Gender in Theory and Practice: An Interview with Raewyn Connell

Raewyn Connell1 is currently a professor in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. What characterises her researchF whether it is on educational inequalities, class structure, gender theory or knowledge productionFis the critical gaze with which she looks at the social world. In much of her work she deconstructs the canon in order to understand the power dynamics that are hidden in the shadows of this privileged set of texts. One of her professional goals is to make social science relevant to social justice and to bring research to bear on public policy and strategies of social change, or, as she stresses in the first pages of Southern Theory (2007: vii), to ‘propose a new path for social theory that will help social science to serve democratic purposes on a world scale’. She clearly combines scientific research and political commitment in a ‘public sociology’, a sociology that is not only theoretically significant but relevant to the world at large (see Burawoy, 2005). Her great cultural sensibility is proven by the many awards she has received for her work: the American Sociological Association presented her with an award for distinguished contribution to the study of sex and gender; and the Australian Sociological Association for distinguished service to sociology in Australia. Four of her books are listed among the ten most influential texts in Australian Sociology.2 In this face-to-face interview that I conducted at the University of Sydney in February 2010, we mainly spoke about Connell’s concepts developed in her research on gender on the occasion of the recent re-publication of Gender: In World Perspective (2009)