We are accepting book proposals for the imprint The Social Sciences.
Common Ground is setting new standards of rigorous academic knowledge creation and scholarly publication.
Unlike other publishers, we’re not interested in the size of potential markets or competition from other books. We’re only interested in the intellectual quality of the work.
If your book is a brilliant contribution to a specialist area of knowledge that only serves a small intellectual community, we still want to publish it. If it is expansive and has a broad appeal, we want to publish it too, but only if it is of the highest intellectual quality.
As part of the process of publishing The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences all submissions are sent for peer refereeing, prior to publication. Assessment, comments and guidance by the referees are an essential part of the publication process and invaluable to the authors of the submitted papers.
In recognition of the important role of referees, the international advisory board acknowledges all referees who have refereed papers as an ‘Associate Editor’ in the volume of the journal they have contributed to.
If you would like to referee papers submitted to The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, please email journals@thesocialsciences.com, with your professional details, areas of expertise and contact details. If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for papers within your expertise, we will contact you.
Where Are You From? Voices in Transition edited by Margaret Kumar, Heather D’Cruz and Niranjala Weerakkody is now available from The Social Sciences imprint.
Where are you from? Voices in Transition records the diverse recollections and reflections of fourteen Asian Australian women about the question ‘where are you from?’ posed to them and assumptions about their identity made by different people at different times, locations and contexts. The book examines why in the globalised world we live in today, it is not always possible to label or describe a person as having one specific cultural or national identity as they are expected to do by those asking the question.
‘… The question, ‘where are you from?’ can serve a function of demanding an explanation from minority groups about how they belong to a particular community, and whether they even have right to do so. A person who is assumed to belong to the dominant group is seldom asked this question.
The essays in this wonderful volume provide personal narratives of how issues of identity and belonging are negotiated in ways that are always complex and difficult, even painful and haunting, but also creative and playful. They show how answers to the question, ‘where are you from?’ are never uniformly and predictably available, but require telling of personal histories, cultural traditions and professional aspirations but are also continually reshaped by new cultural experiences and exchange. We interpret new experiences in a variety of ways that involve not only particular historical understandings but also acts of imagination that are always a product of a range of factors, both historical and social, as well as political and strategic.’
(Professor Fazal Rizvi, Foreword to Where are you from? Voices in Transition.)
Tug of War by Tony English is now available from The Social Sciences imprint.
Tony English wrote Tug of War for negotiation experts and others who might be interested in a fresh analytical method which draws on the literature of negotiation but delves into many other disciplines, including international relations, fine arts, philosophy, management, anthropology and psychology. The book focuses on international negotiation but is relevant to negotiation in general. Tony interviewed many veteran negotiators in diplomacy, hostage release and business. He weaves the rich character, skills and experience of individual veterans into the book, and presents two cases in fine detail.
The informants include: Hugh Davies, lead British negotiator for the return of Hong Kong to China; Sir Alan Donald, British Ambassador to China and several other countries; Terry Waite, of Beirut kidnap fame; Meg McDonald, Australian Ambassador for the Environment and team leader for the greenhouse gas negotiations at Kyoto; Malcolm Lyon, Australia’s lead negotiator for the Torres Strait Treaty with Papua New Guinea; Don Kenyon, Australian Ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg and the European Union, and former Chairman of the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body; Doug Anderson, Managing Director of P & O Ports; Sam Passow, Research Director of London’s Centre for Dispute Resolution; Geoff Goon, a major exporter of fruit and vegetables from Australia to the Middle East; Steven Hochman and Kirk Wolcott, dispute resolution advisers to President Jimmy Carter; and a few others who needed anonymity. Tony also draws on his own experience in several countries.
At the core of the book is the tension, which comprises complementary phenomena, both physical and abstract, that compete for influence over our behaviour. Profuse forces generate tensions. Tony presents a model of negotiation context that comprises tensions and the forces generating them. Expert negotiators are expert tension managers and therefore have high ‘contextual intelligence’, a variation on Robert Sternberg’s concept of Successful Intelligence in cognitive psychology. Tony links contextual intelligence with seven traits identified in his veterans. Some writers refer to the tension but neglect its nuances and miss its generic value in analyzing negotiations and other human activity as people try to impose manageable order on chaotic information. We are all tension managers, whether or not we are aware of it.
Community Development Practice: Stories, Method, Meaning edited by Ann Ingamells, Athena Lathouras, Ross Wiseman, Peter Westoby and Fiona Caniglia is available from The Social Sciences imprint.
Thankfully, another publication from the creative Queensland Community Development ‘crowd’…Indeed, what would we do without them in a rather sedate and seemingly stagnant Australian publishing landscape in so far as Community Development is concerned…? What I most particularly appreciate is the editors’ and contributors’ ongoing attempts at creating ‘living theory’ informed by their ongoing practice and their holding on to the spiritual, democratic, relational and dialogical principles for which their work has become known. The book therewith documents its authors’ continuing attempts at developing good practical and reflective support for their ongoing social change efforts, something our local community development scene could very well do with…
Jacques Boulet, editor New Community Quarterly.
Congratulations to Sean M. Clark, the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the area of interdisciplinary social sciences for his paper Revealing Clio’s Secrets: The Case for Historical Macromeasurement
Abstract: An excessive focus on methodological training and recent case studies has left political scientists woefully ignorant of work done by scholars in other fields, particularly that of economic historians and historical demographers. Most glaringly, political science has missed the emergence of ‘cliodynamics,’ or the novel attempt to fashion broad historical trends into consistently measurable data over great lengths of time. I therefore not only submit a comprehensive survey of the population, economy, and conflict research offered by historiographers, but also explain how this data can be harnessed by political science.
If you have read the paper you may wish to add a review.
Congratulations to all of the Award Winner finalists:
Maria Chong Abdullah, Habibah Elias, Rahil Mahyuddin and Jegak Uli: The Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Adjustment Amongst First Year Students in a Malaysian Public University
Helen Joanna Boon, Stephen Tobias, Bernhard T. Baune, Tarun Sen Gupta and Lee Kennedy: Ars Cooperativa Naturae. Ethical Contingencies Across Medicine and Education: A Case Study
Chris Braddock: Sympathetic Magic and Contemproary Art: Stanley J. Tambiah’s Persuasive Analogy in Ritual Performance (to be included in an upcoming issue)
D. Burcu Egilmez: The Politics of the Turkish Gecekondu (Slum) Dwellers: A Case Study on the Izmir Kurucesme District
Joseph Galbo: Ethnographies of Empire and Resistance: “Wilderness” and the “Vanishing Indian” in Alexis de Tocqueville’s “A Fortnight in the Wilderness” and John Tanner’s “Narrative of Captivity”
Barbara J. Kampa and Raphael Nawrotzki: Assisting and Protecting Refugee Women: A Policy Analysis
Fazil Najafi, Sofia Vidalis, Kim Munksgaard and Matthew Diamond: Effective Environmental Policy toward Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions Produced from Transportation (to be included in an upcoming issue)
Amla Salleh, Zahara Aziz, Abd. Aziz Mahyuddin and Zuria Mahmud: How do Malaysian Adolescent Children Perceive their Fathers’ Involvement in their Parenting?
Krista Sigler: Great Expectations: Advertising and the Problem of Consumer Capitalism in Late Imerial Russia, 1905-1917
Children’s Participation? Learning from Children and Adults in the Asia-Pacific Region edited by Jan Mason, Natalie Bolzan and Anil Kumar is available from The Social Sciences imprint.
This edited book is the result of collaboration between five countries in the Asia Pacific Region. It is auspiced by Childwatch International, a global research network.
It explores the socio-cultural context of children’s participation in the five countries, in response to the obligations on these countries, as signatories to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. While the legal mandating of participation has significant implications for children’s lives and adult-child relations, research in this area has been limited, particularly cross culturally.
Views from the Inside: Participant Perspectives on Community Leadership by Joy Murray, Jodi-Lee Rash, Rej Creaton, Peter Cooley and Donna McClelland is available from The Social Sciences imprint.
This book tells five stories of a three-year leadership capacity building program designed for residents of government housing estates in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs. It tells its stories through the voices of the project leader and four participants. While the project leader explains the workings of the project each of the participants tells how it fitted into their life-story. They talk of their childhood and growing up and sometimes precarious survival at the poor end of town.
The four insider stories are set beside the program’s intentions as seen by government funding body and program managers, and the philosophical understanding that underpinned the program leader’s actions.
In so doing the book explores the relationship between: one person’s theory; a community development program in practice; and real life experience. It does this not through a voice of authority commenting on people’s lived experience and attempting to relate this to the theory, but by showing what the program meant to the project leader and what it meant to each of the four participants. It tries to demonstrate, but not explain, how these disparate meanings connected, or otherwise, with the theory that the project leader believed she was applying; and how in the end all knowledge is personal, built up over a life time and stitched together with the threads of our relationships in whatever environment we happen to inhabit.
Common Ground Publishing has launched the new imprint The Social Sciences.
There is a selection of books already published and available in the bookstore:
You can now submit proposals or completed manuscript submissions of:
Books should be between 30,000 words and 150,000 words in length. They will be published simultaneously in print and electronic formats.
Voices from the Coalface: Practitioner Perspectives on the Challenges of Community-Based Work edited by John R. Owen and Freidoon Khavarpour is available from The Social Sciences imprint.
Across Australia the field of social and community-based work is undergoing a significant push toward professionalisation. One only needs to look at the level of tertiary interest in these fields, and the saturation of university courses, to get a sense of this phenomenon. In addition to various units where “practice” and the operations of community-based work are of central concern, a majority of Australian universities and TAFE institutes now offer as a core part of their programs an intensive period of fieldwork practice. However, there are few, if any, books where students and teachers can explore the actual experience of practice in the field. This arises from two fairly obvious conditions. First, that practice is something that cannot be easily rendered into writing. Second, that practice is typically recorded by academics in a scholarly way or conveyed by practitioners either in the course of their doing, or in the compilation of case studies and in the reflective stages of evaluation. Continue reading ‘Voices from the Coalface’
The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, Volume 3 is complete.
Papers of interest in Volume 3 include:
With more than 250 papers, published over 12 issues, in Volume 3 there are too many interesting papers for us to mention here. Please have a look through the
online bookstore for papers which may be of interest to you.
Youth Identity and Migration: Culture, Values and Social Connectedness edited by Fethi Mansouri has now been published.
The key objective of this book is to explore identity and wellbeing among young people from migrant and refugee backgrounds. The chapters collectively explore some of the most critical issues in research into second-generation migrants, namely identity formation, social connectedness and the role of social policy and intervention in dealing with these complex issues.
The book also focuses on the problematised nature of certain migrant groups, such as Muslim youth in the West. The book consists of thirteen chapters organised around three broad thematic sections, namely: migrant youth identity and social connectedness, focusing on cultural adaptation and wellbeing among migrant youth; global and educational perspectives on the social experiences of migrant youth, focusing in particular on comparative insights from Australia, France and the US; and the interaction of migrant youth with new media and its implications for social connectedness.
Migrant Workers & Ethnic Communities - Their Struggles for Social Justice & Cultural Rights: The Role of Greek-Australians by George Zangalis is now available.
The ACTU President, Sharan Burrow in her foreword described the work as a “unique contribution to Australian history - lens on union and labour history offers a rich understanding of how multiculturalism developed within a working class environment, through our workplaces, ethnic and migrant associations, our inner city schools and, indeed, the influence on public policy”.
Dr Michael Tsounis, the doyen of Greek-Australian historians, in his foreword writes: “This study adds a new chapter in understanding the development of Australia as a multi-ethnic and multicultural society… and the role played by Greek-Australians”. The book has several chapters on the history and role of Ethnic Community Councils, Ethnic Affairs Commissions, Ethnic Affairs Ministries and Departments.
Congratulations to Joleen Steyn-Kotze, the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the area of interdisciplinary social sciences.
Joleen Steyn-Kotze’s paper, An Overdue Appraisal: The Need to Rethink Democracy Theory, can be accessed in the online bookstore: http://iji.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.88/prod.629
Paper abstract: This paper is rooted in democracy and transformative theories as it attempts to identify issues surrounding democracy theory in order to determine whether there is a need to review democracy theory as it stands today. The central purpose of democratic consolidation theory is to determine what will ensure stability and deepening of democracy in emerging democracies. It is widely accepted that democratic consolidation theory centre on conditions that are most conducive to political stability and as such attempt to identify the conditions conducive for political stability. These conditions relate to institutions and regime performance in general. There are however fundamental flaws with democratic consolidation theory. The paper will explore the need to re-evaluate theory in order to obtain a more inclusive interpretation of reality. In essence, theory seems to be missing the point in practice, especially in non-Western contexts.
Some papers of interest which were published in Volume 3 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences include those published by plenary presenters at the conference:
Area Studies versus Disciplines: Towards an Interdisciplinary, Systemic Country Approach by Hans Kuijper.
Space Conceptualisation in the Context of Postmodernity: Theorizing Spatial Representation by Constantine D. Skordoulis and Eugenia Arvanitis.
Paper submissions are now open for Volume 4 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences.
You will first need to submit a presentation proposal for the conference as either an attending or virtual participant. If accepted you will be able to submit your full paper for refereeing and possible publication in the Journal.
Please check the submission guidelines prior to submitting your paper.
