Pleaese note this event has now been postponed until 2022.

Join Beck Pearse and Mike Beggs for 'Which ways are we going? Notes on the sociology of class in Australia'

In 1983 Raewyn Connell published a book called Which Way is Up? The awkwardly titled collection of essays canvassed major conceptual and practical problems for class analysis. The problems of functionalism in systems theories associated with analytic Marxism. The problems of categorical rigidity in stratification theories. And the challenges to class theory from feminists and anti-colonial intellectuals. The impasses and problems of theory and method detailed in Connell’s book persist today. Our reading of the contemporary field of class studies in Australia is that the paths taken have multiplied empirically, but the project of theorising class relations as a structuring social dynamic is at a standstill. We offer some thoughts on the basis from which we might start moving again and where we could go with it.


About the speakers
Beck Pearse is in the School of Sociology and the Fenner School of Environment & Society at the ANU. Her work focuses on climate and energy policy, environmental inequalities, and the sociology of knowledge.

Mike Beggs is in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. His work focuses on money, macroeconomic policy and the history of capitalism. 




Photo by Evelyn Mostrom on Unsplash.