Books published by UCL Press

Practical guidance for teaching languages from scratch in higher education, using German as a case study. As entries for UK school exams in modern foreign languages decrease, this book serves the urgent need for research and guidance on ab initio learning and teaching in higher education. Drawing extensively on the expertise of teachers of German in universities across the UK, the volume offers an overview of recent trends, new pedagogical approaches, and practical guidance for teaching languages at the beginners' level in the higher education classroom that will be useful for teachers of both German and other languages. The first chapters assess the role of ab initio provision within the wider context of modern language departments and language centers. They are followed by sections on teaching methods and approaches in the ab initio classroom, including the use of music, textbook evaluation, effective use of flipped classrooms, and the contribution of language apps. Finally, the book focuses on the learner in the ab initio context and explores issues around autonomy and learner strengths.

An interdisciplinary exploration of the concept of passages. The study of literature and culture is marked by various distinct understandings of passages--as both phenomena and critical concepts. These include the anthropological notion of rites of passage, the shopping arcades (Passagen) theorized by Walter Benjamin, the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade, present-day forms of migration and resettlement, and understandings of translation and adaptation. This book explores passages as contexts and processes within which liminal experiences and encounters are situated. Based on the premise that concepts travel through times, contexts, and discursive settings, the volume enables a meaningful exchange regarding passages across disciplinary, national, and linguistic boundaries. Contributions from senior scholars and early-career researchers whose work focuses on areas such as cultural memory, performativity, space, media, (cultural) translation, ecocriticism, gender, and race utilize specific understandings of passages and liminality, reflecting on their value and limits for their research.

An interdisciplinary exploration of the concept of passages. The study of literature and culture is marked by various distinct understandings of passages--as both phenomena and critical concepts. These include the anthropological notion of rites of passage, the shopping arcades (Passagen) theorized by Walter Benjamin, the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade, present-day forms of migration and resettlement, and understandings of translation and adaptation. This book explores passages as contexts and processes within which liminal experiences and encounters are situated. Based on the premise that concepts travel through times, contexts, and discursive settings, the volume enables a meaningful exchange regarding passages across disciplinary, national, and linguistic boundaries. Contributions from senior scholars and early-career researchers whose work focuses on areas such as cultural memory, performativity, space, media, (cultural) translation, ecocriticism, gender, and race utilize specific understandings of passages and liminality, reflecting on their value and limits for their research.

A collective case study of photographic culture through the lens of the Victoria and Albert Museum. A massive quantity of museums' photographic holdings resides not on gallery walls or archives, but outside of their formal collections, including reference photos and ephemera that are integral to the workings of museums. What Photographs Do explores how museums are defined through their photographic practices. Studied through the prism of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, this collection asks complex and ambiguous questions about how accumulations of photographs create the values, hierarchies, histories, and knowledge systems of a museum ecosystem. Chapters are comprised of short, auto-ethnographic interventions from museum practitioners, from studio photographers and image managers to conservators and non-photographic curators, who address the significance of both historical and contemporary practices of photography in their work, providing an extensive and unique range of accounts of what photographs do in museums while also expanding the critical discourse of both photography and museums.

A significant contribution to knowledge about university spatial development in urban contexts. Co-Curating the City explores the role of universities in the construction and mobilization of heritage discourses in urban development and regeneration processes, with a focus on six case study sites ranging from Sweden to Brazil. The book expands the field of critical heritage studies in the urban domain, arguing that universities should position themselves as significant institutions in the development of urban heritage narratives and heavily influence urban development. The case studies investigate how universities, as mixed communities of interest dispersed across buildings and urban sites, utilize strategies of engagement with local people and neighborhoods and ask how this could contribute to a reshaping of ideas, narratives, and lived experience of urban heritage in which universities have a distinctive agency.

Transdisciplinary approaches to resolving problematic debt. In an era when many of us depend on debt to survive but struggle with its consequences, Financing Prosperity by Dealing with Debt draws together current thinking on how to solve debt crises and promote prosperity. By profiling existing action by credit unions and community organizations, alongside bold proposals for the future, with contributions from artists, activists, and academics, the book shows how we can rethink the validity and inevitability of many contemporary forms of debt through organizing debt audits, promoting debt cancellation, and expanding member-owned co-operatives. The authors set out legal and political methods for changing the rules of the system to provide debt relief and reshape economies for more inclusive and sustainable flourishing. The book also profiles community-based actions that are changing the role of debt in economic, social, and political life--among them, participatory art projects, radical advice networks, and ways of financing feminist green transition. This volume moves beyond critique to present a wealth of concrete ways to tackle debt and forge the prosperous communities we want for the future, making it relevant to a broad audience of academics, practitioners, activists, and policymakers.

The first scholarly appraisal of suffragette Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett in more than 30 years. "Courage calls to courage everywhere" is the best-known phrase associated with Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847-1929), the leading UK suffragist and women's rights campaigner of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But what is the source of her quote, and what is its context? This book reproduces Fawcett's essential speeches, pamphlets, and newspaper columns to tell the story of her dynamic contribution to public life. Thirty-five texts and twenty-two images are contextualized and linked to contemporary news coverage as well as to historical and literary references. These speeches, articles, artworks, and photographs cover both the advances and the defeats in the campaign for women's votes. They also demonstrate a variety of the topics and causes Fawcett pursued: the provision of education for women, feminist history, a love of literature (and Fawcett's own attempt at fiction), purity and temperance, the campaign against the employment of children, the British Army's approach to the South African War, the Unionist cause against Home Rule for Ireland, and the role of suffrage organizations during World War I. This volume offers a rich, intertextual web of literary works, preferred reading material, organizations, contacts, friends, and sometimes enemies, that reveals Fawcett the individual throughout sixty-one years of campaigning.