'Spaces for Action' provides a hands-on guide for teachers and students looking to make architectural learning more engaging, collaborative, and socially meaningful.

The book brings together over 80 creative tools that can be adapted to different classrooms, communities, and design challenges. The tools are grouped by teaching approaches—like cooperative teamwork, experiential learning, and transformative practices—and by the stages of the design process: identifying challenges, generating ideas, and putting them into action. Each entry gives a clear overview of what the tool is for, how it works, and what you need to make it happen. You’ll also find tips on group sizes, resources, and possible collaborators, making it easy to bring these methods straight into practice.

What makes this toolkit unique is its strong link between theory and real-world application. Alongside detailed instructions, you’ll discover case studies from projects such as Service-Learning and “Live Projects,” which connect design directly to community needs. Open and adaptable, this repository is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to foster creativity, collaboration, and social impact in architecture education.

In Dutch Afro Becomings, artist, curator, and researcher Charl Landvreugd argues that we do not yet have a language to understand Dutch Afro-ness, and that it is insufficient to rely on the discourses developed in African American, Black British, or Caribbean cultural theory alone. This critical monograph on continental European Black art and cultural history articulates the specificity of Dutch Afro-ness and the way that Blackness has been translated and (mis)understood across multiple decades of cultural policy, while also providing an incisive analysis of the Dutch state’s aim to showcase “diversity” in a way that is comfortable to the white cultural class, without ever addressing issues of racism or race.

Simultaneously, Landvreugd traces how recent generations of artists are effectively constructing a new visual language to name their Dutch Afro-ness by deepening the way their being is shaped across multiple cultural identities and national histories. These time travelers and wanderers are the Wakaman: cultural workers that embrace their hybridity and multiplicity and have defined, on their own terms and through their own words, their nativity within the Dutch art scene.

Dutch Afro Becomings is a key theoretical and art-historical work, as an introduction to both different international genealogies of Black arts and culture and to the different movements that shaped the specificity of Dutch Afro artists in particular.

Anna Beresin’s 'Make/Unmake' is an engaging and deeply original exploration of children’s play as a powerful cultural force. Drawing on ethnographic research and vivid travel writing, the author journeys to the Midlands region of England to observe three remarkable play-based programs: the Maker{Futures} Mobile Makerspace, the Pitsmoor Adventure Playground, and the GLUE Collective. She captures the voices of playworkers, teachers, and artists and documents the ingenuity of children turning objects into tools of imagination and change.

At a moment when children’s opportunities for material play are shrinking, this book confronts urgent questions: Who gets to play? Who is left out? The work resonates with UNICEF’s recent call to address inequality, climate pressures, and technological shifts shaping children’s lives today. By centring under-resourced communities, gender equity, and cultural representation, this volume reframes play as both a process of making and unmaking the world—an act of resilience, creativity, and collective transformation.

This book will appeal to scholars and students in childhood studies, play studies, education, and cultural anthropology, as well as practitioners, teachers, policymakers, and all who are committed to protecting children’s right to play.

This groundbreaking volume marks a rare and transformative contribution to studies of the Cairo Genizah, a vast trove of documents generated by Egypt’s Jewish community between the 10th and 19th centuries. While the Cairo Genizah has long yielded extraordinary insights into Jewish history in the greater Mediterranean region, attention has focused overwhelmingly on documents from the ‘classical’ period (11th–13th centuries). Documents from the later period, when Egypt was ruled by the Mamluk Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire, remain woefully underexplored. This book helps to change that, presenting a meticulously curated collection of later Genizah documents that expand the boundaries of current scholarship.

Moving beyond the more familiar Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic texts, the author ventures into neglected terrain, offering expert translations of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish texts in Arabic script. The collection is rich with remarkable ‘firsts’, including a Jewish funerary prayer on the reverse of a letter from a military commander, fragments of Sufi poetry, and a primer on Muslim practice. The author uses her training in Ottoman history to analyse and contextualise these documents fully. As a result, each document opens new avenues of inquiry, linking Egypt’s Jewish community to wider intra- and intercommunal networks in the Ottoman Empire and beyond.

With a lucid introduction, well-structured chapters, and a thoughtful conclusion, the book illuminates networks of exchange in the early modern Mediterranean. It will appeal to scholars of Jewish history, the Cairo Genizah, the Ottoman Empire, and early modern Egypt; students of Middle Eastern languages and religions; historians of intercommunal relations and trade; and librarians, archivists, and general readers fascinated by Middle Eastern manuscript culture and the vibrant religious and commercial networks of the early modern Mediterranean.

Works for Works, Book 2: “No Rights,” privileges works-based agency (praxis) in literary-artistic scholarship. The principal focus of the Franciscan-inspired embrace of a “no rights” status for works of literary-artistic scholarship is toward freeing both author and works from forms of technocratic determinism and neo-utilitarianism associated with regimes of intellectual property rights law and platform cultures. Engaging, and then dispensing with, the concept of “the artistic exception,” a holdover from modernist justifications for art in/for itself, Works for Works nonetheless restores the primacy of the work itself through disconnecting author and work toward a transfiguration of both author and work and the substantiation of a new ecosystem for radical works of artistic-critical inquiry.

Works for Works, Book 2: “No Rights,” follows upon Works for Works, Book 1: Useless Beauty (2022), a structuralist-inspired survey and exposé of the immanentist paradox artist-scholars inhabit in the post-contemporary transition from modernist and post-modernist reflexivity to forms of cultural production that favor no singular raison d’être or socio-cultural, socio-economic, or socio-political bias.