Archive for the 'Books' Category

Where Are You From?

Published on May 18, 2010 in Books and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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

Published on April 14, 2010 in Books and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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.

Children’s Participation?

Published on January 15, 2010 in Books. 0 Comments

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.

How Messy It All Is

Published on October 29, 2009 in Books. 0 Comments

From David Runciman, The London Review of Books

The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

The argument of this fascinating and deeply provoking book is easy to summarise: among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can imagine. They do worse even if they are richer overall, so that per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population (the basic measure of inequality the authors use). The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to make their case is overwhelming.

Read more here…

Views from the Inside

Published on October 14, 2009 in Books. 0 Comments

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.

Voices from the Coalface

Published on May 8, 2009 in Books. 0 Comments

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’

Youth Identity and Migration

Published on April 30, 2009 in Books. 0 Comments

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.