RW Connell

For over twenty years Bob Connell has been a leading figure in the development of an Australian sociology, and his move from Macquarie University to the University of California several years ago was a significant loss to Australian academic life. I wish I could write Australian public life, but our press, which is fond of academics with far less to say than Bob Connell, has largely ignored his work. Nonetheless Connell’s work in class, sexuality, gender, and education is arguably the most distinguished body of social theory written in this country, and deserves far greater acknowledgment.

A founding figure in the Sociology Department at Flinders and now Professor at Macquarie, Bob Connell is almost certainly the most significant figure in sociology in Australia. If sociology has traditionally been a poor relation in our older universities to both politics and anthropology, its current claims to influence owe a considerable amount to the directions in which Connell has pushed it.