How did you get into Sociology?
When I started as a student in the 1960s, I majored in History and Psychology. By the time I finished the BA, however, I felt these studies did not tell me what I needed to know. The world was in flames – Australia was involved in the atrocious American war in Vietnam, Africa was decolonizing, a student movement was building, Aboriginal resistance was growing, transnational corporations were becoming more powerful, nuclear weapons were spreading… Where were the intellectual tools to cope with issues like that?
Sociology seemed like an answer. But sociology was just being formed as an academic discipline in Australia at the time. I enrolled in a political science department and did a PhD project that mixed sociology and psychology. At the same time, I learned by participating in anti-war protests, the Labor Party, and the student movement. Then my partner and I spent a year in Chicago, at the famous Department of Sociology. I spent long hours in its fabulous library, and learned a lot from the graduate students. That was how I got into sociology in terms of personal trajectory.
But getting into sociology also has a collective dimension. In the 1970s, I was involved in setting up sociology programs in new universities in Adelaide and Sydney. I had energetic and inventive colleagues, and we got busy designing new curricula, launching research projects, teaching undergraduates, supervising research students, and doing outreach. We abandoned the bizarre cult of the Three Founding Fathers, and the familiar theory and methods courses. Instead, we wove method and theory into course sequences on major themes for the sociology we were trying to build: class and power, sexuality and gender, culture and knowledge. We brought an Aboriginal presence into the Introduction to Sociology course, and tried to build collective student agency into the learning process.
I was involved in research on class inequalities in Australia, including a collaborative project on the history of class from colonial times to the present. Research grants from the national government, in the 1970s and 1980s, made it possible to create new research teams. We launched projects on social dynamics in ruling-class and working-class high schools; the social theory of gender; sexuality and the prevention of AIDS; the making of masculinities; teachers and schools in poor communities.
In academic terms, Australia is a small, marginal country. I had traveled to the United States and Britain, and published a few articles in global-North journals. It was only when I realized that our main reports reached few international readers because they were published in Australia, that I really engaged with issues of centrality and marginality. Then I became more conscious about getting into sociology globally.
In the mid-1980s, our paper ‘Toward a new sociology of masculinity’, published in a global-North journal, found an audience and helped shape a field. My book Gender and Power, published in Australia, North America and Europe, also found an audience. I tried to follow the same model with later books, most effectively with Masculinities in 1995. That got an extra boost when it was translated into multiple languages.
By the 1990s, I was traveling more internationally, and becoming more familiar with social science as it was practiced in different regions of the world. Crucially, I became better acquainted with the history of social thought in the colonial and post-colonial world. So I collected the materials that became Southern Theory in 2007, began contributing more extensively to global-South journals and books, and helped build an agenda of post-colonial sociology.
What makes you sociologically curious?
I’m curious about how structures of power, exploitation, and oppression are shaped, how they persist, and how they can be contested. I don’t think these questions can be answered a priori. They need close-focus research, which means getting one’s hands dirty in the details of surveys, interviews, field observation, media content, and the rest.
To give examples: My work on gender was driven by questions about how we can understand gender as a full-scale social structure, given gender’s distinctive connection with reproductive bodies. Studies of gender in schools, life histories, the state and state agencies, provided the base. I turned to the problem of masculinities because it was plain that understanding power structures requires an understanding of the privileged as well as the oppressed. That was precisely the reason that in my earlier work on class, I had paid close attention to the local ruling class.
Similarly, my work on the global sociology of knowledge has tried to understand the specific role of elite global-North institutions, as well as the intellectual work and workforce in colonial and post-colonial societies. The Good University, published in 2019, grew out of my share in union campaigns against the corporate-style management that had been installed in Australian universities. I wanted to know how universities could be understood as social organizations, how managerial power could be contested, and what better futures might be possible.
Curiosity isn’t idle. Our research on schools was meant to inform the work of teachers and education policymakers. The research on masculinities was ultimately about how gender relations can become more equal, which certainly requires change in the gender practices of men. I have worked for that in educational and policy forums, local and international.
Our research on sexuality began in the crisis of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. We tried to produce knowledge about sexual practices that affected transmission of the virus, and get it quickly, in real time, into the hands of community educators. Sociological knowledge can help to shape our futures, but to do that it needs to be relevant, and it needs to be in the hands of the people who can use it.
What challenges does sociology face as a science?
There’s a tendency to think academic legitimacy lies in formalism, most commonly in modeling the discipline on the more formal aspects of natural science. The enthusiasm for ‘big data’ is a newly fertile field for this, we are now thought able to predict scientifically. On the other hand, there’s a tendency, particularly strong under corporate-style university management, to value only the activities that earn money. Sociology could become a fragmented, residual science, concerned mainly with applied studies of marginal groups, local social difficulties, and the organizational problems and marketing needs of corporations.
It is also possible that sociology could be abolished. Together with some other disciplines, sociology is under attack from the new rightwing politics, with its ruthless mythmaking about ‘cultural marxism’, its attacks on ‘critical race theory’, ‘gender theory’, ‘cosmopolitanism’ and cultural ‘elites’, and its support of militarism and the fossil fuel economy. Authoritarian regimes do not like critical social science.
Academic sociology came, historically, from the global North; we can hardly overstate the role of researchers and teachers like Burgess, Lynd and Lazarsfeld in making the discipline what it is today. To argue for decolonizing the discipline is only one way to put this point, but whatever we call it, we desperately need to change this old hegemony.
To build the sociological workforce in the majority world, and to have an intellectual agenda that addresses the full range of threats to social survival, is the only worthwhile future for sociology. This matters for more than the academic discipline, because social-science knowledge matters for the future of the planet. We need to be bold.