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In the wake of economic crisis on a global scale, more and more people are reconsidering their role in the economy and wondering what they can do to make it work better for humanity and the planet. In this innovative book, J. K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy contribute complex understandings of economics in practical terms: what can we do right now, in our own communities, to make a difference?

Full of exercises, thinking tools, and inspiring examples from around the world, Take Back the Economy shows how people can implement small-scale changes in their own lives to create ethical economies. There is no manifesto here, no one prescribed model; rather, readers are encouraged and taught how to take back the economy in ways appropriate for their own communities and context, using what they already have at hand.

Take Back the Economy dismantles the idea that the economy is separate from us and best comprehended by experts. Instead, the authors demonstrate that the economy is the outcome of the decisions and efforts we make every day. The economy is thus reframed as a space of ethical action—something we can shape and alter according to what is best for the well-being of people and the planet. The book explores what people are already doing to build ethical economies, presenting these deeds as mutual concerns: What is necessary for survival, and what do we do with the surplus produced beyond what will fulfill basic needs? What do we consume, and how do we preserve and replenish the commons—those resources that can be shared to maintain all? And finally, how can we invest in a future worth living in?

Suitable for activists and students alike, Take Back the Economy will be of interest to anyone seeking a more just, sustainable, and equitable world.

Concerned about aspects of her romantic relationships, Donna McDonald consulted with a psychologist who asked, “Your hearing loss must have had a big impact on you?” At age 45, with a successful career in social work policy, McDonald took umbrage at the question. Then, she realized that she never had addressed the personal barrier she had constructed between her deaf-self and her hearing persona. In The Art of Being Deaf, she describes her long, arduous pursuit of finding out exactly who she was.
 
       Born in 1950s Australia, McDonald was placed in an oral deaf school when she was five. There, she was trained to communicate only in spoken English. Afterwards, she attended mainstream schools where she excelled with speechreading and hard work. Her determination led to achievements that proved her to be “the deaf girl that had made good.” Yet, despite her constant focus on fitting in the hearing world, McDonald soon realized that she missed her deaf schoolmates and desired to explore her closed-off feelings about being deaf.
 
       When she reconnected with her friends, one urged her to write about her experiences to tell all about “the Forgotten Generation, the orally-raised deaf kids that no one wants to talk about.” In writing her memoir, McDonald did learn to reconcile her deaf-self with her “hearing-deaf” persona, and she realized that the art of being deaf is the art of life, the art of love.

The Cultivation of Whiteness is an award-winning history of scientific ideas about race and place in Australia from the time of the first European settlement through World War II. Chronicling the extensive use of biological theories and practices in the construction and “protection” of whiteness, Warwick Anderson describes how a displaced “Britishness” (or whiteness) was defined by scientists and doctors in relation to a harsh, strange environment and in opposition to other races. He also provides the first account of extensive scientific experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s on poor whites in tropical Australia and on Aboriginal people in the central deserts.

“[Anderson] writes with passion, wit, and panache, and the principal virtues of The Cultivation of Whiteness are the old-fashioned ones of thoroughness, accuracy, and impeccable documentation. . . . [His] sensitive study is a model of how contentious historical issues can be confronted.”—W. F. Bynum, Times Literary Supplement

“One of the virtues of The Cultivation of Whiteness is that it brings together aspects of Australian life and history that are now more often separated—race and environment, blood and soil, medicine and geography, tropical science and urban health, biological thought and national policy, Aboriginality and immigration, the body and the mind. The result is a rich and subtle history of ideas that is both intellectual and organic, and that vividly evokes past states of mind and their lingering, haunting power.”—Tom Griffiths, Sydney Morning Herald

The Cunning of Recognition is an exploration of liberal multiculturalism from the perspective of Australian indigenous social life. Elizabeth A. Povinelli argues that the multicultural legacy of colonialism perpetuates unequal systems of power, not by demanding that colonized subjects identify with their colonizers but by demanding that they identify with an impossible standard of authentic traditional culture.
Povinelli draws on seventeen years of ethnographic research among northwest coast indigenous people and her own experience participating in land claims, as well as on public records, legal debates, and anthropological archives to examine how multicultural forms of recognition work to reinforce liberal regimes rather than to open them up to a true cultural democracy. The Cunning of Recognition argues that the inequity of liberal forms of multiculturalism arises not from its weak ethical commitment to difference but from its strongest vision of a new national cohesion. In the end, Australia is revealed as an exemplary site for studying the social effects of the liberal multicultural imaginary: much earlier than the United States and in response to very different geopolitical conditions, Australian nationalism renounced the ideal of a unitary European tradition and embraced cultural and social diversity.
While addressing larger theoretical debates in critical anthropology, political theory, cultural studies, and liberal theory, The Cunning of Recognition demonstrates that the impact of the globalization of liberal forms of government can only be truly understood by examining its concrete—and not just philosophical—effects on the world.

This book offers rich insights into the news media’s role in the development of policy in Australia, and explores the complex and interactive relationship between news media and Australian Indigenous affairs.
 
Kerry McCallum and Lisa Waller critically examine how Indigenous health, bilingual education, and controversial legislation are portrayed through public media, and they look closely at how Indigenous people are both being excluded from policy and media discussion, as well as using the media to their advantage.

At a time when concern over the ethics of euthanasia and the implications of a rapidly aging population are frequent topics of discussion, Trollope’s only science fiction novel strikes a very modern chord. The Fixed Period, begun in 1880 when Trollope was 65, is set in the then far-distant year of 1980. The story is narrated by the president of the fictitious Republic of Britannula, an ex-British colony on an imaginary island near New Zealand. The original young settlers, led by their president, adopt a plan called the Fixed Period. Under this plan, the island would be relieved of the burden of an aging population by calling for compulsory euthanasia for citizens reaching the age of 67. Opposition to the plan grows as the time approaches for “depositing” the first citizen in the euthanasia park, and the elderly citizens successfully persuade the British government to send a gunboat armed with a powerful new weapon to reannex the country.
 
Trollope’s satiric portrayal of the statisticians who calculate the savings to be realized by putting the old people away before they become an expensive catastrophic burden, and the ironic presentation of the narrator’s justification of euthanasia by appeal to Christian practice and doctrine, will delight contemporary readers. Trollope’s strong dislike of government bureaucracy is evident throughout, as is his awareness of the dangers to the world of an imagined weapon of destruction not unlike (in its effect) the atomic bomb.
 
In making accessible the complete text of this work with corrections from the original manuscript, Super has performed an invaluable service for Trollope scholars and enthusiasts.
 

In the summer of 1967, in response to violent demonstrations that rocked 164 U.S. cities, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, a.k.a. the Kerner Commission, was formed. The Commission sought reasons for the disturbances, including the role that law enforcement played. Chief among its research projects was a study of 23 American cities, headed by social psychologist Robert Shellow. An early draft of the scientists’ analysis, titled “The Harvest of American Racism: The Political Meaning of Violence in the Summer of 1967,” provoked the Commission’s staff in November 1967 by uncovering political causes for the unrest; the team of researchers was fired, and the controversial report remained buried at the LBJ Presidential Library until now.
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The first publication of the Harvest report half a century later reveals that many of the issues it describes are still with us, including how cities might more effectively and humanely react to groups and communities in protest. In addition to the complete text of the suppressed Harvest report, the book includes an introduction by Robert Shellow that provides useful historical context; personal recollections from four of the report’s surviving social scientists, Robert Shellow, David Boesel, Gary T. Marx, and David O. Sears; and an appendix outlining the differences between the unpublished Harvest analysis and the well-known Kerner Commission Report that followed it.

“The [Harvest of American Racism] report was rejected by Johnson administration functionaries as being far too radical—politically ‘unviable’… Social science can play an extremely positive role in fighting racial and other injustice and inequality, but only if it is matched with a powerful political will to implement the findings.  That will has never come from within an American presidential administration—that will has only been forged in black and other radical communities’ movements for justice. The political power for change, as incremental as it has been, has come from within those communities. Washington responds, it does not lead."
—from the Foreword by Michael C. Dawson

"Certain to be the standard reference for all subsequent scholarship."—John Noble Wilford, New York Times Book Review, on the History of Cartography series

"The maps in this book provide an evocative picture of how indigenous peoples view and represent their worlds. They illuminate not only questions of material culture but also the cognitive systems and social motivations that underpin them" (from the introduction).

Although they are often rendered in forms unfamiliar to Western eyes, maps have existed in most cultures. In this latest book of the acclaimed History of Cartography, contributors from a broad variety of disciplines collaborate to describe and address the significance of traditional cartographies. Whether painted on rock walls in South Africa, chanted in a Melanesian ritual, or fashioned from palm fronds and shells in the Marshall Islands, all indigenous maps share a crucial role in representing and codifying the spatial knowledge of their various cultures. Some also serve as repositories of a group's sacred or historical traditions, while others are exquisite art objects.

The indigenous maps discussed in this book offer a rich resource for disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, art history, ethnology, geography, history, psychology, and sociology. Copious illustrations and carefully researched bibliographies enhance the scholarly value of this definitive reference.

Irish Australian outlaw Ned Kelly led one of the most spectacular outbreaks the tradition has ever experienced, culminating in a siege at Glenrowan on June 28, 1880. Donned in homemade metal armor and a helmet, he was captured and sentenced to hang at the Melbourne Gaol in November. Immortalized in a series of onscreen productions, he has since become one of the most resilient screen presences in the history of Australian cinema. The Ned Kelly Films recounts the history of this presence, covering the nine feature films, three miniseries, and two TV movies that have been made about this controversial character.

 

Providing a comprehensive overview of these productions and their reception, Stephen Gaunson illuminates a central irony: From dime novels to comics to the branding of the site where he was captured, most cultural representations of Kelly are decidedly lowbrow. But only the films have been condemned for not offering a more serious interpretation of this figure and his historical context. Parsing the assumption that films about Kelly should do more than broadcast the sentiments of his fans, Gaunson explores why historical films have a reputation as a form of “bad” culture. Asking what value we can place on such “bad” historical cinema, he offers new insights about the textual characteristics of cinematic material and the conditions of film distribution, circulation, and reception.

Jeremy Bentham’s writings on Australian governance and colonization.
 
Jeremy Bentham conceived the panopticon, in part, as an alternative to criminal transportation to Australia. This latest volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham series draws out these connections by collecting both Bentham’s fragmentary and extended comments on Australian governance and colonization. These writings include a fragment headed “New Wales” (1792) correspondence with William Wilberforce (1802), three letters to Lord Pelham (1802), a “Plea for the Constitution” (1802–3), and “Colonization Company Proposal” (1831)—the majority published here for the first time. Although Bentham’s most famous ideas emerged from his opposition to colonization, these writings demonstrate how the reformer became a vocal advocate for settler colonization near the end of his life.
 

Transcontinental Dialogues brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous anthropologists from Mexico, Canada, and Australia who work at the intersections of Indigenous rights, advocacy, and action research. These engaged anthropologists explore how obligations manifest in differently situated alliances, how they respond to such obligations, and the consequences for anthropological practice and action.

This volume presents a set of pieces that do not take the usual political or geographic paradigms as their starting point; instead, the particular dialogues from the margins presented in this book arise from a rejection of the geographic hierarchization of knowledge in which the Global South continues to be the space for fieldwork while the Global North is the place for its systematization and theorization. Instead, contributors in Transcontinental Dialogues delve into the interactions between anthropologists and the people they work with in Canada, Australia, and Mexico. This framework allows the contributors to explore the often unintended but sometimes devastating impacts of government policies (such as land rights legislation or justice initiatives for women) on Indigenous people’s lives.

Each chapter’s author reflects critically on their own work as activist-­scholars. They offer examples of the efforts and challenges that anthropologists—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—confront when producing ­knowledge in alliances with Indigenous peoples. Mi’kmaq land rights, pan-Maya social movements, and Aboriginal title claims in rural and urban areas are just some of the cases that provide useful ground for reflection on and critique of challenges and opportunities for scholars, policy-makers, activists, allies, and community members.

This volume is timely and innovative for using the disparate anthropological traditions of three regions to explore how the interactions between anthropologists and Indigenous peoples in supporting Indigenous activism have the potential to transform the production of knowledge within the historical colonial traditions of anthropology.
 

Literary representations of British convicts exiled to Australia were the most likely way that the typical English reader would learn about the new colonies there. In Transported to Botany Bay, Dorice Williams Elliott examines how writers—from canonical ones such as Dickens and Trollope to others who were themselves convicts—used the figure of the felon exiled to Australia to construct class, race, and national identity as intertwined.

Even as England’s supposedly ancient social structure was preserved and venerated as the “true” England, the transportation of some 168,000 convicts facilitated the birth of a new nation with more fluid class relations for those who didn’t fit into the prevailing national image. In analyzing novels, broadsides, and first-person accounts, Elliott demonstrates how Britain linked class, race, and national identity at a key historical moment when it was still negotiating its relationship with its empire. The events and incidents depicted as taking place literally on the other side of the world, she argues, deeply affected people’s sense of their place in their own society, with transnational implications that are still relevant today.

In today's world of specialization, people are attempting to protect the Earth's fragile state by swapping limousines for hybrids and pesticide-laced foods for organic produce. At other times, environmental awareness is translated into public relations gimmicks or trendy commodities. Moreover, simplistic policies, like single-species protection or planting ten trees for every tree cut down, are touted as bureaucratic or industrial panaceas.

Because today's decisions are tomorrow's consequences, every small effort makes a difference, but a broader understanding of our environmental problems is necessary to the development of sustainable ecosystem policies. In Trees, Truffles, and Beasts, Chris Maser, Andrew W. Claridge, and James M. Trappe make a compelling case that we must first understand the complexity and interdependency of species and habitats from the microscopic level to the gigantic. Comparing forests in the Pacific Northwestern United States and Southeastern mainland of Australia, the authors show how easily observable speciesùtrees and mammalsùare part of a complicated infrastructure that includes fungi, lichens, and organisms invisible to the naked eye, such as microbes.

Eminently readable, this important book shows that forests are far more complicated than most of us might think, which means simplistic policies will not save them. Understanding the biophysical intricacies of our life-support systems just might.