Abstract
Professor Fran Collyer is a revered sociologist currently leading an epic Australian Research Council-funded project about the history of sociology in Australia. The project includes interviews with almost 200 Australian sociologists. For this special section celebrating Journal of Sociology’s 60th Anniversary, the journal’s co-editor-in-chief, Ashley Barnwell, turned the microphone on Fran Collyer to learn more about the history of our discipline. The interview also showcases Fran's ground-breaking research in honour of her 2024 Distinguished Service to the Australian Sociological Association Award, recognition of her career-long contribution to the sociology community.
Professor Fran Collyer is a revered sociologist currently leading a mammoth Australian Research Council (ARC)-funded project about the history of sociology in Australia. The project includes interviews with almost 200 Australian sociologists. For this special section celebrating Journal of Sociology’s 60th anniversary, the journal’s co-editor-in-chief, Ashley Barnwell, turned the microphone on Fran to learn more about the history of our discipline. Prior to her current position at the University of Wollongong, Fran Collyer was professor of sociology in Sweden and at the University of Sydney. Fran is the author of important titles such as the Research Handbook on the Sociology of Knowledge (2025); Knowledge and Global Power (2019, with Raewyn Connell, Joao Maia and Robert Morrell); Navigating Private and Public Healthcare (2020, with Karen Willis); The Palgrave Handbook of Social Theory in Health, Illness and Medicine (2023 Chinese edition; 2015 English edition); and Mapping the Sociology of Health and Medicine (2012). She has been a leader in both the Australian Sociological Association and the International Sociological Association (ISA), and is currently president of the ISA History of Sociology Research Committee. Fran is managing editor of Serendipities: Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences, and is former editor-in-chief of Health Sociology Review. In addition to wishing Journal of Sociology a Happy Birthday, the interview showcases Fran's ground-breaking research in honour of her 2024 Distinguished Service to the Australian Sociological Association Award, recognition of her career-long contribution to the sociology community. The conversation unfolded via Zoom on a summer's day, Fran in New South Wales, and Ashley in Victoria, with Trixie the dog and Kitti Bisquitti the cat, respectively, making cameo appearances.
I wanted to start, Fran, by asking you a little bit about yourself – how did you come to be a sociologist?
Yes, sure, I can talk about that. When I left school, I went to art school to do fine arts, painting and drawing mostly. That's what I’d always wanted to do. But I found myself loving Friday mornings at nine o’clock. Once a week we had a lecture on the history of art and art theory, and I found that to be the height of my week. The lecturer said to me: ‘You know you should go to university because you can study this stuff all week long.’ And that's what I did. I changed my enrolment to Flinders University, and did fine arts. I was part-time because I had two little children – a single parent with two little children. I did all the fine art subjects, and I came to the end of that. And then they said to me: ‘You have to do some other subjects for your degree.’ I had no idea what to do. We were in this line-up – you enrolled in those days with pieces of paper in the (very hot) gymnasium. I was holding up the queue because I didn’t know which numbers to put down and someone just leaned over my shoulder, took my form and wrote some numbers down and said: ‘This is what you’ll do.’ And I didn’t know them, but they said ‘Don’t worry, it's sociology’ or something like that. And I said: ‘What is that?’ They said: ‘Don’t worry. You’ll like it.’ They just wanted me to move.
So I went to that, and my first lecturer was Bryan Turner. He was trying to explain why we do things, and he talked about the great green frog in the sky. It was Sesame Street days, a great green frog in the sky, and how we all want to feel green inside and out. And it just made sense to me! And I just thought: ‘Wow, these people think the way I do.’ I think of myself as a ‘natural sociologist’ in that I didn’t have to learn how to be a sociologist. It was the way I thought. So I stayed with sociology. I wanted to do honours in fine arts, but the year I was to do honours, all the staff at Flinders in fine arts were on sabbatical, so there was no one to supervise me. Bryan Turner, who was chair of department at that time, said to me: ‘Well, come and do sociology with us.’ And so I did, although at ANU [Australian National University], with Bryan's colleague Jack Barbalet. Once I’d done my honours, I was hooked on sociology, and I went on to do my PhD. It was just serendipitous, absolutely serendipitous. And when I do those interviews on the history of sociology, and I’ve done about 190 interviews, that was a question, a burning question. I asked them all ‘How did you find sociology?’ and there were quite a few who came to sociology in the same way.
All because of the impatient person in the line behind you.
Yes, yes, so it's quite nice looking at the different ways people found sociology, and then their different stories as they journey through sociology, journey through life with and in sociology. And that’s what I really was after. That's what I wanted to find out in the history interviews.
What inspired you, Fran, to put together your history of Australian sociology?
There are a couple of things. I have always had twin interests; I’ve always been both a health sociologist and a sociologist of knowledge. And those two things are quite entwined. In Australia I’m known as a health sociologist, and most people who know of me think that's all I am. But overseas I’m known as a sociologist of knowledge, and the history of sociology comes in under the sociology of knowledge. For me, these dimensions have always been really important, and I’ve managed to, in my best work I think, bring those two together. So when I look at medicine, I’m looking at the history of it. I’m looking at knowledge in medicine. I don’t tend to do the kind of health sociology that looks at improving a particular clinical practice, or something similar. I’ve never been interested in that. I’m looking at the workforce. I’m looking at how they accrue knowledge, how they use it, what it means. So, in a way, health and medicine are just a case study for me to look at these bigger questions. How does the state come together with the market? How does it ensure that we behave in particular ways? How does it regulate social relationships? I’m just looking at a bounded area, if you like, that I know well and where I can ask these kinds of questions. So that's half the answer – I bring those two together in a lot of my work. So, for instance, in my book Mapping the Sociology of Health and Medicine (2012), I’m bringing medicine and knowledge and workforce all together.
Now, specifically, the history of Australian sociology. To do the sociology of knowledge, of course, you have to be looking at history. You can’t do the sociology of knowledge without being fascinated by history. Now, I was working as the editor of Health Sociology Review from 2004 – 2009, and as the editor, I was constantly in touch with lots of Australian sociologists. That started me really getting a good network of people together. It's a great way to get a network when you are an editor. And I noticed that we were starting to lose colleagues. People who I had admired since my undergraduate days were starting to retire or pass on. I was really keen to find a way to preserve something of those people. They really were key members of our sociology community, and they were disappearing. So I came up with various plans to do a history, and it took a bit of a while to get the funding, but I would get little bits of funding from the university and other sources. I started the project quite early and over about 10 years I had produced bits of work here and there, but then I managed to get a large ARC grant to do the project more systematically. I managed to do the history section on the website for TASA [The Australian Sociological Association]. I’ve written papers on it, and as I said, I’m in the process of writing THE book, which has been a slow process, but I promise everyone it will happen.
It sounds like it's going to be a big book, a huge piece of work based on the number of interviews you’ve done, but also that each of those interviews contains a whole life history and a whole career.
Yeah, it might have to be a couple of books, different kinds of books.
Have you started to notice a uniqueness in how sociology developed in Australia and the Asia-Pacific?
Well, yes, because another question I asked people was ‘Is there an Australian sociology? And if there is, what is it?’ So that was a burning question for me also. Now a lot of people were unsure of that and couldn’t say. They’d weigh up both sides, and they couldn’t really come to a decision about whether there was an Australian one or not. But I’ve written about this, too, in a paper in the Journal of Historical Sociology in 2021, where I talk about how people answered that question. I didn’t like going into any of these questions with a pre-set answer. I really wanted to find out what everyone else knew, not what I think. I already know what I think! I wanted to find out what others think. And so I asked everyone this question, and I think one of the strong themes that came out of their answers was how important colonialism has been to us as Australian sociologists. Now, people talk about colonialism and postcolonialism. I think we’re still in colonialism. I don’t know whether you’ve read Jenny Hockey's book, The Palace Letters?
Yes. Scandalous.
Everyone should read that book, and it's clear from that that we are not independent from Britain. There's the Palace continuing to intervene in our political affairs in Australia. And you know we worry about the Chinese; we should be much more worried about the British! By the way, I was born in England, so I can happily criticise the Poms, right? Because I’m one myself, or was.
Your original question to me was, is there anything unique about the development of sociology in Australia? And one of the things I just wanted to have noted is that whenever I talk about sociology, whether it's in Australia or anywhere else in the world, I always think of it as having two clear dimensions. Are we talking about sociology as an intellectual field, as a field of ideas and thoughts? Or are we talking about it as an arena of practice and an institution? I always try to keep that clear in my mind, and as a field of intellectual endeavour, if we want to put it that way, it has a lot longer history in Australia than it does as an institution. So as an institution, when we started to get departments of sociology, when we started having a journal and established TASA, for example, then we’re talking the 1960s. But if we’re talking about it as an intellectual endeavour, we can trace intellectual sociological work going back much earlier, at least till the very early 20th century. So we’ve got people like Peter Elkin and work that was done in the Workers’ Education Association.
Do you think that there's an effect from sociology starting out prior to having that official sort of institutional influence; that it started in those workers’ education or adult education forums?
Yeah, absolutely, because it was about workers. It was about people outside the universities at a time when the universities themselves would not teach it officially. They wouldn’t allow departments of it, nor sociology as an accredited subject in a degree programme. Now, we’re talking ‘sandstones’ sandstone universities back then. They wouldn’t have it. And a lot of that's to do with these institutional battles – battles between sociology or proponents of sociology and departments of anthropology, departments of economics. Both of those two were very important in keeping us out of the sandstones. This is about the hierarchy of the sciences, their differential levels of power and influence. In those early days the other disciplines believed that we would take up the resources, and we would pinch their students. Of course we would.
Sociology as an institution in Australia really only developed from about the 1960s. We’ve had some early departments, a bit of sociology at ANU, but the first one most people recognise is UNSW [University of New South Wales]. And then we build from there.
Australia is not unique in having sociology as an institution developing from the 1960s. There's quite a few countries that are very similar. Britain's very similar. Its academy was demolished during World War Two. It had to rebuild, so, like us, it rebuilt mostly in the 1960s with that baby boomer population needing to be educated. But many other countries were the same. I’ve just approved a paper for Serendipities, the journal that I manage, that's on Croatian sociology. Although Croatian sociology has an extremely different history to us, having to deal with the Soviet influence and the communist influence, they nevertheless mostly developed from the 1960s. So it's a common pattern. We’re not unique because we didn’t develop until then.
But, as I mentioned, our colonialism has had an incredible impact on us, and we can see that in the kind of sociology that we do. If you compare the kind of sociology that's done in different countries, one of the things that stands out about Australian sociology is our concern with inequality and power. In many ways we’re much more reflexive about inequality and power than a lot of countries. I mean, I don’t think we’re perfect by any means. I’m not suggesting that, but I think we are more reflexive about it.
Many of us in this country were educated as sociologists within the British sociology tradition. My own education at Flinders was with Bryan Turner, who was from England. He was educated in Britain and so were many of our lecturers; if they weren’t English themselves they were educated in that tradition. So we had this adopted tradition of looking at things. As sociologists, we had the tools, the methodologies, the epistemologies, the theories, the concepts – all imported from Britain. Yes, our lecturers brought ideas from Europe and from America as well, but it was primarily Britain, and we had those tools in front of us. And yet we were in this country where things didn’t quite make sense if you use those tools. All of us had to shift and accommodate to that dissonance, if you like. I think that's a really important part of why there is a sociology in Australia that we can call Australian sociology, although those terms are problematic. But I think we can, because we’re doing things here that aren’t done elsewhere.
The way in which you do sociology, which is never just in an armchair in a bubble somewhere, you’re always located somewhere. Sociologists, I think, are better at being aware of how their location is shaping their sociology. So we, as I said, we’re more reflexive. We have a greater emphasis on gender than sociology in a lot of countries, we had that really close collaboration, certainly through the 1970s and 1980s, between feminist theory and sociology, absolutely intimate. It was fundamental. Sociology wouldn’t have developed in Australia without that huge feminist input. Mind you, I make a similar claim when I say that health and medical sociology in Australia was always central to our development, too.
In your history on the TASA website, I saw you wrote that the medical sociology group was one of the very early forerunners to the thematic groups of TASA?
That's right. And the other groups were formed because medicine and health already had one. So we became the template, and for many years we were the majority of participants at TASA. It's not the same now, there's been a splintering. And there's all these specialist groups. So there's disability. There's the body. There's health and nursing. But health sociology used to encompass all that. And now there are many different thematic groups. That's fine. That's just how it changes.
To go back to what we were discussing, we have a very different institutional set-up in here, in Australia, for sociology, institutionally. In America most sociologists are male. In Britain, there's a good balance between males and females. In Australia, our workforce is mostly female. So that in itself helps to shape what kinds of things we want to research and how we work politically. I think Australian sociologists are much more collaborative, and I think that's partly to do with the fact that we have a lot of women in sociology. Whereas in the United States, certainly, and some other countries, it's much more individualistic, and sociologists won’t, and scholars generally, won’t work with others. They’d rather be the one that has the star on their chest, or the citations, or whatever. But I think we are much more collaborative and cooperative. I think we’ve got a good … I do use the word ‘community’ for sociology, our sociology community. I’ll keep saying that. And I put a lot of emphasis on that because I believe we are a community, and people can really become part of that community, if they’re open to that. It's a really good way of countering a lot of the toxic, toxic culture that's in universities at the moment, to have this sociological community at your back to look after you a bit.
Just as you were deconstructing Bryan Turner's British sociology as it came to you, Fran, you’ve also sort of deconstructed my next question because I was going to ask you who have been the key figures of influence in Australian sociology. But I’d like to amend that question based on what you said to also think about those influential collectives or schools, not just individuals.
Well, we can start with individuals. There's been many who have been influential within Australia, and not always so many who are influential overseas unless they go and live there. So Elton Mayo, who is very well known, or was very well known 30, 40 years ago in the United States with his Hawthorne experiments and his industrial sociology, he was a Queenslander, who couldn’t get a good position in a university. So he went to the States. They often don’t recognise him as an Australian when they talk about him. They claim him as their own. But there are a lot of Australians who’ve done that, and then we kind of lose them, they go and become part of another country's history. But there have also been quite a few who’ve stayed more or less in Australia and helped to build up Australian sociology.
When you start naming people it's always something of a fraud, because then there's so many people you don’t mention, and they can get their noses out of joint – and with good reason. I mean, lots of people have done fantastic work, and we can only see some of that ourselves. So I’ll have a go at naming a few people, with the caveat that I’ll also be missing some great people too. We’d have to mention John Western or Sol Encel. They would be influential in my book, because they were institution builders. They’re not what I would think of immediately as great scholars, but they were great institutional builders – like Talcott Parsons was in the US – putting sociology on the map, getting funding and building departments and supporting journals, and all those kind of things. John Western was important building up sociology at the University of Queensland, but also working on the national stage and in the Asia-Pacific region. Then Sol Encel was, of course, important at UNSW. And he served as a protagonist for many people, too. There's that side of it. But anyway, he was an institution-builder, certainly with the Journal of Sociology – well, the earlier versions of JoS and the sociological association of the time.
There were other Australians who’ve been important for other reasons, like mentoring young sociologists or early career sociologists. And I’m thinking here of Evan Willis, Anna Yeatman, Lois Bryson, Anne Edwards, Jerzy Zubrzycki, Gary Bouma. Oh, gosh! There's really too many people who have been important in this way.
Important to name those people, because they are often doing invisible work, mentoring. And it's so important.
It is, isn’t it? Very much. And they were mentors, but they were also very much activists. Gary Bouma, for example, used to help young female students in trouble. When they were pregnant, and there was no abortion, no legal abortion at that time, and he and his wife used to help these women to find a solution to their problems, to find the right services. I mean, how many people know about that, right? By the way, he was quite happy for us to talk about that work. He was one of the people I interviewed before he passed on. So I’m not spilling secrets that shouldn’t be spilled. And I think we should be really proud of the activist side of sociologists. Our universities today really don’t reward that in any shape or form. But it's a really important part of our history. And maybe that’s another influence on Australian sociology.
And there are also those people who were activists, but they managed to take sociology into the policy arena. Bettina Cass, for example. Anne Edwards, who has been important with the Council on the Ageing, another example. So it's taking your own sociological perspective, this sociological imagination and making it work for us in the much wider community. That's a really important sociological project to undertake.
Then there are scholars who I can think of as influential because of their scholarship. And of course we have to mention Raewyn Connell there. Iván Szelényi, who was chair at Flinders for a while in the 1970s. Bryan Turner, Michael Pusey.
I was lucky enough to be taught by Michael Pusey.
Oh, were you? Oh, you are lucky! His work Economic Rationalism in Canberra (1991) – really important. Evan Willis – Medical Dominance (1983) – often cited overseas, probably even more so than Michael Pusey's book, because medical dominance was something that wasn’t specific to Australia. Whereas Pusey's study was seen to be about Canberra, and many people didn’t see the relevance to what became the global phenomenon of neoliberalism.
There are so many who come to mind, but we just can’t just go on listing some of the people who come to mind for me. That is really quite subjective, built on my experiences and the kind of people I’ve come into contact with. Any list I build will have people missing from it. Geoff Lawrence is another one who's been really fantastic in the environmental space and was, or still is, an institution-builder, and has done wonderful things for Far North Queensland sociology. People have been influential in different ways.
So many great voices. I’ve reflected, too, sometimes, Fran, that other disciplines get more airtime in the public arena, like historians. For example, there isn’t a specific sociology programme on ABC Radio National, yet they have philosophy programmes about niche things, endless obscure Anglican histories. Maybe sociologists are quiet achievers or something. Do you have any sense about why this is?
Oh, yes, there are a few answers to that. One is that sociologists will often not call themselves sociologists in the public arena. But if you know who they are, then as soon as they start talking and or being mentioned, you go, that's a sociologist, but other people don’t know, because they’re not being labelled in that way. But the other answer to that is what I talked about at TASA's conference dinner last year, when they were silly enough to give me a microphone. I mentioned that one of the reasons sociology is always under attack, and sociology is often not given space or voice, is because we don’t give the orthodox answers to their questions. We don’t give the answers that people want us to give. Sociology is an alternative perspective on the world. It's not the orthodox. It's not the mainstream. It would be wonderful if it was, but it's not – although that would mean there would be no need for sociology. And so that's why we don’t get the space in the public arena. It's not a weakness in sociology, it's a strength. It's not something we have forgotten to do or don’t do well enough, and we always berate ourselves. But it's not our fault.
That's comforting to hear.
Okay. Now, back to the other part of your question about schools of sociology. You wanted me to talk about that a little bit and I’ve always found this to be quite a problematic question – about whether there are schools or not. Waters and Crook talked about this in 1990, and they claimed before the 1990s there were three schools of sociology in Australia. The first was at the ANU, which was quantitative and largely positivist. Although Frank Jones, as head of sociology there, got very angry – well, gets very angry – when people say it was positivist. It was certainly highly quantitative. There's a really interesting exchange somewhere in the JoS archives between Frank and others such as Raewyn Connell – you can find letters about it across several issues of ANZJS [Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology] in 1983. So that was one school. The second was at Flinders University, and Waters and Crook said it had a Weberian focus, so that would have been under Bryan Turner and Bob Holton. And then the third was Macquarie University, largely under the leadership of Raewyn Connell, which was Marxist. So they identified those three schools. Now, I’ve written about this in the Health Sociology Review in 2013, and the paper is called ‘Schools of Sociology’.
What I argue in that paper is that those three schools in Australia were the result of specific individuals being active and having a few colleagues or followers, students perhaps, who worked in the same vein. As soon as those individuals left those universities and went somewhere else, which they all did, at some stage not too long afterwards, the school would disappear. So in Australia our ‘schools’, if you want to call them that, in quotation marks, are all very much based around specific individuals. They were tenuous, temporary, easily dispersed. If you look to ‘schools’ in the United States, for example, what you find is they’re institutionally structured. They’re institutionally based. And when they’re institutionally based, then it doesn’t matter. The individual can leave, and someone else will take their place. But we don’t have that in Australia, and there are a few reasons for that. We don’t have that infrastructure, and one is the chronic underfunding of our universities. The second is our small intellectual, academic population relative to the society and relative to the rest of the world, and the other one would be the neoliberalism and the utilitarianism of our governments and our university managements (the governments have always been utilitarian with regard to our universities; neoliberalism has made it worse). Our universities are now called ‘higher education institutions’, and the word ‘university’ has disappeared from the lexicon. And so governments at all levels see our universities only as places to train workers. They’re not interested in scholarship. They’re not interested in intellectual endeavour. It's not rewarded in this country. When we get to do it, it's because we’ve found some private time to do it, and we have a motivation, a personal motivation to do it. This situation is really sad. And I should mention also the global ranking of universities, the publishing industry – these all work against us building up institutions.
Why do institutions matter? If you want to have a school of sociology that's based on good quantitative work (or good theory-building work), you need several generations to get that really underway, you can’t do it in five years. You can have an individual come in and do it and attract a couple of colleagues. To build a school, you need to have students who then have students, who then have students, and this happens over many, many years. You can’t do that kind of sustained work without lots of training and really being socialised into that particular intellectual field. Otherwise it really fragments.
So we haven’t funded Australian universities in that way. It's not been helped by any of the governments or the universities. They’re not interested in supporting that.
That speaks to the next question I was going to ask around the particular struggles that sociology has faced in Australia. You’ve explained that lack of institutional support to really build a place where new ideas and scholarship can flourish, and I think that's a huge part of what still affects us now, like the precarity of junior scholars finishing PhDs, having to do whatever kind of piecemeal work you can get on random projects, and then having a really difficult time articulating your own expertise. It's not the fault of the scholar, but the sector. So as we’re talking, I can see how the history you’ve documented informs the issues that we still face now. Are there things you would add, in terms of struggles that we’ve faced in Australia as a discipline?
Oh yes. One of the very early ones was the McCarthyism period. It was quite outrageous in the United States, but it certainly had big effects here as well. It's today's Zionist versus pro-Palestinian conflict. The tension between those movements, forces, whatever you want to call them, these collectives, is huge. And the Zionist versus pro-Palestinian conflict reminds me that we’ve had these kinds of struggles in the past. They’re ideological. They’re about people's beliefs, their perspectives on the world, and this has affected sociologists in Australia. So I go back to the McCarthyism period. And this is a history that hasn’t been told enough. It's been told in little bits, but it's certainly going to feature in my book on the history of Australian sociology – when it’s finally published. The anti-communist fervour that was in the 1960s and 1970s in Australia meant there were quite a few sociologists who lost their jobs. Many more were simply not given the opportunity to continue in Australian sociology. So the universities got rid of lots of the casual lecturers and tutors, the juniors that were coming through, because they saw them as too radical. Lois Bryson has talked about this in her interview for my project. She was in Melbourne at the time, in the Social Work Department. The relationship with sociology was a little more tangential down there. But it was also at Sydney University (prior to the formation of its Sociology Department), and quite a few people were in trouble with the university for airing their views. We’re seeing the same thing again now in relation to Zionism in the university. So that's one of the early struggles that shaped early sociology (mostly prior to its institutionalisation).
Another struggle which I have previously mentioned was the competition between disciplines. Particularly economics and anthropology, which kept sociology out of the ‘sandstone universities’, where there were some very influential individuals who were able to stand up in the Senate and convince the Senate or the University Council that their own disciplines were quite sufficient on their own, and could address whatever social problems there were. They didn’t need sociologists. So there have been various kinds of tension between disciplines, and consequently a struggle for sociology to get into the universities. It largely found a home in the ‘gum tree’ and the ‘red brick’ universities, to use Simon Marginson's typology here. Interestingly, sociology today, as a named discipline, is now in the sandstones. When Adelaide University adopted gender studies and sociology – wow! That was a big thing, because they’d always kept sociology well out of the place. It had always been unique to Flinders, the second university in South Australia. So that has been a big shift.
A third challenge, the more recent challenge, I think, is the political class. And this is where I think about sociology as an alternative perspective on the world. It's always been hard for sociology to convince the political class, and therefore the public, that we can actually offer something better than they are serving up at the moment. It's really hard to convince them of that because it's a much scarier way of looking at the world for people who don’t want to look at things differently. As sociologists, we don’t find it scary at all. We wouldn’t be sociologists if we did. The implications of it are scary, and the fact that it's so hard to change other people's perspective on things – that's scary. But thinking differently – wow! We love that, we thrive on it. That's what sociology is all about. It is an alternative way of understanding reality. So we are at odds with the political class, and we need to stay at odds with the political class unless the political class changes. And I can’t see that happening. We need to stay at odds with them, because we can’t adopt – adopt the mainstream perspective on the world. If we do, then there's no sociology. It's gone. So it is a really big struggle.
There used to be a much stronger collaboration. That's what my interviewees are telling me in the history of sociology project. There was much closer collaboration between politicians, government, communities, sociologists, academics, scholars, in the past. That allowed lots of really good ideas to come through. We can think of multiculturalism, that's a really clear example. Jerzy Zubrzycki's work on that, other people's work on that, influenced policies and programmes. But that's changed. And now we have conservative as well as more left-leaning governments antagonistic towards us, and not really wanting to talk to us. When the ABC was really starting up, a lot of the early journalists who were at the ABC were trained, or rather influenced, in their education, by sociology. And you can see in their early work how that comes through. It's really lovely. There's a really great edited book by Sally Neighbour called The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners (2012). It's a reflection on the impact the ABC has had, and it has some wonderful sociology coming through in the kinds of stories the journalists wanted to tell.
I guess journalists now, they’re under pressure too, by the same political forces, about what stories they can tell.
Absolutely, absolutely. And so a lot of the journalism we get is absolutely dreadful. It's really poor, and the lack of critical thinking and sociological perspective is one of the reasons for that. I mean, fancy putting Ita Buttrose in charge of the ABC?
It really tells you everything, doesn’t it?
Just bringing her name up, you immediately laugh, and I’m sure our readers will as well, or grimace!
Australia has a very utilitarian approach to education. It's all about training workers and keeping the society orderly. It's not about educating people. It's not about preserving, enhancing and building culture.
So an example of, when I say very utilitarian, the New South Wales Education Department has removed many subjects from its curriculum this year, and most of the ones taken out are social sciences and arts. In the New South Wales curriculum, they used to have this subject called ‘society and culture’. It was really popular, and it used to feed directly into sociology in the universities. The students who loved doing that subject would come to us in sociology. It was a very simple sort of sociology, nothing too radical or anything, but it obviously interested them and encouraged them to think about society. So that's a good start, isn’t it? … Well, they’ve taken it out now. STEM is all the rage. So our main feeder vein has gone in New South Wales. I believe there's still sociology of a kind in Victorian schools but there's a whole lot of work to be done in New South Wales to rebuild that and get it back into schools.
Yes. That's another challenge for sociology – having a presence so people can know what sociology is. It goes back to what you were saying before, about how you started; many people just stumble onto sociology, and they think ‘I found my people now.’ And we’re really limiting those opportunities for young people to do that.
Yes, yes, certainly.
As our conversation today is part of marking the Journal of Sociology's 60th anniversary this year, I wanted to ask you, what role do you think JoS has played in the sociology community?
I think it's been really important, and perhaps it's been more important symbolically than immediately, materially, although, you know the symbolic will leak into the material eventually, in some way. But symbolically, it's really been very important because it's given Australian sociologists a sense of community. It symbolises our community. It's something tangible that we can feel. Yes, we have something there that shows we’re real sociologists. We have our own journal. And so it helps to give us a sense of ourselves as a group, as a collective, not just individuals.
It also gives us a sense that we’re professionals in some way. Although I’m not using that in the new way they’re using it in the universities to distinguish between admin and academics; I’m not keen on that.
With JoS there's this capacity with this journal for us all to participate in some way. We can just be readers of it. Through paying our fees as members of TASA, we’re helping to support the journal in some way. We can be authors. We can be reviewers. We can have a turn as editors if we wish to, or as part of the editorial team. So there's lots of ways we can participate in JoS. That integrates us and brings us together. So JoS can be seen as something that's collectively produced by us, not just for us, but something we have produced.
It's a very important mechanism of bringing us together. And I think that's really important, because the sociological community in Australia, as in a lot of places, I guess, can be very fragmented. And you know, one of us will be about sociology of sport, and another one health sociology, or whatever. And so often we – we see the differences between us more than we see the similarities. By having a journal, we can kind of see that there's more to this than just our own little section of sociology. It's symbolically really important because it represents the whole.
What do you think might be the role of the Journal of Sociology in the future of Australian sociology?
I think it's important to realise that a journal can’t be everything to everyone, and we can’t expect it to solve the world's problems or anything like that. Those limitations are there for a reason. If it tried to do everything, it would become some sort of instrument that did nothing at all. I think it would be too fragmented, so I think we need to keep coherence in the journal. This idea of bringing the community together is still important, and it should keep on doing that. I think it would be good if it can encourage more debate and discussion over contemporary issues. We still need to have those research papers, that's really important. We can’t stop doing that. That's where we do the in-depth analysis of particular issues, problems and build theory, and so on. But I think JoS could also expand to take in a few other ways of communicating, other ways of being a communications network. Because that's what it is at heart, a communications network.
At Serendipities, at the moment, we’re trying to create a new website where we’re asking for different kinds of papers. We’re going to have commentaries and transcriptions of interviews and various things like that alongside the research papers, and it will have more things in it. There's not going to be less room for the research papers. But there's going to be more room in there for alternatives. Book reviews have been in journals for a long time. But I think you can do more with book reviews than just – this is what it's about, and this is what's wrong with it. We can do a lot more with book reviews, make them more discussion-based. So there's just some ideas.
I think it's important for sociologists to be able to have a journal where they can see that issues are being discussed, and they can look back and see how they were discussed in the past, too. That's useful.
I like this idea of really bringing forward the role of the journal as a space for community, and creating more opportunity for responsiveness.
If I can ask you just one more question, this one goes full circle, back to what you said at the beginning of the interview, about how it's so important that we know our history. If we’re to understand what kind of knowledge community we are and what we can be, we need to know where we’ve come from. Where do you see us heading as a sociology community and what lessons can we learn from our past?
It's really hard to do without a crystal ball.
I think, just knowing about the struggles in the past, instead of saying ‘Oh, it was all wonderful back then, and now it's all ruined’, we need to say: ‘Hey, you know, we’re a fighting force, and we’ve made so many gains. We’ve been involved in so many really good things in the past. We can continue this way.’ But it's not going to be easy. It's always going to be a struggle. Activism is hard, and people are always having to make decisions about whether to put their energies into being an activist sociologist, or an armchair scholar, or snuggle up to management, get that promotion, or work with industry, or take their money and live high on the hog, and perhaps push the sociology into the smallest corner of the report. People are going to have to continue to make those decisions. As I said, we’re an alternative way of seeing the world, so it's never going to be super easy.
The changes that are coming with artificial intelligence are just unfathomable at this stage. What is going to happen to scholarship? Is it really going to disappear? Are we just going to have our kids taught by machines? What's going to happen? We have no idea. We do know that the era of celebrating and debating the ideas of specific individuals is going to disappear very fast. AI does not reference specific scholars or ground the ideas in specific schools of thought or take into account the locations of these perspectives – it just adds them all together as an interesting, but false, amalgam of ideas and perspectives. Our journal papers and books have already been taken into the AI machine – and the publishers have encouraged this as it is lucrative for them. Students are now using AI, and will soon lose the basic critical skills essential for good scholarship. It is not a hopeful future for scholarship or the humanities or social science disciplines. Well, any disciplines really.
So there are many struggles ahead. I think we need to listen to the early career scholars and the PhD students. Talk to them more about what's happening. That's the question for them, and if they can answer, what would they like us to do? What kinds of knowledge would they like us to provide about our history? What would help the most? That would be a great piece of guidance for people like me who are writing about it.
I was reading up about the history of JoS. The juicy bits, like the coup of 1972 where people like Raewyn Connell and Lois Bryson and others staged a vote at the annual conference to take the journal from the ‘old guard’. They thought that the editorship should regularly change rather than having the same group, from the same university, continuing to edit the journal. The previous editors weren’t happy about it, they thought the young folk were going to radicalise and damage the journal. But that history brought an opportunity for generational renewal of the discipline and made space for people to refigure what it means to be radical, or to be a sociologist.
And that's one thing that TASA and JoS have been really good at, bringing in the new ideas and the new people. Originally yes, ANU had the journal, and they were a permanent editorial. They didn’t think it a good idea to change editors or institutions, or whatever. But ever since then we’ve been doing that. We’ve moved between different editors, different institutions every few years. And I think that's been really important. And we’ve brought in young people, often alongside someone more experienced. So we’re putting our money where our mouth is. It's not just empty words. I think we’ve become really good at bringing in the next generation, helping to socialise them into the discipline. Yes, you will probably always get some complaints because you can’t suit everybody. But in the main I think we’ve done a good job. We should pat ourselves on the back for the community that we’ve created over several generations.
That's a nice way to end our conversation, isn’t it? A collective pat on the back for all sociologists.
Absolutely, past and present.
Well, thank you so much, Fran. It's been wonderful to get some insight into all this incredible research that you’ve done about the history of the sociology. A very fitting way to celebrate 60 years of JoS, hearing how it came onto the scene and the influence that it's had, and the influence that it can have going forward.
Yes, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak about it.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
