Advanced texts

• Contributors: Godfrey Fitton, Simon Harley, Alan Hastie
• Academic Press (2020)

The Encyclopedia of Geology, Second edition presents in six volumes state-of-the-art reviews on the various aspects of geologic research, all of which have moved on considerably since the writing of the first edition. New areas of discussion include extinctions, origins of life, plate tectonics and its influence on faunal provinces, new types of mineral and hydrocarbon deposits, new methods of dating rocks, and geological processes. Users will find this to be a fundamental resource for teachers and students of geology, as well as researchers and non-geology professionals seeking up-to-date reviews of geologic research.

• Author: Alastair Robertson
• Geological Society of London (2019)

This memoir presents and discusses recent research mainly concerning the Permian and Triassic geological development of South Island in its regional context, which includes New Zealand as a whole, the continent of Zealandia, eastern Australia and Antarctica. The volume will interest geoscientists, including stratigraphers, sedimentologists, palaeontologists, igneous petrologists, geochemists, geochronologists and economic geologists, and is aimed at professional geologists and advanced students of geology

• Authors: Anton Ziolkowski, Evert Slob
• Cambridge University Press (2019)

This volume describes how controlled-source electromagnetic (CSEM) methods are used to determine the electrical conductivity and hydrocarbon content of the upper few kilometres of the Earth, on land and at sea. The authors show how the signal-to-noise ratio of the measured data may be maximised via suitable choice of acquisition and processing parameters and selection of subsequent data analysis procedures. 

Requiring no specialist prior knowledge of electromagnetic theory, and providing a step-by-step guide through the necessary mathematics, this book provides an accessible introduction for advanced students, researchers and industry practitioners in exploration geoscience.

• Author: Brian Upton
• Dunedin Academic Press (2015)

Scotland's mountains and glens retain the secrets of the long and frequently violent geological history that has gone into their making. Reflecting current research into Scotland's geology, the author speculates as to the climate, geography and ecology of the long-gone landscapes in which the volcanoes of differing ages were created and destroyed.

• "[The book] will be welcomed in particular by students at all levels and by amateur geologists such as those who read The Edinburgh Geologist. They will learn so much about all the fascinating volcanic relics that we are fortunate to have in Scotland, will clarify their understanding of volcanic and magmatic processes in general and, above all, will thoroughly enjoy reading an undoubted masterpiece.' (The Edinburgh Geologist)

• Authors: Michael Johnson, Simon Harley
• Cambridge University Press (2012)

Orogenesis, the process of mountain building, occurs when two tectonic plates collide – either forcing material upwards to form mountain belts such as the Alps or Himalayas or causing one plate to be subducted below the other, results in volcanic mountain chains such as the Andes. Integrating the approaches of structural geology and metamorphism, this book provides an up-to-date overview of orogenic research and an introduction to the physico-chemical properties of mountain belts.  This book provides a valuable introduction to this fast-moving field for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of structural geology, plate tectonics and geodynamics, and will also provide a vital overview of research for academics and researchers working in related fields including petrology geochemistry and sedimentology.

• Editors: Eva Panagiotakopulu, Jonathan Sadler
• Wiley (2021)

The key debates concerning the biogeography of the North Atlantic islands still rumble on: Do the biota reflect cryptic refugia or otherwise, or tabula rasa and recolonization? How important were human communities in shaping the existing biota and biogeographical patterns? Throw into this mix current concerns over global warming, and we can now ask, how resilient is the biota to change, either natural or anthropogenic?

This volume draws together a range of researchers with longstanding research interests in the region, from diverse academic backgrounds, to evaluate some of these questions.

• Series Volume Editors: Paolo Tarolli, Simon Mudd
• Elsevier (2020)

Remote Sensing of Geomorphology, Volume 23, discusses the new range of remote-sensing techniques (lidar, structure from motion photogrammetry, advanced satellite platforms) that has led to a dramatic increase in terrain information, and as such provided new opportunities for a better understanding of surface morphology and related Earth surface processes.

Useful for MSc and PhD students, this book is also ideal for any scientists that want to have a single volume guideline to help them develop new ideas. In addition, technicians and private and public sectors working on remote sensing will find the information useful to their initiatives.

• Author: David (Dave) Reay
• Palgrave Macmillan (2019)   
• Available for open access (Access the e-book for free)

This open access book asks just how climate-smart our food really is. It follows an average day's worth of food and drink to see where it comes from, how far it travels, and the carbon price we all pay for it. From our breakfast tea and toast, through breaktime chocolate bar, to take-away supper, Professor Dave Reay explores the weather extremes the world’s farmers are already dealing with, and what new threats climate change will bring.

• Author: David (Dave) Reay
• Palgrave Macmillan (2006) 

Climate change is one of the greatest threats that humankind faces in the twenty-first century. This book argues that while government and industry dither, we could all cut our personal greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent - the level necessary to halt the current trend according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

After summarizing today's state of affairs, scientifically and politically, climatologist Dave Reay explores the climate impact of housing, gardening, food, money, work, transport, and even death. Packed with provocative case studies, calculations and lifestyle comparisons, this entertaining and authoritative book makes the complexities of climatology understandable and challenges readers to rethink their notions of 'doing their bit'.

• Author: Hannah Fitzpatrick
• Wiley (2024)

Mapping Partition delivers the first in-depth geographical account of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. The book explores the impact of colonial geography and geographers on the boundary, both during the partition process and in the period preceding it.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Hannah Fitzpatrick argues that colonial geographical knowledge underpinned the partition process in heretofore unacknowledged ways. The author also discusses the consequences of placing different ethnic, communal, and linguistic groups onto the colonial map and the growing importance of majority and minority populations in representative democratic politics.

Mapping Partition: Politics, Territory and the End of Empire in India and Pakistan is required reading for students and researchers studying geography, colonial and imperial history, South Asian studies, and interdisciplinary border studies.

• Author: Tim Cresswell
• Wiley (2024)

In the newly expanded Second Edition of Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction, renowned scholar Tim Cresswell delivers a thoroughly up-to-date and accessible examination of the major thinkers and key theoretical developments in the field. Coverage of the complete range of the development of theoretical knowledge—from ancient geography to contemporary theory—appears alongside treatments of the influence of Darwin and Marx, the emergence of anarchist geographies, the impact of feminism, and myriad other central bodies of thought. This latest edition also includes new chapters on physical geography and theory, postcolonialism and decoloniality, and black geographies.

Perfect for students of undergraduate and graduate courses in geographic thought, Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction will also earn a place in the libraries of students and scholars researching the history and philosophy of geography, as well as practicing geographers.

• Editors include: Jamie Pearce
• Springer (2021)

This volume provides a critical response to the COVID-19 pandemic showcasing the full range of issues and perspectives that the discipline of geography can expose and bring to the table, not only to this specific event, but to others like it that might occur in future. Comprised of almost 60 short (2500 word) easy to read chapters, the collection provides numerous theoretical, empirical and methodological entry points to understanding the ways in which space, place and other geographical phenomenon are implicated in the crisis.

The intended audience ranges from senior undergraduate students and graduate students to professional academics in geography and a host of related disciplines. The book will also be helpful to policy-makers at various levels in formulating responses, and to general readers interested in learning about the COVID-19 crisis.

• Editors: Simon Shackley, Greet Ruysschaert, Kor Zwart, Bruno Glaser
• Routledge (2020)

This user-friendly book introduces biochar to potential users in the professional sphere. It de-mystifies the scientific, engineering and managerial issues surrounding biochar for the benefit of audiences including policy makers, landowners and farmers, land use, agricultural and environmental managers and consultants, industry and lobby groups and NGOs.

The book reviews state-of-the-art knowledge in an approachable way for the non-scientist, covering all aspects of biochar production, soil science, agriculture, environmental impacts, economics, law and regulation and climate change policy. 

• Edited by Julie Cupples, Marcela Palomino-Schalscha, Manuel Prieto
• Routledge (2020)

The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Development seeks to engage with comprehensive, contemporary, and critical theoretical debates on Latin American development. The volume draws on contributions from across the humanities and social sciences and, unlike earlier volumes of this kind, explicitly highlights the disruptions to the field being brought by a range of anti-capitalist, decolonial, feminist, and ontological intellectual contributions.

With contributions from authors working in Latin America, the US and Canada, Europe, and New Zealand at a range of universities and other organizations, the handbook is an invaluable resource for students and teachers in development studies, Latin American studies, cultural studies, human geography, anthropology, sociology, political science, and economics, as well as for activists and development practitioners.

• Author: Laura Watts
• MIT Press (2019)

In this book, Dr Laura Watts tells a story of making energy futures at the edge of the world.  The islanders on the Scottish Orkney Islands turned to energy innovation when forced to contend with an energy infrastructure they had outgrown. Today, Orkney is home to the European Marine Energy Centre. There are about forty open-sea marine energy test facilities globally, many of which draw on Orkney expertise. 

Mixing storytelling and ethnography, empiricism and lyricism, Laura tells an Orkney energy saga—an account of how the islands are creating their own low-carbon future in the face of the seemingly impossible. The Orkney Islands, Laura shows, are playing a long game, making energy futures for another six thousand years.

• Edited by Julie Cupples and Tom Slater
• Rowman and Littlefield Publishers (2019)

In Mexico City, as in many other large cities worldwide, contemporary modes of urban governance have overwhelmingly benefited affluent populations and widened social inequalities. The urban poor have however negotiated and resisted these developments in a range of ways. This text explores these urban dynamics in Mexico City and beyond, looking at the material and symbolic mechanisms through which urban marginality is produced and contested. It seeks to understand how things might be otherwise, how the city might be geared towards more inclusive forms of belonging and citizenship. 

• Author: Tim Cresswell
• University of Chicago Press (2019)

What is the nature of place, and how does one undertake to write about it? To answer these questions, geographer and poet Tim Cresswell looks to Chicago’s iconic Maxwell Street Market area.Brilliantly interweaving words and images, 'Maxwell Street' sheds light on a historic Chicago neighborhood and offers a new model for how to write about place that will interest anyone in the fields of geography, urban studies, or cultural history.

• "Erudite. . . The rewards are plentiful as Cresswell goes about answering what appears a simple question, 'How to write about a place?', in 200-some provocative pages." (Chicago Tribune)
• “Cresswell offers kaleidoscopes for understanding what ‘place’ can mean. With its richly archived and colorful past, Maxwell Street is the perfect choice for wandering with this geographer, poet, and philosopher." (Gary T. Johnson, president, Chicago History Museum)
• "Cresswell’s wide-ranging, Benjamin-esque discussion of Maxwell Street, its history, its sights, sounds and smells, and of our discipline’s approach to writing and thinking about the concept and the reality of place is fascinating to read. (Cultural Geographies).

• Author: Fraser MacDonald
• Profile Books (2019)

'Escape from Earth' is the untold story of the engineers, dreamers and rebels who started the American space programme. In particular, it is the story of Frank Malina, founder of what became NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the scientist who cracked the, as he called it, 'problem of escape from the Earth by rocket'. Armed with hitherto unpublished letters, journals, and documents from the Malina family archives, Dr Fraser MacDonald reveals what we didn't know.  This is a story of soaring ideals entangled in the most human of complications: infidelity and divorce, betrayal and treason.

• Editors: Mark Rounsevell, Markus Fischer,  Amor Torre-Marin Rando, André Mader
• Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, IPBES (2018)

As information for policymakers , the Regional Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services for Europe and Central Asia produced by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) provides a critical analysis of the state of knowledge regarding the importance, status, and trends of biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people.

The assessment analyses the direct and underlying causes for the observed changes in biodiversity and in nature’s contributions to people, and the impact that these changes have on the quality of life of people. The assessment, finally, identifies a mix of governance options, policies and management practices that are currently available to reduce the loss of biodiversity and of nature’s contributions to people in that region. The assessment addresses terrestrial, freshwater, and coastal biodiversity and covers current status and trends, going back in time several decades, and future projections, with a focus on the 2020-2050 period.

• Edited by Imogen Tyler and Tom Slater
• Sage, Sociological Review Monograph Series (2018)

Stigma is not a self-evident phenomenon but like all concepts has a history. We argue that in order to grasp the role and function of stigma in society, scholarship must develop a richer and fuller understanding of stigma as a cultural and political economy.  This collection has been specifically motivated by: (1) how reconceptualising stigma might assist in developing better understandings of pressing contemporary problems of social decomposition, inequality and injustice; (2) a concern to decolonise the discipline of sociology by interrogating its major theorists and concepts; and (3) a desire to put class struggle and racism at the centre of understandings of stigma as a classificatory form of power.

• Edited by Julie Cupples, Ramón Grosfoguel
• Routledge (2018)

The westernized university is a site where the production of knowledge is embedded in Eurocentric epistemologies that are posited as objective, disembodied and universal and in which non-Eurocentric knowledges, such as black and indigenous ones, are largely marginalized or dismissed.

This book represents a highly timely contribution from both early career and established thinkers in the field. Its themes will be of interest to student activists and to academics and scholars who are seeking to decolonise their research and teaching.

• Authors: Julie Cupples, Kevin Glynn
• Springer (2018)

This book explores the mediated struggles for autonomy, land rights and social justice in a context of growing authoritarianism and persistent coloniality in Nicaragua. To do so, it draws on in-depth fieldwork, analysis of media texts, and decolonial and other cultural theories. 

• ditors: Nils Markusson, Simon Shackley, Benjamin Evar
• Routledge (2012)

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has emerged rapidly as a crucial technological option for decarbonising electricity supply and mitigating climate change. This book is the first to bring together the full range of social and policy issues surrounding CCS shedding new light on this potentially vital technology and its future.  It tackles the many issues in a way that speaks to those concerned not only to understand these developments, but to those who are involved in the scientific and technological work itself, as well as those charged with evaluating and making decisions relevant to the future of the technology.

• Edited by Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, Elvin Wyly
• Routledge (2010)

Gentrification remains a subject of heated debate in the public realm as well as scholarly and policy circles. This Reader brings together the classic writings and contemporary literature that has helped to define the field, changed the direction of how it is studied and illustrated the points of conflict and consensus that are distinctive of gentrification research.With insightful commentary from the editors, who are themselves internationally renowned experts in the field, this is essential reading for students of urban planning, geography, urban studies, sociology and housing studies.

• Authors: Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, Elvin Wyly
• Routledge (2008)

This first textbook on the topic of gentrification is written for upper-level undergraduates in geography, sociology, and planning. The gentrification of urban areas has accelerated across the globe to become a central engine of urban development, and it is a topic that has attracted a great deal of interest in both academia and the popular press. Gentrification presents major theoretical ideas and concepts with case studies, and summaries of the ideas in the book as well as offering ideas for future research.