and Robert Knox (University of Liverpool)
Published: 2024
In recent years, growing attention has been paid to the relationship between international law and aesthetics. This collection situates this relationship within its wider political context, demonstrating that the question of aesthetics in not neutral but rather connected to the social, economic, and political relationships in which international justice is deeply embedded. The first part of the collection is an invitation to reflect on what we see and register in international justice, in particular in representations of those who suffer violence, including the violence of law. The second part of the collection uses different forms to reflect on how aesthetics can be turned against the dominant aesthetics and politics of international law, in the form of ‘counter-aesthetics’ through cartoons, interviews, parables, and a screenplay. This collection is the first of its kind to make visible the dominant and normalized aesthetics of violence and justice through a political economy lens; and to take seriously the limitations of the aesthetic forms that give violence and justice their expression.
Christine Schwöbel-Patel is currently an academic at University of Warwick and previously held faculty positions at the University of Liverpool (2011-2018). Christine was awarded the 2014 Outstanding Early Career Researcher award by the University of Liverpool.
Robert Knox joined University of Liverpool in 2014 and is a Senior Lecturer in Law, at the School of Law and Social Justice, in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.