THE BOOKS
OUT SOON
Happy Daze
The Role of Optimism in our Downfall
ISBN-978-0-6451758-7-5
Cilento Publishing, August 2022
​
Happy Daze exposes optimism as a mind-altering cultural fix.
Too much optimism has stimulated climate change denial and all manner of excessive human behaviours. Optimism may be life-enhancing, but too much optimism has a corrupting influence. This book explains why and how optimism can lead to very bad outcomes.
Tom Jagtenberg’s last book, Beyond the Limits: A Planet in Crisis (Cilento Publishing, 2015), is a hard-hitting and probing analysis of the underlying problems that define the possibilities of any response to the problem of climate change. No matter how hard politicians try to broker agreements curbing greenhouse gas emissions there are deeper obstacles that would seem to guarantee Planet Earth’s ecological decline.
Beyond the Limits
ISBN-13-978-0992560287
Cilento Publishing
​
No matter how hard politicians try to broker agreements about curbing greenhouse gas emissions there are deeper obstacles that would seem to guarantee Planet Earth’s ecological decline.
Beyond the Limits is a hard-hitting and probing analysis of the underlying problems that define the possibilities of any response to the problem of climate change.
All profits from sales will be donated to the buy back charity Bush Heritage Australia
Eco-Impacts and the Greening of Postmodernity
ISBN-13-978-0803974074
SAGE Publications
Addressing a growing need to examine environmental issues from a cultural perspective, this innovative book adopts a cultural studies approach to reach a deeper understanding of the significance of ecological issues in our lives.
Eco-Impacts and the Greening of Postmodernity explores such vital questions as: Can nature survive? How do academic disciplines engage with environmental crises? And, how do we map sustainable futures? The authors, Tom Jagtenberg and David McKie, bring a body of relevant literature into the debate - that stems from both cultural and environmental issues - as well as their own multidisciplinary perspectives on the subject.
Four Dimensional Social Space: A Reader in Australian Social Sciences
ISBN-13-978-0063121270
Harper Educational Publishers
​
This reader introduces a wide spectrum of Australian social issues. It expands upon the traditional dimensions of class, ethnicity and gender to include nature, thereby reflecting the importance of the environmental context of human activity. Extensively revised, this expanded edition includes over 100 articles and contributors, of which half are new to this edition. The text features a wide range of Australian course material, and provides additional statistics to support the discussions contained in the readings. Each chapter is introduced by the editors, and is cross-referenced with other chapters to provide a broad overview of Australian society.
The Social Construction of Science: A Comparative Study of Goal Direction, Research Evolution and Legitimation
ISBN-13-978-9027714985​
Springer (Reidel)
This book concerns the institutionalisation of the physical sciences. The book breaks with the established tradition in the history, philosophy and sociology of sciences by attempting to capture both the cognitive and social dimensions of institutionalisation in one unified analysis. This unifica tion has been achieved through a treatment of research as goal directed social action - a theme which has been developed both theoretically and empirically. The analysis presented is therefore unique in its breadth of focus and shows how the traditional concerns of sociology with generalised macro-structures of meaning and action can be related to the lifeworlds of individual scientists. The sociology of the sciences is still today a relative newcomer to the field of sciences studies which has traditionally been dominated by the history and philosophy of the sciences. I hope that this book reflects the excitement I experienced in being able to respond to the debates and concepts which erupted in that particularly fertile period follOwing the publication of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 - a period from which a cogni tively oriented sociology of the sciences was to emerge as a serious challenger to orthodoxies in the history, philosophy and sociology of sciences.