Book reviews—Comptes Rendus

Themes in medieval history—Aspects de l'histoire du moyen âge

Dianne WATT ed., Medieval Women in their Communities University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1997 ISBN 0–7083–1369–8(Hardback) £30.00 ISBN 0–7083–1361–2(paperback) £14.95.

Chris GIVEN‐WILSON ed., An Illustrated History of Late Medieval England, Manchester University Press, Manchester 1996 xi + 292 pp. ISBN 0–7190–4152‐X £35.00

Themes in Eighteenth‐Century History—Aspects de l'histoire du dix‐huitième siècle

Jeremy BLACK ed., An Illustrated History of Eighteenth‐Century Britain 1688–1793 Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1996, xv + 244 pp. ISBN 0–7190–4267–4. £25.00.

Jeremy BLACK ed., Culture and Society in Britain 1660–1800 Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1997, viii + 199 pp. ISBN 0–7190–4947–4. £35.00.

Themes in Russian History—Aspects de l'histoire Russe

Lionel KOCHAN and John KEEP, The Making of Modern Russia: From Kiev Rus’ to the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Third Edn., Penguin, London, 1997, xii + 603 p., ISBN 0–14–015715–8. £9.99.

Wendy R. SALMOND, Arts and Crafts in Imperial Russia: Reviving the Kustar Art Industries, 1870–1917, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, xv + 270p., ill., ISBN 0–521–41576–4 £50.00.

Morgan Philips PRICE, Dispatches from the Revolution: Russia 1916–1918, Pluto Press, London, 1997, xii + 181 p., ISBN 0–7453–1210–1 £30.00.

John Lewis GADDIS, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, x + 425p., ISBN 0–19–878070–2 £25.00.     

Residential movement among the poor: the constraints on housing choice in Latin American cities

"The paper examines the validity of current theories of intra-city migration, subjecting those theories to the test of explaining new data collected in a total of 13 low-income settlements in three Latin American cities: Bogota, Mexico City, and Valencia, Venezuela. The study focuses attention upon the principal reception points for migrants; the location of previous place of residence for contemporary barrio dwellers; [and] the tenure and dwelling characteristics of previous places of residence. The authors conclude that residential patterns in Latin American cities are less the outcome of migrant choice, as some theories argue, and more the product of constraints imposed upon the land and housing markets."     

Viewpoint: Visibilising Care in the Academy: (Re)Performing Academic Mothering in the Transformative Moment of COVID-19

The effects of COVID-19 have been profoundly felt across higher education as across broader society. In particular, the pandemic has revealed that many of our most stubbornly entrenched inequalities do not simply follow gendered fault lines, but rather care fault lines. In this article, we adopt a maternal epistemology and collaborative witnessing to outline the disruption that academic mothers have experienced during the pandemic. However, we argue that this disruption is not simply obstructive to academic mothers and other caregivers. Rather, COVID-19 has provided a potentially transformative moment for the visibility and normalisation of care in the academy. It has forced the complex negotiation of paid work and care work that academic mothers must constantly manage into the spotlight. The pandemic has provoked an opportunity for a different performance of mothering in the academy; one that does not require us to invisibilise our care to be valued. This (re)performance and revaluation has the potential to reform the cultural landscapes of the academy, towards spaces in which care is reimagined as not simply an encumberment but also an enrichment.     

Outsourcing the Business of Development: The Rise of For-profit Consultancies in the UK Aid Sector

While much attention has been paid to the ways in which the private sector is now embedded within the field of development, one group of actors — for-profit development consultancies and contractors, or service providers — has received relatively little attention. This article analyses the growing role of for-profit consultancies and contractors in British aid delivery, which has been driven by two key trends: first, the outsourcing of managerial, audit and knowledge-management functions as part of efforts to bring private sector approaches and skills into public spending on aid; and second, the reconfiguration of aid spending towards markets and the private sector, and away from locally embedded, state-focused aid programming. The authors argue that both trends were launched under New Labour in the early 2000s, and super-charged under successive Conservative governments. The resulting entanglement means that the policies and practices of the UK government's aid agencies, and the interests and forms of for-profit service providers, are increasingly mutually constitutive. Amongst other implications, this shift acts to displace traditional forms of contestation and accountability of aid delivery.