Bulletin

Issue: January/February 2006

News

Beating the drum for social sciences in Australia

The La Trobe University-based journal, Thesis Eleven, has been beating the drum for critical theory for 25 years – and today is one of the leading English language journals in its field.

Its research articles and commentary on key issues in social science, contemporary culture and politics have achieved widespread international recognition.

At a time when many academic journals are struggling financially, the journal is self-supporting with an influential readership in the thousands.

Professor of Sociology and Director of the University’s Thesis Eleven Centre, Peter Beilharz, is one of the journal’s founders and editors. He says Thesis Eleven reaches internationally across the social sciences and liberal arts, and cultivates a diversity of critical theories of modernity.

The centre regularly conducts events that attract international scholars – and its special 25th Anniversary seminar in December featured the President of the US Social Science Research Council, Professor Craig Calhoun, for a program on ‘American Civilization’.

The event also included the Australian launch of a new book, Gore Vidal’s America, written by La Trobe University Professor of Politics, Dennis Altman, who had just returned from a US speaking tour dealing with the book.

Professor Altman was a panelist at the seminar, along with Professor Beilharz. Other panelists were La Trobe sociologist, Dr Trevor Hogan, Monash University educationist, Dr Peter Murphy, Sydney writer and author of Highway to Hell, Clinton Walker, and La Trobe historian, Dr Diane Kirkby.

Professor Beilharz said the seminar explored why Australians, and people from many other nations today, have a ‘love-hate relationship’ with the US. Until the sixties, in contrast, America was viewed as a new civilization, or as ‘The American Dream’.

‘Many people say they hate America, but scratch the surface and you find this great affinity with US culture. Maybe you like jazz, or American films, or their technology. A good illustration of this ambivalence is a bit of graffiti I saw in Mexico: “Yankee go home” – and beneath someone had written: “and take me with you”.’

Professor Beilharz says the US and modernity go hand-in-hand. ‘For many people the US represents a capacity to remake themselves. While Australians admire many aspects of US popular culture, they don’t historically like inequality.

‘When you’re dealing with the fundamental intellectual questions of today, you can’t avoid looking at the US and, differently, Europe. For example welfare: do you have a minimal system like the US, or make better provisions like some European countries? Do you have Howard’s US-style industrial relations system or something more like Germany’s? Should we follow the American university system, or go our own way?’