New books – Politics, History, Variorum

Politics and International Relations

The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Warfare  Edited by George Kassimeris and John Buckley

Empowering Our Military Conscience: Transforming Just War Theory and Military Moral Education  Edited by Roger Wertheimer

Justice and Morality: Human Suffering, Natural Law and International Politics  Amanda Russell Beattie

Participatory Research Methodologies: Development and PostDisaster/Conflict Reconstruction  Edited by Alpaslan Özerdem and Richard Bowd

The Politics of Security in Modern Russia  Edited by Mark Galeotti

Securing Africa: Post-9/11 Discourses on Terrorism  Edited by Malinda S. Smith

History

Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England  Dennis R. Klinck

Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800–1914  Catherine Mills

Vengeance in the Middle Ages: Emotion, Religion and Feud  Edited by Susanna A. Throop and Paul R. Hyams

War, the State and International Law in Seventeenth-Century Europe  Edited by Olaf Asbach and Peter Schröder

Variorum

Considering Medieval Women and Gender  Susan Mosher Stuard

From Atoms to Molecules: Studies in the History of Chemistry from the 19th Century  Colin A. Russell

An interview with Robert Holton, editor of the Ashgate series Global Connections

Global Connections builds on the multi-dimensional and continuously expanding interest in Globalization. The main objective of the series is to focus on ‘connectedness’ and provide readable case studies across a broad range of areas such as social and cultural life, economic, political and technological activities.

An interview with Global Connections’ series editor Robert Holton has recently been added to the Sociology pages of the Ashgate website, and is reproduced here:

An Interview with Robert Holton

What encouraged you to enter academia?

I entered academia as a student in the second half of the 1960’s in a period of great social unrest throughout the Western world. Like many other people I wanted to contribute to desirable forms of social change, but came to realize that this needed further thought, analysis, and research. Better understanding of the social world would be necessary to achieve effective change, and this, together with intellectual curiosity, led me to seek a career in research and teaching.

What made you (decide to) initiate this series?

The series is intended to fill what I see as two major gaps in the study of globalization.

Firstly. while there are plenty of general surveys and general theories of globalization, I detect a lack of publications offering in-depth work capable of digging beneath generalities and orthodoxies. I particularly wanted to encourage and showcase work that confronted general theories with evidence, or which developed new and original lines of theoretical discussion from outside of the mainstream.

Secondly I wanted to encourage the publication of more sociological and inter-disciplinary work, to correct an excessive economistic focus on markets and states alone. Like a number of analysts I see globalization as a multi-dimensional set of (often conflicting) processes, involving culture as much as politics and the economy. And beyond this I saw a great need to publish work that analysed global-local or macro-micro connections, able to illuminate the way globalization can be re-shaped, re-made, criticised, resisted and possibly reversed?

New books – Geography, Law, Reference

Geography

International Business Travel in the Global Economy  Edited by Jonathan V. Beaverstock, Ben Derudder, James Faulconbridge and Frank Witlox

Taxi! Urban Economies and the Social and Transport Impacts of the Taxicab  James Cooper, Ray Mundy and John Nelson

Law

China’s New Enterprise Bankruptcy Law: Context, Interpretation and Application  Edited by Rebecca Parry, Yongqian Xu and Haizheng Zhang

Fair Trade, Corporate Accountability and Beyond: Experiments in Globalizing Justice  Edited by Kate Macdonald and Shelley Marshall

Integrity Systems for Occupations  Andrew Alexandra and Seumas Miller

Reference

Development Ethics  Edited by Des Gasper and Asuncion Lera St. Clair

Emile Durkheim  Edited by Ivan Strenski

Family Values and Family Justice  Michael Freeman

Islamic Studies 2010 catalogue now available

Ashgate publishes a wide range of Islamic Studies books across many different subject areas. The Islamic Studes catalogue brings all these titles together, and the new 2010 Islamic Studies catalogue is available to browse on our website.

It covers History, Religion, Law, Philosophy, Arts, Science and Politics – ancient and modern! Why not take a look?

New books from Ashgate – Spring/Summer 2010

Another new catalogue, this time our seasonal catalogue, featuring all the new titles we are publishing between January and June 2010!

Browse the pdf version of Ashgate’s Spring/Summer 2010 catalogue on our website.

Ashgate at the Swinburne 13th Aviation Industry Seminars, Melbourne, 10-12 February

Ashgate will have a broad display of Ashgate aviation and human factors books at Swinburne Aviation Industry Seminars (10-12 February 2010, Australia).

The Swinburne Aviation Industry Seminars have become a key event in the Aviation calendar. Each year, Swinburne University welcomes registrations from individual and corporate participants in aviation and related industries and in 2009, over 300 delegates heard some excellent presentations from a number of international and Australian presenters. For 2010 there will be presentations related to topics in the areas of technology, operations, management and human factors. The seminars also offer participants the opportunity to interact with industry representatives as well as Swinburne Aviation academic staff and students.

New books – Art, Information Management (Digital Humanities), Sociology, Music

Art and Visual Studies

Art and Visual Studies Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present Edited by Patrizia Di Bello and Gabriel Koureas

Maria Spilsbury (1776–1820): Artist and Evangelical Charlotte Yeldham 

The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe David S. Areford

Later Stuart Portraits: 1685–1714 John Ingamells  (A Lund Humphries book)

Information Management

Revisualizing Visual Culture Edited by Chris Bailey and Hazel Gardiner  #digitalhumanities

Sociology and Social Policy

Plural Masculinities: The Remaking of the Self in Private Life Sofia Aboim

Screening Generation X: The Politics and Popular Memory of Youth in Contemporary Cinema Christina Lee 

Technology and Medical Practice: Blood, Guts and Machines Edited by Ericka Johnson and Boel Berner

Women’s Work and Pensions: What is Good, What is Best?: Designing GenderSensitive Arrangements Bernd Marin and Eszter Zólyomi

Music

Carl Nielsen Studies: Volume 4 Edited by Niels Krabbe

Music, Sound, and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Edited by Paul Attinello, Janet K. Halfyard and Vanessa Knights

Shostakovich in Dialogue: Form, Imagery and Ideas in Quartets 1-7 Judith Kuhn

Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures: Record Collecting as a Social Practice Roy Shuker

How not to write a PhD thesis

Tara Brabazon offers her top ten tips for Doctoral failure in this week’s Times Higher Ed. Useful reading!

to offer insights to postgraduates who may be in the final stages of submission, cursing their supervisors who want another draft and further references, here are my ten tips for failing a PhD. If you want failure, this is your road map to getting there…

Read more on the THE website

New 2010 Music Studies catalogue is now available

It’s the time of year when our 2010 subject catalogues appear, and the latest one is Music Studies!

You can view a pdf version of the new Music Studies catalogue on our website. And don’t forget that the subject catalogues now have hyperlinks from each title in the pdf to the full information on the book’s own web page.

Do virtual worlds have potential for the corporate environment? The business case.

From the preface of  Working through Synthetic Worlds

Over the past several years, a number of new Internet based immersive worlds (virtual worlds) have grown in popularity. Second Life logs millions of simultaneous users on a daily basis. Massively Multi-User Online Games (MMOGs) such as World of Warcraft are becoming ubiquitous. It is clear that games and social interaction are greatly facilitated by virtual worlds but we believe that the time is right to start taking a serious look at the future potential of these environments beyond games and social networks. We need to ask questions like: Just what are virtual worlds good for? What value is there in these virtual communities and what potential value could there be for doing real work? Where might one strategically invest in research with these technologies to influence their development to make people more productive?

So by “working” we mean: How could virtual world technologies be used as a tool to assist in transforming the traditional workplace? How can we use them to facilitate information sharing and collaboration across a diverse workforce that might be geographically and temporally separated? What does a virtual environment afford that offers a favorable value proposition compared to the real world?

Working Through Synthetic Worlds is edited by C.A.P. Smith, Colorado State University, USA, Jeffrey G. Morrison, Ph.D, Program Manager, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center – Pacific, USA and Kenneth W. Kisiel, Principal Research Engineer, Lockheed Martin Corporation, USA

For more information about the book, visit Ashgate’s website