Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles

Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 04 July 2022

The comparative mortality of an elite group in the long run of history: an observational analysis of politicians from 11 countries

2022 • Philip M. Clarke, An Tran-Duy, Laurence S. J. Roope, Jay A. Stiles & Adrian G. Barnett

This study aims to compare the mortality rate and life expectancy of politicians with those of the age and gender-matched general populations. This was an observational analysis of mortality rates of politicians (i.e. members of national parliaments with available data on dates of birth, death and election, gender, and life tables) in 11 developed countries.

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 03 July 2022

Lessons from History: Leading historians tackle Australia’s greatest challenges

2022 •

Does history repeat itself in meaningful ways, or is each problem unique? How can a knowledge of Australian history enhance our understanding of the present and prepare us for the future? Lessons from History is written with the conviction that we must see the world, and confront its many challenges, with an understanding of what has…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 21 April 2022

Australia’s Great Depression: How a nation shattered by the Great War survived the worst economic crisis it has ever faced

2022 • Joan Beaumont

How a nation still in grief from the Great War found the courage and resilience to face a new tragedy, the Great Depression. Some generations are born unlucky. Australians who survived the horrors of the Great War and the Spanish flu epidemic that followed were soon faced with the shock of the Great Depression. Today…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 06 April 2022

Language vs. Reality Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists

2022 • N.J. Enfield

A fascinating examination of how we are both played by language and made by language: the science underlying the bugs and features of humankind’s greatest invention. Language is said to be humankind’s greatest accomplishment. But what is language actually good for? It performs poorly at representing reality. It is a constant source of distraction, misdirection,…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 28 March 2022

COVID Societies: Theorising the Coronavirus Crisis

2022 • Professor Deborah Lupton

COVID Societies presents a compelling and accessible overview of key sociocultural theories that can help us make sense of the diverse, dynamic and complex elements of the COVID crisis. These include discussions of the political economy perspective; biopolitics; risk society and cultures; gender and queer theory; and more-than-human theory. The book provides insights into everyday life…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 14 March 2022

Wicked Problems in Public Policy

2022 • Brian W. Head

By Brian W. Head With scholarship that combines deep conceptual knowledge with practitioner insights, Brian Head unpacks some of the most pressing and complex policy challenges we all face. Rich with empirical detail, this book looks set to become the definitive work on wicked issues and what to do about them. Claire A. Dunlop, Professor…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 13 March 2022

Good International Citizenship: the case for decency

2022 • Gareth Evans

Why should we in Australia, or any country, care about poverty, human rights atrocities, health epidemics, environmental catastrophes, weapons proliferation or any other problems afflicting faraway countries, when they don’t, as is often the case, have any direct or immediate impact on our own safety or prosperity? Gareth Evans’ answer is the approach he adopted when Australia’s…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 02 March 2022

Bridling Dictators Rules and Authoritarian Politics

2021 • Graeme Gill

Galtieri, Lukashenka, and Putin are some of the dictators whose untrammelled personal power has been seen as typical of the dog-eat-dog nature of leadership in authoritarian political systems. This book provides an innovative argument that, rather than being characterised by permanent insecurity, fear, and arbitrariness, the leadership of dictatorships is actually governed by a series…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 28 February 2022

The Party: The Communist Party of Australia from heyday to reckoning

2022 • Stuart MacIntyre

The long-awaited second volume in Stuart Macintyre’s definitive history of the Communist Party of Australia. Communism was unlike any other political movement Australia has ever seen. At its peak in the 1940s, unions led by communists could call a strike that paralysed the nation, and communists influenced the highest level of government, and commanded the…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 27 February 2022

Scribbling A Way: My Journey Through the Foothills of Scholarship

2022 • Peter Saunders

Scribbling A Way: My Journey Through the Foothills of Scholarship charts Peter Saunders’ journey from his modest childhood on a council estate in post-war Britain through school and university. It highlights the events that steered him towards an unplanned but rewarding and successful academic career. https://www.unsw.edu.au/arts-design-architecture/our-research/research-centres-institutes/social-policy-research-centre/about/celebrating-40-years

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 08 February 2022

Unfree Workers: Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia, 1788-1860

2022 • Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Michael Quinlan

This book examines how convicts played a key role in the development of capitalism in Australia and how their active resistance shaped both workplace relations and institutions. It highlights the contribution of convicts to worker mobilization and political descent, forcing a rethink of Australia’s foundational story. It is a book that will appeal to an international…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 01 February 2022

Georges River Blues

2022 • Heather Goodall

The lower Georges River, on Dharawal and Dharug lands, was a place of fishing grounds, swimming holes and picnics in the early twentieth century. But this all changed after World War II, when rapidly expanding industry and increasing population fell heaviest on this river, polluting its waters and destroying its bush. Local people campaigned to…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 08 December 2021

What’s the worst that could happen? By Andrew Leigh

2021 • Andrew Leigh

What’s the Worst That Could Happen? Existential Risk and Extreme Politics by Academy Fellow and Federal Member for Fenner Dr Andrew Leigh MP focuses on potentially world-ending threats, including nuclear war, climate change, bioterrorism and unaligned artificial intelligence. It’s a blend of Dr Strangelove, The Matrix, 28 Days Later, and Blade Runner 2049, with a…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 05 December 2021

Racism in Australia today

2021 • Amanuel Elias, Fethi Mansouri and Yin Paradies, Singapore,

This book focuses on historical and current data to examine racism in Australia. Making use of the latest state and federal data sets, it critically synthesises contemporary research on race relations with a focus on racism and anti-racism initiatives.  Employing innovative analytical methods, the book provides students and researchers with a current and up-to-date analytical…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 27 November 2021

Contemporary Social Theory: An introduction

2021 • Anthony Elliott

Now in its third edition, Anthony Elliott’s comprehensive, stylish and accessible introduction continues to be the indispensable guide to social theory. Fully revised and updated, the book examines the major theoretical traditions from the Frankfurt School to posthumanism, and from feminism and post-structuralism to globalization theory and beyond. Classical debates in social theory are given…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 27 November 2021

Welcome to Country 2nd edition: Fully Revised & Expanded, A Travel Guide to Indigenous Australia

2021 • Marcia Langton

Marcia Langton: Welcome to Country 2nd edition is the essential follow-up to Australia’s landmark travel guide to Indigenous Australia, Welcome to Country. In this extensively updated edition, Marcia Langton offers a full range of Indigenous-owned or -operated tourism experiences across Australia, including an expanded directory with 250 new listings, illustrated maps, and photography by Wayne Quilliam.…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 15 November 2021

Helping Hands: Understanding Vietnamese Offenders in Victoria

2021 • Nathalie Nguyen

Prompted by Vietnamese community concerns regarding the over-representation of Vietnamese in the correctional system, this report highlights the ongoing effects of postwar trauma in Australia’s largest refugee community. It charts pathways for best practice, particularly for Vietnamese youth in the prevention space. The oral histories that form the core of the report have a crucial…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 06 November 2021

The Diasporic Condition: Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World

2021 • Ghassan Hage

Bridging the gap between migration studies and the anthropological tradition, Ghassan Hage illustrates that transnationality and its attendant cultural consequences are not necessarily at odds with classic theory. In The Diasporic Condition, Ghassan Hage engages with the diasporic Lebanese community as a shared lifeworld, defining a common cultural milieu that transcends spatial and temporal distance—a collective…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 19 October 2021

Making Sense of AI: Our Algorithmic World

2021 • Professor Anthony Elliott

Industrial robots, self-driving cars, customer-service chatbots and Google’s algorithmic predictions have brought the topic of artificial intelligence into public debate. Why is AI the source of such intense controversy and what are its economic, political, social and cultural consequences? Tracing the changing fortunes of artificial intelligence, Elliott develops a systematic account of how automated intelligent…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 22 September 2021

Resource and Environmental Economics: Modern Issues and Applications (2nd Edition)

2021 • Clement A Tisdell

This important book deals with the essential principles of resource and environmental economics, provides applications to contemporary issues in this field, and outlines and assesses policies being used or proposed for managing the use of environmental and natural resources. Covering specific contemporary topics such as agriculture and the environment, water use, greenhouse gas management, biodiversity…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 22 September 2021

The Political Economy of Automotive Industrialization in East Asia

2021 • Richard F. Doner, Gregory W. Noble, and John Ravenhill

East Asia is a powerhouse of automobile production. Yet, across the region, national automobile industries have had strikingly different patterns of development. Despite starting from equally low levels of performance and initially similar strategies, countries have experienced vastly different results. From Thailand’s success as an assembly hub for foreign automakers and China’s unexpected achievements in…

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 30 August 2021

Muslim Minorities and Social Cohesion

2021 •

This book examines various attempts in the ‘West’ to manage cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity – focusing on Muslim minorities in predominantly non-Muslim societies.

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 30 August 2021

Psychiatric Ethics: Fifth Edition

2021 •

Drawing on the positive reception of Psychiatric Ethics since its first publication in 1981, this highly anticipated 5th edition offers psychiatrists and other mental health professionals a coherent guide to dealing with the diverse ethical issues that challenge them.

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Fellows’ Featured Books & Articles • 24 August 2021

The Routledge Social Science Handbook of AI

2021 •

A unique integration of social science on the one hand and new technologies of artificial intelligence on the other, this Handbook offers readers new ways of understanding the rise of AI and its associated global transformations.

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