Raewyn Connell : Research Politics Social Change

Painters have their Retrospective Exhibitions, poets their Selected Poems, chess masters their Best Games, singers their Greatest Hits. But a researcher? It seems bold, even vainglorious, to present my Greatest Hits and Best Games. So much of social science is collaborative, so much depends on organisations, networks, shared ideas and shared excitement. This book is not an autobiography, but it is a collection of work by one researcher over forty years. I hope to show by example how intellectual projects can develop, how different lines of thought can meet and weave.

The collection is arranged in five sections, concerned with class structure, gender relations, the making of masculinities, the social dimension of education, and the global economy of knowledge. It includes some of my best-known writing and allows me to raise questions about change. These fields all involve questions of social justice. When I started out, I assumed that accurate knowledge and good understanding would support action for social justice. Sometimes that assumption was battered - at other times I could be more optimistic.

Raewyn Connell is professor emerita, University of Sydney and life member of the National Tertiary Education Union.