Forthcoming books
Archaeological housework: Excavating the avocational archaeological atelier of Fiona Gorman, Isle of Arran, Scotland
Nyree Finlay
Part excavation and part house clearance, this contemporary archaeological collection study documents the recovery of an unusual heritage assemblage. It involved the recording of domestic workrooms on the Isle of Arran, Scotland. Central to the analysis is the stratigraphy of a forgotten worktable and repurposed containers.
Belonging to Fiona Gorman, avocational archaeologist and former art teacher, the collection comprises an extensive assemblage of found objects. Along with friends she discovered significant new prehistoric sites on Arran through systematic field-walking and landscape reconnaissance. Other items in the collection reveal the convivial and inter-generational attraction of stone gathering with close friends and family and creation of museum displays.
A celebration of recreational heritage participation, it documents domestic curation and repeat cataloguing practices. A unique collection of later dementia works prompts exploration of earlier embodied traces in creative display practices alongside the art and archaeology of assemblage making.
Archaeological housework promotes archaeology as affective care and explores the wider disciplinary neglect of its materialities and indoor practices through one woman’s passion for art, archaeology and the ancient landscapes of her island home.
This book will be published open access under a CC BY-NC Licence.
Publication date: Winter 2025/26
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Nyree Finlay is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Glasgow and convenor of the MSc Material Culture and Artefact Studies.
Drawing on a background in Scottish and European prehistory, her research practice centres around lithics using experimental and recursive sensorial assemblage analysis to expose enduring engagements with lithic technologies, craft skill, and stone as mnemonic media.
Other areas of research include gender, personhood, age, the lifecourse, gatherer-hunter archaeological sites and work realising various legacy excavation and collection projects. Current writing, exhibition and installation works includes new directions in the archaeologies of dementia, embodied care, creative knowledge practices and relational (re)collections.
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Acknowledgements
Introduction
Beginnings, people and place
Homework: recording an avocational atelier
Housework: Alt Beag
Housework: Burnbank
The table
Creative display
Reassembling stone practices
The materiality of dementia
Coda: an ending of sorts
Glossary
References
Beyond the state: music making in the rural creative economy
Simon McKerrell
This book takes an ethnographic approach to understanding music in the rural creative economy of the Highlands and Islands and brings a fresh understanding of sustainability in regional policy and creative lives. Drawing upon ethnographic evidence from over 70 interviews with musicians, venue operators, musical instrument makers, luthiers, music teachers, festival organisers, arts promoters, public officials, charity officers, police and educators, the book reveals the ingenuity, creativity and place-based innovation across the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.
The book argues that one of the results of continuing globalisation and digitalisation of society is a return to local, place-based communities with greater digital visibility, and that creative livelihoods in rural areas are becoming increasingly sustainable because of this movement. The chapters deal with the lived experience of rural and island musical education and performance, and provide an explanation of the impact of continuing state-retreat from the arts and the cultural sector; the importance of place-based enterprise in the rural creative economy; the newly emerging opportunities for rural economic sustainability in the arts using digital media; the barriers to participation for young people and young adults, and; the special nature of rural innovation in the creative economy.
Importantly, this book offers an original contribution to the literature on the creative economy and creative industries, by rethinking the model of capital exchange in music that moves beyond older binary models. The author makes the case that in today’s platformed world, music should not be understood as a commodity, but as a form of labour that includes a much wider range of activity beyond performance including audiences and listeners. This fundamental shift, turns our attention to understanding capital exchange through people’s desire to participate in the arts as the core commodity that supports sustainability in the creative economy.
This book will be published open access under a CC BY-NC Licence.
Publication date: Winter 2025/26
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Simon McKerrell is a Professor of Media and Music at Glasgow Caledonian University. His research focuses upon the social impact of music, cultural policy and the rural creative economy. He is the author of Focus: Scottish Traditional Music (Routledge), and co-editor of both Music as Multimodal Discourse: Media, Power and Protest (Bloomsbury) and Understanding Scotland Musically: Folk, Tradition, Modernity (Routledge).
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Coming soon
Democratising spywatching: Public oversight of intelligence-driven surveillance in southern Africa
Edited by Jane Duncan and Allen Munoriyarwa
Digitisation has provided intelligence agencies with the capabilities to conduct surveillance at an unprecedented scale. Using a range of digital surveillance technologies and practices, and unprecedented public-private collaborations, intelligence agencies have extended their ability to collect, store and analyse data for intelligence purposes. Effective oversight is required to limit the potential for abuse. However, across southern Africa – where digital surveillance is expanding – official oversight institutions typically lack the power and resources to monitor and review surveillance capabilities in order to ensure that intelligence agencies behave effectively and lawfully. Consequently, oversight in these countries typically is conducted by the public, through, for instance, challenging unjustifiable secrecy, publicising abuses and organising campaigns to rein these agencies in.
Through comparative case study research exploring lessons from key moments in the region, this volume explores public oversight of intelligence-driven digital surveillance in eight southern African countries and examines cases where this oversight either succeeded, failed, or achieved mixed outcomes. Authored by researchers and journalists from the fields of law, communication and media studies, this book offers lessons for academics and activists, suggesting that a new model of public oversight of surveillance is possible, and, arguably, functions better than extant approaches to surveillance. It will be of global significance, as surveillance abuses are a worldwide problem, as is the problem of oversight failing to keep pace with expanding surveillance capabilities.
This book will be published open access under a CC BY-NC Licence.
Publication date: Winter 2025/26
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Jane Duncan is a Professor of Digital Society at the University of Glasgow, and she holds a British Academy Global Professorship at the same university. She is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg. She is author of The rise of the securocrats (Jacana, 2014), Protest Nation (University of KwaZulu/ Natal Press, 2016), Stopping the spies (Wits University Press, 2018) and National security surveillance in southern Africa (Zed Books, 2022).
Allen Munoriyarwa is an Associate Professor of Journalism at Walter Sisulu University in South Africa, in the Department of Marketing, Public Relations and Communication. His research interests are in surveillance, digital journalism, and media cultures, as well as digital surveillance. He has published widely in these areas. He is the co-author of Digital Surveillance in Southern Africa: Policies, Politics and Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
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Coming soon