Antipodean Social Theory

Australia, Peter Beilharz and Trevor Hogan (2012: xxi) write, ‘remains antipodean – in the south and of the north at the same time’. It could be argued that Australian sociology, too, reflects this ambivalent positioning, inflected as it is by multiple intellectual and disciplinary lineages and straddling both the concerns of Grand Theory and everyday life. Organising under the rubric of ‘antipodean social theory’, this session explores what is distinctive about social theorising in Australia and the region more broadly. Is there an antipodean social theory tradition as such? How might this relate to other approaches like postcolonialism, subalternity and southern theory? We are particularly interested in how conceptions of place, culture and centre-periphery relations have inflected Australian social theory, as well as how it has been informed by disciplines like geography, history and art. In what ways does social theorising in Australia reflect or produce a sense of place and region? Is there a particular antipodean attitude to culture and the movement and exchange of ideas, values and beliefs? How does the construction of Australia as antipodean refract and complicate relations between centre and periphery – and how have these relations changed in this period of Asian, especially Chinese, ascendancy? What might the interdisciplinarity of social theorising in Australia say about the parameters of social theory conventionally understood?