Reading the Riot Act: Reflections on the 2011 urban disorders in England

This lively collection presents a multi-disciplinary, multi-perspectival commentary explaining the what, where, and how of the riots that the austerity-hit UK experienced during the long, hot summer of 2011. It looks beyond London and its Tottenham district where disturbances started, to locations such as Manchester and Birmingham. Parallels are drawn with Cairo during the period of the Arab spring, and even with the Star Wars saga. The book locates the riots in historical context by looking at the previous UK riots of 1981 and 2001, looking at how news cycles and concepts such as that of ‘moral panic’ have changed in the age of social networking. It is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary debates in social policy, media studies, anthropology sociology, cultural studies, and human geography. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal for Cultural Research.

Rupa Huq was Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Kingston University, UK, from 2004 until her election as Labour MP for Ealing Central and Acton in May 2015. Her previous books include Beyond Subculture: youth, pop and identity in a postcolonial world (Routledge, 2006) and Making Sense of Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, 2013).