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This month Bloomsbury Collections features open access titles for Open Access Week. Through our open access publishing programme we are committed to the widest possible dissemination of research, whilst providing subject expertise and professional publishing services to authors, funders, and institutions. Explore some of the breadth and depth of Bloomsbury’s open access publishing through the selection of titles below.
This open access book explores tanning culture: how the desire for tanned white skin led to the phenomenal growth in sunbed use and how the practice spread through Britain. By analysing the role of the media, medical experts, and socio-political changes, The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed exposes how sunbed providers, consumers and the ‘sunbed tan’ itself shifted from ‘healthy’ to ‘harmful’ in late twentieth-century depictions. Fabiola Creed examines print media, film, medical journals, trade directories, catalogues, and children’s toys to map this transition.
Check out this chapter the examines the timeframe from 1980 to 1981 when sunbed businesses and sales soared.
Climate change, biodiversity collapse, pandemics, wars, resource shortages, inflation, socio-economic inequality… How do we talk to and teach young people about collapse without triggering defence mechanisms of denial and depression?
This urgent, and radically honest, open access book looks collapse in the face, acknowledges the temptation for denial and despair, but chooses hope. Pedagogies of Collapse makes a dire, fact-packed case for the urgency of action, but resists the urge to fall into the usual categories of environmental discourses. It rejects both the unwarranted optimism of progress narratives and the unhelpful despair of extinction narratives.
In this chapter, the author provides a historical and systemic overview of education arguing that in order to craft an education system fit for the daunting tasks ahead, the first step involves reckoning with the emergence of schooling as we know it.
Exploring the rise of open scholarship in the digital era and its transformational impact on how knowledge is created, shared, and accessed, this open access book offers new insights on the history, development, and future directions of openness in the humanities and identifies key drivers, opportunities, and challenges.
Read this chapter discussing a wide range of issues and opportunities relating to open scholarship in the humanities, arguing that there is a need to develop a stronger framework in which to enable open humanities rather than simply reapplying approaches drawn from open science.
This open-access volume is the first to explore systematically and comprehensively the concept and category of ‘horror’ in antiquity. The contributors retrieve the ancient grammar of horror by paying equal attention to its affective and cognitive dimensions, and by looking at it as an embodied, enactive and full-rounded existential experience. They explore how horrifying experiences in antiquity are construed as embodied events while being conceptually rooted in cultural frameworks. They also showcase the ways in which the body itself can turn into a source of deep horror, be it in literary or medical texts and traditions in the Greek and Roman world, from the classical period to late antiquity.
Read this chapter about horror and horrific associations in our collective consciousness and its connections to horror in antiquity.
Authored entirely by African researchers, Internet Shutdowns in Africa shows how shutdowns are used as a tactic of war, to blackout news of state violence, or to disrupt opposition protests. At the same time, the findings gathered here demonstrate the wide variety of forms these shutdowns take: they can be nationwide or localised; they can target a specific social media platform or website; or they can avoid the appearance of a complete shutdown by throttling connection speeds; and all of these types of shutdowns can last weeks, months, or even years.
Check out this chapter to read about a nationwide internet shutdown on election day, 12th of August 2021, imposed by the Zambian government that had a significant impact on the social, economic and political rights of millions of citizens.
Bloomsbury Open Collections is a collective-action approach to funding open access books. Through this model, we are aiming to make open access publication available to a wider range of authors by spreading the cost across multiple organisations, while providing additional benefits to participating libraries. Our aim is to engage a more diverse set of authors, bringing their work to a wider global audience.
Read more about some of the titles published through the Bloomsbury Open Collections program below.
Featuring stories of early settler and contemporary Asian migrant women in Asia-Pacific region, Fire Dragon Feminism discusses Asian migrant women’s encounters with coloniality and racial capitalism at their workplace and in their everyday life. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 Asian migrant employees in Australian universities, the book examines how Asian migrant women are implicated and complicit in white race-making projects while being subjected to racialisation and marginalisation simultaneously.
In this chapter, the author presents the concept of fire dragon feminism and explores the experiences of Asian migrant women in migration, coloniality, and racial capitalism.
co-communities can inspire, provoke, and challenge us to live more environmentally harmonious and collective lives. Eco-communities are examples of grassroot efforts at socio-ecological transformation—self-organised practices, infrastructures and spaces that seek to transform ways of being, living and working. While many eco-communities attempt to transform all elements of their daily lives, these processes are always incomplete, in-the-making, unfinished and messy. This book explores the ongoing processes of navigating these tensions and contradictions that none-the-less create hope.
Read this chapter on how important it is for eco-communities to be inclusive of racially and ethnically diverse peoples and the causes that affect their everyday lives.
The Police, the State and the Congo Cop is the first full-length, empirical deep-dive into everyday policework in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Following officers from the classroom to the station and the street, it offers five narrative-driven chapters rich with historical detail and thick description that show how the police force, as an institution, struggles to coordinate practice with training, coercion with persuasion and reconciliation, and the need to make ends meet with the duty to serve the public.
Check out this chapter to learn about the history of policing Congo.
The Anthropocene has ushered in remarkable progress and unprecedented challenges, with ecological crises threatening all life—especially the most vulnerable. In search of new solutions in this open access book, Lay Sion Ng turns to an unexpected source: Ernest Hemingway.
Through a multidisciplinary lens Ng challenges the notion of Hemingway as merely a hyper-masculine figure. Instead, she reveals his texts as "ecological forces" that can heighten our awareness of nonhuman agency, leading us to understand our own place in this interconnected world.
In this chapter, the author explores the narrative of Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises as a compelling exploration of the interplay between sociocultural stereotypes and the discourse of disability, as well as the transformative potential of his connection with the natural world.
While substantial work has addressed the ethics and practicalities of working with trans and gender-nonconforming participants in social science research, approaches to gender nonconformity in arts and humanities research, teaching and practice still remain underexplored.
This book features a diverse collective of arts and humanities researchers, educators and creative practitioners, sharing their thoughts and experiences of how to approach gender nonconformity creatively and ethically, including from a decolonial perspective. Contributors share their thoughts and experience on topics including centering trans people and people of colour in fan adaptations of Les Misérables; moving beyond medicalised approaches to trans history; responding to the early modern history of gender nonconformity through poetic-performative closet dramas; and using trans history to decolonise history teaching.
Check out this chapter to read conversation and reflections on different approaches to gender nonconformity.
Interested in more titles in this area? Visit this page to learn more about open access publishing at Bloomsbury. To learn more about our library-funded Bloomsbury Open Collections model, click here.
Read this blog in which author Rebecca Bennett reflects on how one accessible book changed the course of her entire career, and how the values of open research have been at the core of her work ever since.
If you’ve enjoyed this taster of what Bloomsbury Collections has to offer, why not let your librarian know about the resource? Recommend it to your librarian here.
