This book challenges the hyper-production and proliferation of concepts in modern social research. It presents a distinctive methodological response to this tendency through an exploration of one of the most underappreciated yet widely deployed conventions for the analysis of social processes: the creation of diagrammatic relational spaces. Designed to capture social processes in a way that resists reductive and essentialist categories, such spaces have the capacity to produce powerful, systematic analyses that break the spell of concept proliferation and its resultant naively realist approach to explaining the world. Through an exploration of key examples and series of original case studies, the authors demonstrate the application of this approach across a variety of empirical settings and academic disciplines. They thus offer a relational and pragmatic approach to social research that resists current trends characterised by supposedly self-evident data and/or disconnected theory. As such, the book constitutes an important contribution to some of the central questions in current social research, and promises to unsettle and reinvigorate considerations of method across different fields of practice.
What did you do in the war, daddy?' It's a classic question - and maybe one that expected the answer to be stories of brave attacks on enemy lines, pressing forward against overwhelming odds. But to Gethin Russell-Jones, the question was not one to ask - he knew what his father had done and, growing up, would have summed his father's contribution to the war effort under one word: 'Nothing.' As a conscientious objector, and despite the fact that his fiancée was cracking German codes at Bletchley during the Second World War, John Russell-Jones exhibited a different kind of courage to that shown by most of his peers. Convinced that Christ's teaching forbade him to take the life of another, he faced ignominy, insults, and opposition, from the state, his friends, and even his own family. As an adult, Gethin decided it was time to look for the man his father had been, and to see if he could regain respect for him. And as he finds out what led his father to the decision he made, he discovers a man he never really knew - one who was prepared to suffer for an unpopular and unfashionable belief, and who exhibited a different kind of courage in doing so.
A fascinating, groundbreaking exposé of how commodity traders in New York and London have destabilized societies all over the world, leaving the most vulnerable at the mercy of hunger, chaos, and war. • With a new Afterword for the ebook. For Rupert Russell, the Brexit vote was only the latest shock in a decade full of them: the unstoppable war in Syria, huge migrant flows into Europe, beheadings in Iraq, children placed in cages on the U.S. border. In Price Wars, he sets out on a worldwide journey to investigate what caused the wave of chaos that consumed the world in the 2010s. Russell travels to Tunisia, Iraq, Venezuela, Ukraine, East Africa, and Central America and discovers that unrest in all these places was triggered by dramatic and mysterious swings in the price of essential commodities. Deregulation of the commodities markets means that food prices can shoot up even in years of abundant harvests, causing hunger and protest. Oil prices and real-estate values can surge even when supplies are normal, enriching and emboldening dictators. It is this instability--fueled by banks and hedge funds in faraway New York and London--that has toppled regimes and unsettled the West. Price Wars is a fascinating, original, and groundbreaking exposé of the power of the commodities markets to disrupt the world.
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