Books of the Month: February
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Wherever you are in the world and whatever you're interested in, our ‘Books of the Month’ features a broad sample of recent releases authored by University of Liverpool staff. From architecture to business, photography to tourism, there’s something for everyone. The University of Liverpool Library has curated a reading list for Book of the Month which is available and searchable for University of Liverpool staff and students. The newest titles are added at the top of the list for visibility and further information can be found in the notes area.
If you are a member of University staff and would like your new or recent (2023, 2024 & 2025) publication to be featured, please email the details to the Research Communications Team at rescomms@liverpool.ac.uk.
Neurodivergent Youthhoods: Adolescent Rites of Passage, Disability and the Teenage Epilepsy Clinic
Author: Shelda-Jane Smith
Published: August 2023
Adolescent rites of passage are ubiquitous sociocultural processes that feature across all manner of social activity. As transitional healthcare becomes an increasing fixture within paediatric and adolescent healthcare, this book captures how normative, biomedical and psychologised understandings of youth development permeate social life.
Through an in-depth institutional ethnography of a UK teenage epilepsy clinic, Shelda-Jane Smith shows how the prevailing social expectation of transforming from a dependent child into an independent, self-sufficient adult becomes the organising principle of clinical care.
Interrogating the everyday work of the clinic and the experiences of parental and professional caregivers, Smith explores how the move from paediatric to adult healthcare gets renegotiated in the context of severe and profound learning disabilities, questioning what happens to transitional processes when young people do not conform to the social standards and expectations of youthhood that are placed upon them.
From exploring the fervent application of neuro-psychological developmental models to interrogating expectations of individual independence, Smith draws from the disciplines of Science and Technology Studies, Critical Psychology and Disability Studies and Medical Anthropology to provide an invaluable lens for unpacking the underlying assumptions and tensions of care provision when young people do not emerge into adulthood in socially expected ways.
Shelda-Jane Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Geography and Planning in the School of Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science and Engineering at University of Liverpool.
Researching Street-level Bureaucracy: Bringing Out the Interpretive Dimensions
Author: Mike Rowe
Published: 2025
Police officers, social workers, teachers, and many other street-level bureaucrats exercise discretion in dealing with clients. In so doing, they make policy as it is experienced at the frontline. Instead of puzzling at repeated public policy implementation failures and wondering why street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) don’t behave the way policy-makers expect, we need to understand the world as seen from the ground. This short and practical text explores the value of interpretive analysis for researching street-level bureaucracy.
Using Michael Lipsky’s (1980) idea of SLB and connecting it to contemporary debates, Mike Rowe argues for an approach to researching SLBs that focuses on dilemmas in practice, ones that change with each policy shift, each new target, with austerity, and with new technology such that no settled state is likely. He places emphasis on the need to understand the ways SLBs respond to pressures in order to work with them and to understand what policy becomes in practice. Street-level bureaucrats and their clients are engaged in a process of sense-making.
Researching Street-level Bureaucracy is not just an essential resource for teachers and students of Master's and Doctoral programs in Public Administration, Public Policy, Social Work, and Criminal Justice, it is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the structural pressures that bear on the individual and how any change to the dilemmas confronted might play out at the street-level.
Mike Rowe is a Senior Lecturer in Public Sector Management, School lead for Undergraduate Recruitment, Admissions and Widening Participation Work, Organisation and Management, in the School of Management, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at University of Liverpool.
Rural History of Soviet Central Asia: Land Reform and Agricultural Change in Early Soviet Uzbekistan
Series: Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 8 Uralic & Central Asian Studies, Volume: 31
Author: Beatrice Penati
Published: December 2024
In the mid-1920s, Uzbekistan’s countryside experienced a ‘land reform’, which aimed at solving rural poverty and satisfying radical fringes among peasants and Party, while sustaining agricultural output, especially for cotton. This book analyses the decision-making process underpinning the reform, its implementation, and economic and social effects. The reform must be understood against the background of the wreckage caused by war and revolution and linked to subsequent policies of ‘land organisation’ and regime-sponsored ‘class struggle’.
Overall, this is the first comprehensive account of early Soviet policy in Central Asia’s agricultural heartland, encompassing land rights, irrigation, credit, resettlement, and the co-operative system.
Beatrice Penati is a Senior Lecturer in Russian and Eurasian History
History at the School of Histories, Languages and Cultures, in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at University of Liverpool.