Authors & editors
ANU Press has collaborated with a diverse range of authors and editors across a wide variety of academic disciplines. Browse the ANU Press collection by author or editor.
Popular Music, Stars and Stardom »
Publication date: June 2018
A popular fascination with fame and stardom has existed in Western culture since the late eighteenth century; a fascination that, in the twenty‑first century, reaches into almost every facet of public life. The pervasive nature of stardom in modern society demands study from the perspectives of a range of distinct but thematically connected disciplines. The exploration of intersections between broader considerations of stardom and the discourses of popular music studies is the genesis for this volume. The chapters collected here demonstrate the variety of work currently being undertaken in stardom studies by scholars in Australia. The contributions range from biographical considerations of the stars of popular music, contributions to critical discourses of stardom in the industry more broadly, and the various ways in which the use of astronomical metaphors, in both cultural commentary and academic discourse, demonstrate notions of stardom firmly embedded in popular music thought. Not only do these chapters represent a range of perspectives on popular music, stars and stardom, they provide eloquent and innovative contributions to the developing discourse on stardom in popular music.
East Asia Forum Quarterly: Volume 10, Number 2, 2018 »
Publication date: June 2018
East Asia Forum Quarterly grew out of East Asia Forum (EAF) online, which has developed a reputation for providing a platform for the best in Asian analysis, research and policy comment on the Asia Pacific region in world affairs. EAFQ aims to provide a further window onto research in the leading research institutes in Asia and to provide expert comment on current developments within the region. The East Asia Forum Quarterly, like East Asia Forum online, is an initiative of the East Asia Forum (EAF) and its host organisation, the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research (EABER) in the Crawford School of Economics and Government in the College of Asia & the Pacific at The Australian National University.
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Australian Native Title Anthropology »
Strategic practice, the law and the state
Authored by: Kingsley Palmer
Publication date: May 2018
The Australian Federal Native Title Act 1993 marked a revolution in the recognition of the rights of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. The legislation established a means whereby Indigenous Australians could make application to the Federal Court for the recognition of their rights to traditional country. The fiction that Australia was terra nullius (or ‘void country’), which had prevailed since European settlement, was overturned. The ensuing legal cases, mediated resolutions and agreements made within the terms of the Native Title Act quickly proved the importance of having sound, scholarly and well-researched anthropology conducted with claimants so that the fundamentals of the claims made could be properly established. In turn, this meant that those opposing the claims would also benefit from anthropological expertise.
This is a book about the practical aspects of anthropology that are relevant to the exercise of the discipline within the native title context. The engagement of anthropology with legal process, determined by federal legislation, raises significant practical as well as ethical issues that are explored in this book. It will be of interest to all involved in the native title process, including anthropologists and other researchers, lawyers and judges, as well as those who manage the claim process. It will also be relevant to all who seek to explore the role of anthropology in relation to Indigenous rights, legislation and the state.
The Contest for Aboriginal Souls »
European missionary agendas in Australia
Authored by: Regina Ganter
Publication date: May 2018
This book covers the missionary activity in Australia conducted by non-English speaking missionaries from Catholic and Protestant mission societies from its beginnings to the end of the mission era. It looks through the eyes of the missionaries and their helpers, as well as incorporating Indigenous perspectives and offering a balanced assessment of missionary endeavour in Australia, attuned to the controversies that surround mission history. It means neither to condemn nor praise, but rather to understand the various responses of Indigenous communities, the intentions of missionaries, the agendas of the mission societies and the many tensions besetting the mission endeavour. It explores a common commitment to the supernatural and the role of intermediaries like local diplomats and evangelists from the Pacific Islands and Philippines, and emphasises the strong role played by non-English speakers in the transcultural Australian mission effort.
This book is a companion to the website German Missionaries in Australia – A web-directory of intercultural encounters. The web-directory provides detailed accounts of Australian missions staffed with German speakers. The book reads laterally across the different missions and produces a completely different type of knowledge about missions. The book and its accompanying website are based on a decade of research ranging across mission archives with foreign-language sources that have not previously been accessed for a historiography of Australian missions.
‘A remarkable intellectual achievement, compelling reading.’
— Dr Niel Gunson
‘The range of knowledge on display here is very impressive indeed.’
— Professor Peter Monteath
The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones »
Pacific Islands Perspectives
Edited by: Robert J. Foster, Heather A. Horst
Publication date: May 2018
The moral economy of mobile phones implies a field of shifting relations among consumers, companies and state actors, all of whom have their own ideas about what is good, fair and just. These ideas inform the ways in which, for example, consumers acquire and use mobile phones; companies promote and sell voice, SMS and data subscriptions; and state actors regulate both everyday use of mobile phones and market activity around mobile phones. Ambivalence and disagreement about who owes what to whom is thus an integral feature of the moral economy of mobile phones. This volume identifies and evaluates the stakes at play in the moral economy of mobile phones. The six main chapters consider ethnographic cases from Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Vanuatu. The volume also includes a brief introduction with background information on the recent ‘digital revolution’ in these countries and two closing commentaries that reflect on the significance of the chapters for our understanding of global capitalism and the contemporary Pacific.
Agenda - A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform: Volume 25, Number 1, 2018 »
Edited by: William Coleman
Publication date: May 2018
Agenda is a refereed, ECONLIT-indexed and RePEc-listed journal of the College of Business and Economics, The Australian National University. Launched in 1994, Agenda provides a forum for debate on public policy, mainly (but not exclusively) in Australia and New Zealand. It deals largely with economic issues but gives space to social and legal policy and also to the moral and philosophical foundations and implications of policy.
Subscribe to the Agenda Alerting service if you wish to be advised on forthcoming or new issues.
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International Review of Environmental History: Volume 4, Issue 1, 2018 »
Edited by: James Beattie
Publication date: May 2018
International Review of Environmental History takes an interdisciplinary and global approach to environmental history. It encourages scholars to think big and to tackle the challenges of writing environmental histories across different methodologies, nations, and time-scales. The journal embraces interdisciplinary, comparative and transnational methods, while still recognising the importance of locality in understanding these global processes.
The journal’s goal is to be read across disciplines, not just within history. It publishes on all thematic and geographic topics of environmental history, but especially encourage articles with perspectives focused on or developed from the southern hemisphere and the ‘global south’.
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Focality and Extension in Kinship »
Essays in Memory of Harold W. Scheffler
Edited by: Warren Shapiro
Publication date: April 2018
When we think of kinship, we usually think of ties between people based upon blood or marriage. But we also have other ways—nowadays called ‘performative’—of establishing kinship, or hinting at kinship: many Christians have, in addition to parents, godparents; members of a trade union may refer to each other as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’. Similar performative ties are even more common among the so-called ‘tribal’ peoples that anthropologists have studied and, especially in recent years, they have received considerable attention from scholars in this field. However, these scholars tend to argue that performative kinship in the Tribal World is semantically on a par with kinship established through procreation and marriage. Harold Scheffler, long-time Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, has argued, by contrast, that procreative ties are everywhere semantically central, i.e. focal, that they provide bases from which other kinship ties are extended. Most of the essays in this volume illustrate the validity of Scheffler’s position, though two contest it, and one exemplifies the soundness of a similarly universalistic stance in gender behaviour. This book will be of interest to everyone concerned with current controversy in kinship and gender studies, as well as those who would know what anthropologists have to say about human nature.
“The study of kinship once ruled the discipline of anthropology, and Hal Scheffler was one of its magisterial figures. This volumes reminds us why. Scheffler’s powerful analyses of kinship systems often conflicted with the views of his more relativist contemporaries. He cut through the fog of theory to emphasise the human essentials, namely the importance of the social bonds rooted in motherhood and fatherhood. Anthropology in its decades-long retreat from the serious study of kinship has lost a great deal. This volume points the way to a restoration.”
— Peter Wood, National Association of Scholars
Expressions of Austronesian Thought and Emotions »
Edited by: James J. Fox
Publication date: April 2018
This collection of papers is the seventh volume in the Comparative Austronesian series. The papers in this volume focus on societies from Sumatra to Melanesia and examine the expression and patterning of Austronesian thought and emotions.
The Quest for the Good Life in Precarious Times »
Ethnographic Perspectives on the Domestic Moral Economy
Edited by: Chris Gregory, Jon Altman
Publication date: April 2018
The study of the quest for the good life and the morality and value it presupposes is not new. To the contrary, this is an ancient issue; its intellectual history can be traced back to Aristotle. In anthropology, the study of morality and value has always been a central concern, despite the claim of some scholars that the recent upsurge of interest in these issues is new. What is novel is how scholars in many disciplines are posing the value question in new ways. The global economic alignments of the present pose many political, moral and theoretical questions, but the central issue the essays in this collection address is: how do relatively poor people of the Australia–Pacific region survive in current precarious times? In looking to answer this question, contributors directly engage the values and concepts of their interlocutors. At a time when understanding local implications of global processes is taking on new urgency, these essays bring finely honed anthropological perspectives to matters of universal human concern—they offer radical empirical critique based on intensive fieldwork that will be of great interest to those seeking to comprehend the bigger picture.
Vietnam’s Post-1975 Agrarian Reforms »
How local politics derailed socialist agriculture in southern Vietnam
Authored by: Trung Dang
Publication date: April 2018
This book investigates why collectivised farming failed in south Vietnam after 1975. Despite the strong will of the new regime to implement collectivisation, the effort was uneven, misapplied and subverted. After only 10 years of trying, the regime annulled the policy. Focusing on two case studies—Quảng Nam province in the Central Coast region and An Giang province in the Mekong Delta—and based on extensive evidence, this study argues that the reasons for variations in implementation and the failure and reversal of the policy were twofold: regional differences and local politics.
Prosperity »
Edited by: Jane Golley, Linda Jaivin
Publication date: April 2018
A ‘moderately prosperous society’ with no Chinese individual left behind—that’s the vision for China set out by Chinese President Xi Jinping in a number of important speeches in 2017. ‘Moderate’ prosperity may seem like a modest goal for a country with more billionaires (609 at last count) than the US. But the ‘China Story’ is a complex one. The China Story Yearbook 2017: Prosperity surveys the important events, pronouncements, and personalities that defined 2017. It also presents a range of perspectives, from the global to the individual, the official to the unofficial, from mainland China to Hong Kong and Taiwan. Together, the stories present a richly textured portrait of a nation that in just forty years has lifted itself from universal poverty to (unequally distributed) wealth, changing itself and the world in the process.
Gilded Age »
Made in China Yearbook 2017
Edited by: Ivan Franceschini, Nicholas Loubere
Publication date: April 2018
According to the Chinese zodiac, 2017 was the year of the ‘fire rooster’, an animal often associated with the mythical fenghuang, a magnificently beautiful bird whose appearance is believed to mark the beginning of a new era of peaceful flourishing. Considering the auspicious symbolism surrounding the fenghuang, it is fitting that on 18 October 2017, President Xi Jinping took to the stage of the Nineteenth Party Congress to proclaim the beginning of a ‘new era’ for Chinese socialism. However, in spite of such ecumenical proclamations, it became immediately evident that not all in China would be welcome to reap the rewards promised by the authorities. Migrant workers, for one, remain disposable. Lawyers, activists and even ordinary citizens who dare to express critical views also hardly find a place in Xi’s brave new world. This Yearbook traces the stark new ‘gilded age’ inaugurated by the Chinese Communist Party. It does so through a collection of more than 40 original essays on labour, civil society and human rights in China and beyond, penned by leading scholars and practitioners from around the world.
Skin, Kin and Clan »
The dynamics of social categories in Indigenous Australia
Publication date: April 2018
Australia is unique in the world for its diverse and interlocking systems of Indigenous social organisation. On no other continent do we see such an array of complex and contrasting social arrangements, coordinated through a principle of ‘universal kinship’ whereby two strangers meeting for the first time can recognise one another as kin. For some time, Australian kinship studies suffered from poor theorisation and insufficient aggregation of data. The large-scale AustKin project sought to redress these problems through the careful compilation of kinship information. Arising from the project, this book presents recent original research by a range of authors in the field on the kinship and social category systems in Australia. A number of the contributions focus on reconstructing how these systems originated and developed over time. Others are concerned with the relationship between kinship and land, the semantics of kin terms and the dynamics of kin interactions.
Opening Government »
Transparency and Engagement in the Information Age
Edited by: John Wanna, Sam Vincent
Publication date: April 2018
Transparency and citizen engagement remain essential to good government and sound public policy. Indeed, they may well be the key to restoring trust in government itself, currently at an all-time low in Australia. It is ironic, then, that this has occurred at a time when the technological potential for information dissemination and interaction has never been greater.
Opening Government: Transparency and Engagement in the Information Age explores new horizons and scenarios for better governance in the context of the new information age, focusing on the potentials and pitfalls for governments (and governance more broadly) operating in the new, information-rich environment. Its contributors, a range of international and Australian governance academics and practitioners, ask what are the challenges to our governing traditions and practices in the new information age, and where can better outcomes be expected using future technologies. They explore the fundamental ambiguities extant in opening up government, with governments intending to become far more transparent in providing information and in information sharing, but also more motivated to engage with other data sources, data systems and social technologies.
Double Disillusion »
The 2016 Australian Federal Election
Publication date: April 2018
This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the 2016 Australian federal election. Won by the Liberal–National Coalition by the slimmest of margins, the result created a climate of political uncertainty that threatened the government’s lower house majority. While the campaign might have lacked the theatre of previous elections, it provides significant insights into the contemporary political and policy challenges facing Australian democracy and society today.
In this, the 16th edited collection of Australian election studies, 41 contributors from a range of disciplines bring an unprecedented depth of expertise to the 2016 contest. The book covers the context, key battles and issues in the campaign, and reports and analyses the results in detail. It provides an evaluation of the role of political actors such as the parties, independents, the media, interest groups and GetUp!, and examines election debate in the online space. Experts from a range of policy fields provide an analysis of election issues ranging from the economy and industrial relations to social policy, the environment, and gender and sexuality. Each of the chapters is written on the basis of in‑depth and original research, providing new insights into this important political event.
Made in China Journal: Volume 3, Issue 1, 2018 »
Publication date: March 2018
On 12 May 2008, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake hit Wenchuan county, Sichuan province. Felt as far as Beijing, the tremors caused horrific damage: 69,229 people died and 17,923 went missing. Yet, the aftermath of the seism was also a time of hope—with Chinese citizens from all over the country outdoing each other to show solidarity with the victims. As local governments began to recognise the importance of NGOs in providing disaster relief and social services, 2008 was widely seen as a ‘Year Zero’ for Chinese civil society. At that time, hardly anybody could have foreseen the wave of repression against civil society that was to come and that is today the norm. This issue looks back at the legacy of this disaster, and the ways in which state and civil society actors renegotiate their positions during ‘states of emergency’.
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Between the Plough and the Pick »
Informal, artisanal and small-scale mining in the contemporary world
Edited by: Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt
Publication date: March 2018
Between the Plough and the Pick deepens our understanding of informal, artisanal and small-scale mining, popularly known as ASM. The book engages with wider scholarly conceptualisations of contemporary global social, agrarian and political changes, whilst underlining the roles that local social‑political-historical contexts play in shaping mineral extractive processes and practices. It shows that the people who are engaged in these mining practices are often the poorest and most exploited labourers—erstwhile peasants caught in the vortex of global change, who perform the most insecure and dangerous tasks. Although these people are located at the margins of mainstream economic life, they collectively produce enormous amounts of diverse material commodities and find a livelihood (and often a pathway out of oppressive poverty).
The contributions to this book bring these people to the forefront of debates on resource politics. The contributors are international scholars and practitioners who explore the complexities in the histories, in labour and production practices, the forces driving such mining, the creative agency and capacities of these miners, as well as the human and environmental costs of ASM. They show how these informal, artisanal and small‑scale miners are inextricably engaged with, or bound to, global commodity values, are intimately involved in the production of new extractive territories and rural economies, and how their labour reshapes agrarian communities and landscapes of resource access and control.
This book drives home the understanding that, collectively, this social and economic milieu redefines our conceptualisation of resource politics, mineral‑dependent livelihoods, extractive geographies of resources and commodities, and their multiple meanings.
Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development »
Critical Conversations
Publication date: March 2018
Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development engages with the possibilities and pitfalls of the increasingly popular notion of hybridity. The hybridity concept has been embraced by scholars and practitioners in response to the social and institutional complexities of peacebuilding and development practice. In particular, the concept appears well-suited to making sense of the mutually constitutive outcomes of processes of interaction between diverse norms, institutions, actors and discourses in the context of contemporary peacebuilding and development engagements. At the same time, it has been criticised from a variety of perspectives for overlooking critical questions of history, power and scale. The authors in this interdisciplinary collection draw on their in‑depth knowledge of peacebuilding and development contexts in different parts of Asia, the Pacific and Africa to examine the messy and dynamic realities of hybridity ‘on the ground’. By critically exploring the power dynamics, and the diverse actors, ideas, practices and sites that shape hybrid peacebuilding and development across time and space, this book offers fresh insights to hybridity debates that will be of interest to both scholars and practitioners.
‘Hybridity has become an influential idea in peacebuilding and this volume will undoubtedly become the most influential collection on the idea. Nuance and sophistication characterises this engagement with hybridity.’
— Professor John Braithwaite
East Asia Forum Quarterly: Volume 10, Number 1, 2018 »
Publication date: March 2018
East Asia Forum Quarterly grew out of East Asia Forum (EAF) online, which has developed a reputation for providing a platform for the best in Asian analysis, research and policy comment on the Asia Pacific region in world affairs. EAFQ aims to provide a further window onto research in the leading research institutes in Asia and to provide expert comment on current developments within the region. The East Asia Forum Quarterly, like East Asia Forum online, is an initiative of the East Asia Forum (EAF) and its host organisation, the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research (EABER) in the Crawford School of Economics and Government in the College of Asia & the Pacific at The Australian National University.
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Land Use in Australia »
Past, Present and Future
Edited by: Richard Thackway
Publication date: February 2018
Land Use in Australia: Past, Present and Future, is a compilation of invited chapters from Australia’s leading specialists in land use policy and planning and land management.
Chapters present many widely recognised issues involved in Australia’s land use policy and planning, including limited understanding and poor awareness of:
the rich history of poor decisions on land use planning and management across different levels of government
the discontinuities between providers of national biophysical information
the tools, data and information to improve national land use decision-making outcomes
the poor synthesis and integration between science to policy to natural resource management and resource condition
the benefits of land use practitioners engaging in connection, cooperation, mutual inquiry and collective social learnings.
The aims of the book are threefold: 1) provide a review of the current status of land use policy and planning in Australia; 2) provide a resource to inform and influence the development of land use policy and planning; and 3) provide a sound contribution to Australia’s public–private land use debates in the future.
The audience for the book includes government and non-government land management agencies from state and national bodies, universities and researchers.
China's New Sources of Economic Growth: Vol. 1 (Chinese version) »
改革、资源能源与气候变化
Edited by: 宋 立刚, Ross Garnaut, 蔡 昉, Lauren Johnston
Publication date: February 2018
本书针对近年来中国经济增速的下滑，从供给侧角度出发，探讨中国如何启动经 济增长的新源泉，论证了通过改革进一步提高劳动生产率的重要性。全书分为两个部 分，第一部分为“改革与宏观经济发展”，主要内容包括宏观经济的展望、新经济增 长模式、新型城镇化、互联网金融的发展、供给侧结构性改革、中国的全球投资、农 民工的储蓄与消费行为、证券市场的泡沫检验、企业层面的杠杆率与去杠杆进程等；第二部分为“资源、能源、环境与气候变化”，主要内容包括中国低碳城市发展、能 源政策的变化、钢铁产业重组、工业用水和能耗趋势、水资源和森林资源的保护、电 力行业与环境保护的关系以及中国气候环境战略面临的挑战等。
Chinese print version of this book is available from Social Science and Academic Press
Cascades of Violence »
War, Crime and Peacebuilding Across South Asia
Authored by: John Braithwaite, Bina D’Costa
Publication date: February 2018
War and crime are cascade phenomena. War cascades across space and time to more war; crime to more crime; crime cascades to war; and war to crime. As a result, war and crime become complex phenomena. That does not mean we cannot understand how to prevent crime and war simultaneously. This book shows, for example, how a cascade analysis leads to an understanding of how refugee camps are nodes of both targeted attack and targeted recruitment into violence. Hence, humanitarian prevention also must target such nodes of risk. This book shows how nonviolence and nondomination can also be made to cascade, shunting cascades of violence into reverse. Complexity theory implies a conclusion that the pursuit of strategies for preventing crime and war is less important than understanding meta strategies. These are meta strategies for how to sequence and escalate many redundant prevention strategies. These themes were explored across seven South Asian societies during eight years of fieldwork.
Value for Money »
Budget and financial management reform in the People's Republic of China, Taiwan and Australia
Publication date: January 2018
The Greater China Australia Dialogue on Public Administration has held annual workshops since 2011 on public administration themes of common interest to the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan and Australia.
This book presents and discusses a selection of papers developed from the Dialogue’s fifth workshop held in late 2015 hosted by the National Taiwan University in Taipei. The theme, ‘Value for Money’, focused on budget and financial management reforms, including how different nations account for the relative performance of their public sectors.
All governments face the challenge of scarce resources requiring budgetary management processes for identifying the resources required by and available to government, and then for allocating them and ensuring their use or deployment represents value for money. Such budgetary and financial management processes need to inform decision-making routinely and protect the integrity of the way public resources are used – with some public accountability to indicate that their uses are properly authorised and reflect the policies of legitimate government leaders.
The chapters in this book explore budgeting and financial management in three very different jurisdictions: Australia, the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan). These activist and at times innovative countries are keen to analyse and reflect upon each other’s policy achievements and patterns of public provision. They are keen to learn more about each other as their economic and social engagement continues to deepen. They are also conscious that fundamental differences exist in terms of economic development and global strategic positioning, and levels and philosophies of political development; to an extent these differences are representative of differences amongst countries around the globe.
Asian Economic Integration in an Era of Global Uncertainty »
Edited by: Shiro Armstrong, Tom Westland
Publication date: January 2018
The Pacific Trade and Development (PAFTAD) conference series has been at the forefront of analysing challenges facing the economies of East Asia and the Pacific since its first meeting in Tokyo in January 1968.
The 38th PAFTAD conference met at a key time to consider international economic integration. Earlier in the year, the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union and the United States elected Donald Trump as their next president on the back of an inward-looking ‘America First’ promise. Brexit and President Trump represent a growing, and worrying, trend towards protectionism in the North Atlantic countries that have led the process of globalisation since the end of the Second World War.
The chapters in the volume describe the state of play in Asian economic integration but, more importantly, look forward to the region’s future, and the role it might play in defending the global system that has underwritten its historic rise. Asia has the potential to stand as a bulwark against the dual threats of North Atlantic protectionism and slowing trade growth, but collective leadership will be needed regionally and difficult domestic reforms will be required in each country.