Politics

Disconnected by Andrew Leigh

by Anthony Moran •

March 2011, no. 329

UNSW Press, $34.95 pb, 207 pp, 9781742231532

Politics

Disconnected by Andrew Leigh

by Anthony Moran •

March 2011, no. 329

Since the mid 1990s, when Robert Putnam lionised the concept in his famous essay ‘Bowling Alone’, writing on ‘social capital’ has proliferated. It caught the eye of politicians, including then United States President Bill Clinton, and for a while it seemed that everyone was lamenting its decline; it became a staple of debate among politicians, within policy networks, and in the major newspapers. Australia had its own proponents, including public intellectual Eva Cox, and former politicians Mark Latham, Lindsay Tanner, Carmen Lawrence, and Peter Costello.

Anthony Moran

Anthony Moran is a lecturer in Social Sciences at La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia. He teaches in the areas of ethnicity, race, indigenous issues, nationalism, qualitative research methods, political sociology, social policy, and community studies. He is the author of Australia: Nation, Belonging and Globalization (Routledge, 2005), the co-author (with Judith Brett) of Ordinary People’s Politics (Pluto Press Australia, 2006), and the co-editor (with Sean Watson) of Trust, Risk and Uncertainty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). He has published many articles in international journals on issues of race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, indigenous/settler politics and relations, cosmopolitanism, and nationalism. He is currently writing on multiculturalism in Australia.