Keywords

Remy’s Story

Saturday mornings were our time. It was a few degrees cooler than the sweltering midday and less likely to rain than in the evenings. But there was never any reprieve from the humidity. So, chasing that ragged round ball in the field behind our housing estate meant that we would be soaked in sweat by the time we ran home in time for lunch. I would usually be greeted upon arrival by my annoyed grandmother, chasing me down with a wet rag, audibly muttering about how I had already ruined the clean clothing she had put on me earlier. Yet no amount of forced towelling or dressing down could rip me away from my neighbourhood football bash in those days. I had, after all, very quickly established myself as a fearsome goalkeeper (actually, they called me crazy goalkeeper). I was always ready to dive headlong to meet any fleet-footed opportunists looking for goal, which was usually the space between two bright enough pieces of trash we came across on our walk from our meeting point to the field.

Faisal was not crazy. He was skilful. I remember always trying to track his movements as he wove his way through obstructing legs, deftly traversing the lumpy terrain of grass and patches of bare, dark yellow earth. The tempo of my heartbeat would pick up a few notches every time he approached, by unpredictable trajectories, towards the goal that I defended. And, say, eight times out of ten, no matter how I threw my body and dirtied my clothes, nothing stood in the way of Faisal’s left foot and the celebratory high fives and headlock-like hugs from whoever his teammates were that morning. Perhaps there was ambiguity for me about whether to be pleased or pissed off on those occasions because he was my dear friend, though we frequently found ourselves on opposite teams. Yet few could doubt his talent and my pride. I am not sure that many adults in the neighbourhood considered Faisal talented or me prideful for that matter. But they were irrelevant to us on that uneven and dusty field. Saturday mornings were our time.

One Friday evening, I was compelled to attend a gathering with my extended family and friends. It was some auntie’s birthday—an auntie I did not know at all, which is not an unusual experience for Malaysian children. There was a terrific, constant din of chatter from adults sitting around on plastic seats that accompanied the white fluorescent lights filling the first floor of a large house. As the hours wore on, I grew tired and agitated, shuffling about in my seat between my grandmother and an uncle, who were having a chat with the auntie whose birthday it was, the one I did not know. Whatever it was they were discussing, it was about nothing a six-and-a-bit-year-old could latch onto. So, I whispered to my grandmother asking if we could go home soon. My grandmother nodded and signalled to the adults that we were leaving because I was getting tired and because I get up early on Saturday mornings to play with the other kids in the neighbourhood.

‘Watch yourself’, Auntie-who-I-did-not-know said in a stern tone. ‘Or you might become like those Malay boys’.

I recall her looking at me as she spoke, her perm-stiffened hair framing her fleshy, pale, and red-tinged face. I had no idea what she meant by that. ‘Why wouldn’t I want to become like my friends?’ I wondered to myself. ‘And who wouldn’t want to be awesome Faisal?!’ Besides, my grandmother’s main lingua was Malay. She had a Malay heritage that was—to my mind—visible to those around her, except in contexts where she had to make herself inconspicuous. I have vivid memories of her out in the back lane of our street, sitting with the other aunties in the neighbourhood, all dressed in sarong tied up to their armpits, talking and laughing loudly as they washed and sliced vegetables. They all spoke Malay. I knew this because I spoke Malay (long before I was compelled to speak English).

Some 12 years after those Saturday mornings and thousands of kilometres away from that little grass patch behind our housing estate, I found myself sitting in a small, carpeted room with a dank smell. It was a hot mid-afternoon in March and in this little cupboard-like space with a poorly functioning ceiling fan at the end of the hallway in a 1960s brick building, it was hard not to feel like I’d been had by the image of the University of Sydney sold to me in the glossy prospectus. But I would walk out of that room at the end of that hour thinking neither of the weather nor of being jolly with a group of photogenic people while clutching books under faux-Oxbridge quadrangles. My mind would be abuzz with fuzzy images of those football mornings, my family, Faisal, and that comment by the aunty-I-did-not-know.

The class that day was on Asian economic history, and specifically Southeast Asian economic history, which may strike many as a rather boutique if unexciting topic to be sweating over on a late-summer’s day. But led through key passages by my formidable teacher—Dr. Lily Rahim—I felt every sentence like an electric charge that pulsed into my chest from my cheaply bound course reader through the index finger that traced its pages. It’s hard, even now, to describe the exhilaration of that moment when I first encountered the words of Syed Hussein Alatas (1977) on the nineteenth-century European imperial project and its racialised social system, where ‘The Europeans formed the ruling class at the top of the hierarchy; next came those of mixed European blood and Christian in faith, then came the foreign Asian immigrant community, and finally the native population’ (p. 18). Writing of Malaysia (or Malaya as it was back in the colonial days), Alatas (1977) lays out the precise ideological coordinates of such a system of subjugation, pointing to the origins of ‘the myth of the lazy native’ from the unwillingness of Malay peoples to become a tool in the colonial system of plantation production and the subsequent exploitation of indentured Chinese and Indian labourers on that basis. Citing an influential late-nineteenth-century British writer visiting the Malayan settlements—including Georgetown, where I was born—Alatas (1977) highlights the circulation of racialised myths by colonial administrators and settlers that buttressed this status system:

From a labour point of view, there are practically three races, the Malays (including Javanese), the Chinese, and the Tamils (who are generally known as Klings). By nature, the Malay is an idler, the Chinaman is a thief, and the Kling is a drunkard, yet each, in his special class of work, is both cheap and efficient, when properly supervised. (p. 75)

It is difficult to express how haunting these words are for someone who grew up in Malaysia in the last decades of the twentieth century—haunting because like beings from another time that keep returning to rattle the iron cage of the present, these undead sentiments continue to be uttered, repeated, inscribed, embodied, and exploited by Malaysians in the postcolonial period (Gabriel, 2014, 2015; Hirschman, 1986; Kua, 2007). The oft-raised ‘problem’ of racial divisions in Malaysia—those categories of Malay/Indian/Chinese that crudely cut over family and community histories, that marked lines that didn’t line up with bonds forged of intermarriage, kinship, and friendship, that tethered tongues to ‘mother tongues’ that were supposed to speak of one’s race (and only one), and the hardening of boundaries between people—while not reducible in its entirety to European colonialism, certainly continues to bear its unmistakeable imprint. Through Alatas’s meticulous historical research and Dr. Rahim’s carefully considered pedagogy, the theory of race as a social system—that is, racism—gathered up the many inchoate fragments of experience and emotion that had been strewn around from my childhood in Malaysia.

That day changed how I thought about myself and the world I inhabited. And it altered the way I related to others in my family and community in Malaysia. It allowed me to offer a different story at family gatherings, meetings of activists and friends, and in casual conversations at street stalls—anywhere the ghastly tropes of colonial race ideology may be incanted. Via life’s circuitous routes and after wandering down not a few professional side streets, I find myself here as a teacher educator in Australia, spending most of my days planning and facilitating lessons on the relationship between culture, power, and education. And I am still honing my skills in exorcism.

Suzanne’s Story

I felt that I had found my home when I enrolled in women’s and gender studies as an undergraduate. It was an immersion in wonderfully exciting ideas and theorists whose work somehow just seemed to ‘make sense’. Recently, interviewing sexual assault practitioners about the influence of feminism on their work, I had the strange experience in one interview of feeling like I was interviewing myself. This worker told me about how studying feminism at university had not really been about studying but was something she just seemed ‘just naturally drawn to’. ‘It wasn’t laborious’, she said, ‘It wasn’t like I was trying to read up on an academic framework’. Rather, it was something that ‘just naturally fit’ with her. It was, in her words: ‘So exciting to me because it just fit with something that really was just a bit me. I don’t know. It was really just, I loved it’.

‘That’s it!’ I remember thinking at the time, getting caught up in her excitement despite myself, ‘that’s exactly what it is like’. The lens of gender helped me make sense of a whole host of experiences and observations that I had found equal parts perplexing and annoying. I loved the concept of ‘sexed bodies’, even if I did struggle with the often-convoluted language used to express such ideas. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), as has often been mentioned, was a classic case in point. But the ideas contained therein—that the same behaviour exhibited (e.g. movements, gestures, tone of voice, use of space) is often responded to differently depending on whether our bodies are seen and coded as male or female—just made such immediate sense to me. It checked out with my observations about how people did or did not ‘fit’ in particular contexts based on their outward alignment with certain gendered norms and the punishments and rewards that were meted out accordingly. It was as if theory disclosed my own experiences to me.

However, while I looked forward each week to the lively and animated classes, I barely spoke up in the first six weeks. Everyone else seemed so confident, so fluent in a language and concepts that left me perplexed half the time. It meant that my encounter with critical social theory was simultaneously exciting—revelatory of my own experiences even—as well as being a somewhat intimidating, if not alienating experience. At first (well, for quite a long time, actually), I thought it meant everyone else was much cleverer, much more intelligent than I was. I had left school when I was 15 and worked as cleaner, interspersed by periods of unemployment. Nobody in my family even finished high school, let alone set foot in a higher education institution. The university was not a place where it was easy for me to feel ‘at home’; it was not my ‘habitus’, to use Bourdieu’s (1990) concept. All around me was a way of speaking, behaving, and being that I found and continue to find difficult to understand. Eventually, though I came to wonder if this type of confidence exhibited by those around me—the assured way of presenting oneself and one’s ideas—was not at least as much about privilege as it was about intelligence. The sort of assuredness that can come, say, with a private or elite school education, from knowing that your trajectory will include a university education, from already having imbibed the language and practices of the educated upper-middle class where the academic caste in Australia is still largely drawn.

After those few weeks I did find my voice in those classes. In fact, I found myself throwing around those same sorts of sophisticated sounding phrases and words until one day, I listened to myself speaking and realised that I made no sense to myself. If anyone had challenged me and asked me to explain in plain English what I was talking about, I was sure I would have failed. And that was the second revelatory thing about theory for me: that it can be used to obscure as much as it can disclose. To my mind, critical social theory—what I will designate as ‘Theory’ with a big ‘T’—can do so in a few ways. Firstly, with enough confidence and panache as in my own case, Theory can mask confusion and inattention. More perniciously, it can serve exclude others who do not trade in its linguistic currency while shoring up the privileged status of those who do. As such, it can serve to bolster egos, to mark the territory of individual or disciplinary expertise, to build careers, and/or to categorise other people outside of higher education institutions—often the ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘marginalised’—in ways that, while perhaps well intended, do not always make much sense to those subject to such ‘good intentions’.

Another way that Theory can be used for obfuscation is by allowing its user to adopt the ‘high moral ground’ in relation to others. Sometimes this is referred to as taking a ‘normative stance’, which is just another way of saying that the adherents of the Theory have a view about what (and who) they think is right or wrong. My first encounter with Theory used in this way came when I entered the professionally orientated phase of my degree programme and encountered ‘empowerment’. I knew this notion was important just from gleaning the course outlines, which showed that most of that programme phase would be dedicated to one or another aspect of ‘empowerment’, not to mention its accompaniment by a required textbook of the same name. What did not dawn on me until well into the semester was that ‘empowerment’—a word that seemed so intuitively right (I mean, who would honestly be against empowerment?!)—was itself a theoretically loaded concept. I still clearly remember the day I experienced this revelatory ‘light bulb’ moment: walking with my friend Michelle on campus, I asked her if she had also had this inkling that ‘empowerment’ may not be a singular thing, that there were actually a number of different theories of empowerment. In retrospect, it probably seems a bit ridiculous to not have realised all along that empowerment was a theoretical concept.

Yet perhaps I was not so silly to have thought this. In retrospect, I believe what my fellow students and I were accommodating ourselves to was the manner in which this theory (of empowerment) was being taught. It had an aura of ‘Truth’ about it: for if the stated commitment to social justice was key value of my degree programme in social work, then empowerment was the means through which we would achieve this. There was little room for anything but the most tepid critique of anything or anyone who might question this; empowerment was the frame of reference against which other theories were discussed and critiqued in our discussions (not to mention how the final term paper was to be assessed). While this realisation was profoundly deflating, I suspect it was/is not entirely uncommon. Foucault, for example, often spoke of the stranglehold that Marxism held in French universities during the early years of his academic career (e.g. Foucault, 1980, pp. 78–108). Similarly, the rigid imposition of poststructuralism and deconstruction in English Literature departments during the 1990s has been recounted by many former students, and indeed some former advocates (e.g. Norris, 1996). My point is that the uptake, presence, or popularity of a ‘Theory’ is often about the unspoken exercise of power: whether this takes the form of setting the framework and assessment criteria by which utterances and writings will be evaluated within an educational setting, as in my example above; or the pressures felt by postgraduate students and early-career scholars to pay homage to certain names and ideas in order to gain entry into the world of publications; or simply in the subtle, hard-to-grasp ways in which some people are seen to be ‘with it’ and others not.

These are just some reasons why, when it comes to Theory, I have come to realise the importance of asking: Why is this theory or idea influential for this very place and time? This means reflecting on what is going on in society and culture, as well as within the institutional contexts that we find ourselves in (whether inside or outside the academy). In other words, it is about coming to terms with how we have come to decide on this or that Theory over others and to be honest about why.

Using (other people’s) Ideas

Social theory, most broadly conceived, ‘refers to ideas, arguments, hypotheses, thought-experiments and explanatory speculations about how and why human societies – or elements or structures of such societies – come to be formed, change, and develop over time or disappear’ (Harrington, 2011). Jean Anyon (2009) offers a similar definition of couched in a helpful metaphor. Social theory, according to her, is ‘an architecture of ideas – a coherent structure of interrelated concepts whose contemplation and application (1) help us to understand and explain discursive and social phenomena and (2) provides a model of the way that discourse and social systems work and can be worked upon’ (Anyon, 2009, p. 3). As the above two stories illustrate, social theories have the capacity to name, clarify, obscure, reframe, orient, excite, soothe, agitate, inspire, and affect our senses of ourselves in the world. Consequently—to extend Anyon’s architectural metaphor—they are also invitations to inhabit and act in the world differently to how we had hitherto. That social theories can enable different ways of knowing, being, and doing animate the stories that will be told by the various authors in this book, stories that situate themselves within that very particular province of the world called ‘higher education’ and the types of work that go on there—specifically, teaching and research. While differing from one another in the way they have come to use social theory, not to mention in their theoretical proclivities, all the accounts contained in this book orbit around the questions: What does social theory enable that would otherwise not be possible or at least not possible in the same way? Conversely, what are the limits of social theory? What, in other words, is the use of such an ‘architecture of ideas’—other people’s architectures, no less—in relation to the work of teaching and research that we do in higher education, day in, day out?

In this introductory chapter, we wish to offer three general ways of responding to these questions in the context of higher education. That is, when considering the work of teaching and research, we suggest that a case can be made for a social theory’s usefulness for one or more of the following reasons:

  1. 1.

    It names observable phenomena

  2. 2.

    It has a practical consequence

  3. 3.

    It helps to resolve difficult situations

We will presently explore each of these reasons in turn and with passing reference to theories that have sought to address themselves to two themes prefigured in the stories told above: racism and sexism.

Theories Are Useful If They Can Be Linked to Observable Phenomena

Firstly, we might consider theories or theoretical concepts to be useful if they name certain actions and/or effects in the world that are observable and that can be verified by others. Barbara Kawulich (2012) makes a similar argument about the role that theories play in helping us to identify and organise the connections between various phenomena that may seem unrelated. According to her, a theoretical perspective helps to ‘answer “why” questions and to explain various cases or units of analysis in certain situations’, and from there to ‘determine the relationship between concepts that are carefully defined, ways to measure those concepts and what influences them’ (p. 37). By emphasising social theory’s usefulness for making sense of what may produce a phenomenon by tagging concepts onto its different constituent elements, establishing the relationship of these elements to one another, then gauging which element/s produce particular effects, Kawulich develops a sentiment expressed by the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce.

According to Peirce (1878/1997), we should be able to notice what an idea (and by extension, an architecture of ideas) names in the observable world: ‘Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves, and mistake a mere sensation accompanying the thought for a part of the thought itself’ (p. 36). Once we have established that our ideas (or concepts) have an observable correlate, we can be left with ‘a series of problems capable of investigation by the observational methods of the true sciences’ (Peirce, 1905/1934, sec. 5.276). In other words, because useful ideas and theories are linked to ‘sensible effects’ in the world, they should be discoverable, testable, and/or refinable by others through investigation (Talisse & Aikin, 2008, p. 11). According to this view, if a theory names things in the world that cannot be verified by others somehow, then we should really question whether it is useful.

Consider, for example, the concept of ‘sexism’ as developed by feminist scholars. We can see that it names a variety of actions that perpetuate inequalities by privileging certain types of men over other types of men and most women in observable, verifiable ways. As mentioned in Suzanne’s story above, it ‘checks out’ with what we have also noticed about how people are treated based on how their gendered behaviours line-up (or don’t). Of course, sexism has been discussed, debated, and developed significantly over time: the concept continues to be refined through investigations of its manifestations in different scales and places (e.g. how it appears in various social, cultural, institutional, societal, and national contexts); the uneven distributions of its effects (e.g. how different habits of action like racism and transphobia intersect with sexism to magnify its consequences for some people); and how best to reduce its occurrence (e.g. through education, legislation). Yet we would argue that this is precisely what makes sexism a useful theoretical concept—it sheds light on actions that have observable effects and that can be made clearer through ongoing inquiry (e.g. Haack, 1993; Trout, 2010).

Theories Are Useful If They Can Be Shown to Have a Practical Consequence

While ideas are certainly useful for naming experiences and patterns of action that are observable and verifiable, they can also affect our habits of action by influencing what we believe, think, and feel—effects that are not immediately observable, but do have practical consequences. Sticking with our example, we can see that for many scholars who inquire into sexism, it is not only an idea that is useful for explaining patterns of behaviour. Holding to the theory of sexism—a well-founded move given its copious observable effects that have been documented—might also change what we believe about ourselves (e.g. as perpetrators and/or targets), how we think about ourselves in relation to others (e.g. our attitudes and perceptions), how we feel about ourselves and others (e.g. anger, compassion, desire for change), and how we subsequently act (e.g. to resist, to behave differently).

This is slightly different from the first reason above insofar as the emphasis is less on correlating the concepts of a theory to aspects of a phenomena that can be discovered, observed, measured, counted, and so on, and more on how those concepts may serve to bring together experiences or phenomena that would otherwise seem confusing or random. By bringing together experiences—for instance, being spoken to in a condescending way often—under a theoretical concept (e.g. sexism), it allows us to make sense of situations and perhaps formulate a response to them. In short, social theory is useful because it can be shown to have practical consequences for living and acting in the world.

So, this second reason for using social theory can thus be summarised as follows: theories or theoretical concepts are useful if they enable us to make sense of our own and/or others’ experiences and can be shown to make a practical difference in how we/others might act. This resonates with Lois Tyson’s (2011) proposal for critical social theories, which, apart from enabling the user to ‘think creatively and to reason logically’ (Tyson, 2011, p. 1), also enables us to come to a better understanding of our own experiences and that of others. She argues that social theories, which are often developed as a way of making sense of complex experiences, enable us to:

[T]o begin to understand one another by learning to see the world from diverse points of view, by learning what it might be like to ‘walk a mile in another person’s moccasins.’ And though it might sound like a big claim, that is precisely what critical theory can help us learn because it teaches us to see the world from multiple perspectives. (Tyson, 2011, p. 2)

So in Remy’s story mentioned above, for instance, the usefulness of the theory of racial ideology lay in its ability to make sense of his scattered experiences by bringing it under a set of theoretical concepts and in the way it went on to inform his subsequent actions and interactions with others. This type of argument for the practicality of social theory also finds a precedent in the work of William James, another American pragmatist and friend-cum-intellectual sparring partner of Peirce. In a well-known passage, the former asserts that the ‘cash value’ of an idea (or architecture of ideas) lies in demonstrating the difference it makes:

Grant an idea or belief to be true… what concrete difference will its being true make in any one’s actual life? What experiences [may] be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? How will the truth be realized? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms? (James, 1907, p. 142)

With regard to the theory of racial ideology, then, its usefulness can be shown to hold if it facilitates making sense of a series of experiences that would otherwise appear disparate across contexts and times, but that can be gathered under the name ‘racism’. It should also be clear that there are practical consequences for naming experiences and phenomena as racism—whether this takes the form of social revolt to break the system that manifests this ideology (e.g. Fanon, 1963), institutional interventions (e.g. Perez Huber et al., 2006), the attenuation of feelings of self-blame and self-doubt (e.g. Pyke, 2010), and/or the recognition of complicity in an unjust state of affairs (e.g. Applebaum, 2010). While there may be differences in opinion about the sorts of practical consequences that come with the recognition of racism, it is clear that the naming of this phenomenon in the work of social theorists is usually tied up with an exhortation to think and act differently in light of it.

Ideas Are Useful If They Help to Resolve Problematic Situations

Both the reasons for the usefulness of social theory mentioned so far presuppose but do not give emphasis to the specific contexts that may give rise to the need for them. The first reason focuses on how social theory can name complex phenomena that can then be verified and explained, while the second is concerned with how social theory can help make sense of experiences that are otherwise inexplicable, which makes a practical difference in people’s lives and the world. To put it crudely, the first reason focuses on ‘outer’ phenomena, while the second is inclined towards ‘inner’ change, though one that can be demonstrated to have noticeable outward implications. The third reason for social theory’s usefulness can be seen as sitting in-between the above two: it should address itself to a felt problem arising within a specific situation, suggest alternative ways of approaching the problem, and consider whether the problem can be resolved—in whole or in part—by the adoption of the perspective offered by the theory. We consider it to sit between the first two reasons offered above because its emphasis is neither on observable phenomena nor sense-making alone, but on the ‘situation’ defined as the interaction between people and their environment. A ‘problematic situation’, then, can be broadly defined as difficulties that arise from this interaction.

Jean Anyon (2009), in making the case for the importance of social theory in research, strikes a consonant chord with this perspective when she accentuates the potential of social theory to abet social change:

We choose theories because, in the end, we think they will produce the most explanation parsimoniously, because their adoption may lead to new and interesting data and explanations, and – importantly – because they may provide some purchase on progressive strategies for social change. (p. 8)

We can see how this way of using social theory has been taken up by feminist and anti-racism scholars who are also activists for social change: by considering a given theory’s adequacy for diagnosing a situation of persistent oppressive experiences; how its conception of sexism and/or racism may function as a tool for social change (or inhibit it); and whether changes made on the basis of its conception of the problematic situation have served to enable a more self-determining and flourishing life for people, and for which groups in particular (Collins, 1998; James, 2009). This approach to using social theory resonates with a third pragmatist—John Dewey.

According to him, all human thought and activity is inextricably bound to specific physical, social, and temporal contexts, which he also calls a ‘situation’ (Dewey, 1938a, p. 66). When we experience a general coherence between the habitual ways we interact with our physical and social contexts, we can be said to be in a ‘determinate situation’ (Dewey, 1938b). It is when this experience of stability or normality is disrupted or called into question for whatever reason that we find ourselves in an ‘indeterminate situation’—what we have referred to above as a problematic situation. And it is this experience of being unsettled, of a lack of ‘fit’ between ourselves and our world, which spurs us to inquire into ‘what’s going on?’ and generate ideas for how to act so that we can live in a more determinate situation: ‘Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole’ (Dewey, 1938b, p. 108). Knowledge and ideas, then, should not be taken to represent some transcendent or deeper truth; Dewey (1910/2007) considers this be a manifestation of an impulse to evade the frightening consequences of change: ‘To idealize and rationalize the universe at large is after all a confession of inability to master the course of things that specially concerns us’. Rather, ideas are ‘an instrument or organ of successful action’ (Dewey, 2008, p. 180). In short, they should help to create a new situation, or a better one at least.

This approach to social theory is especially pronounced in the branch of social theory known as ‘critical theory’, which refers to ‘a broad category that includes a set of theories that generally critique larger social structures and explore social inequalities’ (Winkle-Wagner et al. 2018, p. 3). More than an intellectual exercise in negation, however, as the terms ‘critique’ and ‘explore’ may imply, those who draw on such theories often consider their work to be contributing to the transformation of those unjust social structures they examine. As Winkle-Wagner et al. (2018) put it pointedly, ‘critical theorists and those scholars who use these theories do not like oppression and they want their work to change it’ (p. 3). In this way, critical theory exemplifies the type of social theory that seeks to inquire into unbearable situations of inequality and suffering with the goal of changing them.

Notes to the User

So, what is the point of all this unpacking of reasons for the use of social theory in higher education? From the above sketch of some reasons for its use, we submit that social theory can be seen as sets of conceptual tools (or an architecture of ideas, if you prefer) whose utility may be justified on the basis of one or more of the abovementioned reasons. It follows from this that when choosing between alternatives in social theory, it is important for the user to specify the reason, and make an argument if necessary, for preferring one over another based on its fit for purpose. In short, our preoccupations incline us to particular social theories. As Suzanne’s story above suggests, much as we might like to think otherwise, there is no Archimedean point for our theoretical decisions. ‘In arguing over the merits of rival theories’, Roberto Mangabeira Unger (2007) points out, ‘although we may fancy ourselves philosophers enjoying the view from the stars, we are in fact lawyers contending with irreducible ambiguity and foreclosing alternative solutions out of practical need’ (p. 37). In the chapters that follow, the authors will offer accounts how they came to use particular social theories arising at a moment in time from some ‘practical need’ in higher education, specifically the two types of work that preoccupy most emerging academics: teaching and research.

It is also important to remember this when evaluating and debating the relative merits of different social theories—that they are conceptual tools that have been used by others for purposes and contexts that are likely to be different from our own. It is thus more helpful to think of them as more or less useful for our purposes and contexts, rather than as straightforwardly ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’. As Hage (2016) counsels:

[W]henever possible say, I don’t find this theory useful, rather than I don’t agree, or, this is wrong… a theory offers a tool or a set of tools. It is neither a church you adhere to nor a football team you support. (p. 222)

This is not, of course, to suggest that discussions and debates should not be had about the different social theories on offer and why, from a specific location in time and place, given a set of circumstances, some should be deployed over others. Rather, it is to urge us all to be clearer (and more honest) about how the problems that vex us and the purposes that drive us coalesce to influence the theoretical perspectives we take up. This will be visible in the accounts of each of the authors that follow—how they came to judge the usefulness of a particular social theory within a given situation that they found themselves in.

How This Book Came to Be

This book itself is a product of a situation, a moment in time and space shared by the authors from 2017 to 2021 at the University of Sydney, Australia. Its gestation was a monthly reading group held in the small classrooms tucked away in the labyrinthine corridors of the university’s Education Building in that period. On the last Friday morning of every month, the authors of this book would gather around a theoretical text nominated by a member of the group to discuss it—what we found interesting, confusing, insightful, frustrating, and range of other thoughts and affective tones that it may have brought up for us. Month after month we sat and read texts that we may never have encountered if left to our personal proclivities, which tend to stay close to those little provinces called our ‘specialities’. After the first year of these gatherings, as we sat together on a balmy Sydney summer evening in late 2017 sharing what we considered to be most helpful about these meetings, and what kept us returning to it despite writing deadlines and marking piles, a few reasons seemed to resonate amongst us.

Firstly, to our slight surprise, most of the people who turned up regularly for these reading group gatherings were early-career academics, particularly postgraduate students, postdoctoral fellows and academics on fixed-term appointments, and those who were appointed as teaching-focused academics—in short, those for whom the pressures of time were most acutely felt. This seemed to be contrary to the assumption that social theory is the province of high-ranking professors who might have a bit too much time on their hands, those who may be insulated from the vagaries of institutional life and work. The regulars of this reading group found mutual encouragement in the mutual sense that at their best, social theories might offer interesting insights into what we were otherwise busy doing. They were interesting to us in light of, not despite, the work we did.

From this, a second reason emerged as we chatted about why we persisted with the reading group: that unlike other social theory-based reading groups some of us had hitherto experienced, this one seemed to bring the largely abstract (and sometimes downright arcane) register of social theories ‘down to earth’ by raising the question of its usefulness in the types of work we were engaged in. Again and again, especially in its earlier days, someone in the reading group would ask about how and where a given social theory might be applied or not. Over time, we found ourselves articulating these possibilities and limits in our readings of the texts—a hermeneutics of practice that interpreted the social theories in relation to our work preoccupations and to read the social theories as offering us an opportunity to understand ourselves and our work differently.

Because of these reasons, the last but certainly not the least of reasons we returned to the reading group every month was its inviting atmosphere. Absent was the sort of posturing that sometimes accompanies discourse on theory, the sort that serves to exclude as described by Suzanne in her story above, which Hage (2016) characterises as ‘the deployment of theory as a mark of sophistication and a form of cultural capital’. Rather, we found the reading group to be a time and place where we could acknowledge the difficulties we had with work and/or the texts we were reading and to offer one another our thoughts on how the social theories under consideration might be helpful or unhelpful with respect to our work situations. These gatherings were marked by an openness to differing perspectives because of an acceptance of the different institutional positions and preoccupations we had, which shaped the ways we understood the social theories discussed.

It is in the spirit of this reading group that we offer you, the reader, this book. We hope that it will be read less as a collection of authoritative commentaries on social theories and theorists and more as a series of accounts about how social theories can be useful for doing different types of work in higher education. In light of this, we asked each of the chapter authors to consider the following prompts, which were asked in our reading group to those who nominated texts for discussion as a way of introducing them to the rest of us:

  1. 1.

    What was the situation/issue that you were interested in and why?

  2. 2.

    What was the theory you used?

  3. 3.

    How was the theory useful for helping you to understand or act on the situation/issue?

  4. 4.

    What lessons have you learnt about using theory from this experience?

To capture some of the spirit of our discussions, as well as our broader point in this chapter that we tend to incline towards ideas from social theory that speak to our preoccupations at a given time and place, chapters are followed by a response from other members of the reading group. Again, the emphasis in these responses is less on whether the theory in question (and the chapter author’s interpretation) is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but rather on how the responder might read those ideas as more or less useful in relation to their own situation.

What This Book Contains

In the chapters that follow the authors engage with the work of a cosmopolitan cast of contemporary social theorists including Indigenous Australian scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Māori academic Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, British sociologist Nikolas Rose and Lebanese history of medicine scholar Joelle M Abi-Rached, and the Australian sociological theorist Raewyn Connell. The theorists were chosen because of the utility of their work in both highlighting and addressing a number of key emerging social and political issues that we believe are central to critical higher education scholarship. The works of Indigenous scholars, for instance, are imperative to the challenges faced by institutions of higher education in working out how to engage with Indigenous knowledges (i.e. what it means to ‘decolonise’ higher education). While this work may still be nascent in some contexts, it is an issue that is in the process of gaining momentum. For example, as a result of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015), some areas of Canadian higher education are mandated to include Indigenous knowledges and practices in their curricula (e.g. in medicine, law). This trend is echoed in Australia, South Africa, and other settler-colonial states. Speaking to this theme in Chap. 2, Amani Bell and Gulwanyang Moran discuss the use of Indigenous theories and methodologies from the perspectives of an Indigenous researcher and a non-Indigenous researcher via the work of preeminent scholar of decolonising knowledge production (Smith, 2012. Lorraine Towers then adds reflections on her engagement with Smith’s work in light of her personal experiences of working with Aboriginal student and community activists from the late 1980s (Chap. 3). In Chap. 4, Timothy Laurie also engages with Indigenous scholarship—in this instance, Moreton-Robinson’s (2015) theory of white possession under settler-colonialism—to offer an unsettling perspective on student belonging and unbelonging in the classroom and in higher education. Gulwanyang Moran then offers a perspective to these questions of belonging and unbelonging vis-à-vis Indigenous sovereignty from her standpoint as an Indigenous scholar (Chap. 5).

Another example is the growing recourse to the neuro or ‘brain sciences’ in explanations of social problems including poverty, criminality, child abuse, and mental illness—the latter an emerging topic of discussion in higher education. Such explanations have now moved beyond ‘clinical’ research settings and are evident in social policies and practices in fields as diverse as education, juvenile justice, and child protection systems. In Chap. 6, Suzanne Egan thinks through the work of Rose and Abi-Rached (2013) on the brain sciences. She recalls engaging with Rose’s work as a critical lens through which to critically explore and help make sense of the increasing dominance of the brain sciences—via the neuroscience of trauma—in Australian domestic violence and sexual assault policies, practices, and models of service provision. In response, Julian Wood also engages with Rose and Abi-Rached’s work on the neuronal self as part of an effort to weigh up how to adequately engage with the neurosciences as a sociologically trained and inclined teacher educator (Chap. 7).

Other salient themes in contemporary higher education are also discussed in light of social theory in the chapters that follow. Remy Low, for example, grapples with the politics, power, and pliability of identity as it plays out in the tutorial classroom in Chap. 8. Adding to this in his response, José Fernando Serrano Amaya considers the risks and responsibilities incumbent upon educators who deploy agonistic identity politics by drawing on his experiences as a teacher and facilitator in post-conflict Colombia (Chap. 9). Turning from agonism to empathy in Chap. 10, Lauren Weber explores the utility of education scholar Megan Boler’s (1997) work on radical empathy to reconsider the rich possibilities that lie within the act of reading as a mechanism of social change. In turn, her responder Pat Norman alerts us to how neoliberalism has an insidious capacity to render something as inimical to its modus operandi as empathy into an empty moral concept (Chap. 11).

Turning to educational policy in Chap. 12, Ren-Hao Xu’s chapter creatively deploys famed French social theorist Michel Foucault’s (2008) concept of ‘biopolitics’, considering how the global push to raise higher education enrolment rates can be seen part of broader regimes of population management. Remy Low responds to this by suggesting that Foucault’s concept of biopolitics also alerts us to classifications and lines drawn on populations based on race and nation, using as a glaring example Australia’s treatment of international students during the COVID-19 pandemic (Chap. 13). Also offering unique insights into educational policy through a theoretical lens—that of Slavoj Žižek (2012)—is Pat Norman in Chap. 14. He also helpfully elucidates how to retain a primary theorist’s overarching ideas while selectively deploying other theorists’ work to overcome limitations in the primary theorist’s work. Christine Grice also demonstrates this in her response to Norman by bringing Žižek’s ideas together with Ivan Illich’s on education (Chap. 15).

A long-standing frustration for many scholars and practitioners is the apparent ‘gap’ between theory and practice—whether real or imagined or actively reproduced in the interests of maintaining monopolies on ‘expertise’ and professional hierarchies. This troubling gap is itself troubled by Fernando Serrano Amaya in Chap. 16, which draws on his experiences as a scholar positioned in the Global South (Latin America) to show else knowledge production can be conceived, with reference to Raewyn Connell’s (2007) conception of ‘Southern Theory’. Affirming this, Julian Wood’s response also counsels scholars to look beyond the academy and the Global North, at the same time bringing our attention to the porosity of geographic metaphors like ‘North/South’ and ‘East/West’ when charting knowledge production (Chap. 17). Also seeking to trouble the theory/practice gap is Remy Low in Chap. 18, where he considers historiographer White’s (2010) exhortation for historians to produce a ‘practical past’. For teachers who have to deal with the limitations of time and space—as well as student interest and attention spans—any past deployed in the classroom is always already practical, he argues. Christine Grice then responds to this by highlighting how to do ethical educational leadership requires a sense of history, and in turn to do ethical educational leadership is to do the type of history that White counsels in practice (Chap. 19).

As a fitting penultimate chapter to this collection, three emerging scholars—Meenakshi Krishnaraj, Ren-Hao Xu, and Pat Norman—grapple with Raewyn Connell’s (2019) conception of ‘the Good University’ with reference to teaching, research, and professional services, respectively, in Chap. 20. Originally written amidst the upheavals of the COVID-19 pandemic and while under strict lockdowns, they draw on their work and lives in India, Taiwan, and Australia to collectively ask: How else can the higher education be? Raewyn Connell then reflects on the background to her writing of her book on ‘the Good University’ and extends on her thoughts in her reply to Krishnaraj, Xu, and Norman (Chap. 21). In so doing, she exemplifies how social theorists form their ideas through lived struggles and concerns, as well as through dialogue.

At the end—as Amani Bell points out in her concluding chapter that draws the threads together (Chap. 22)—what we hope is that by sharing how we have put these selected theorists to work in our own projects, you as the reader will be encouraged to engage with social theorists as you do your work in higher education. This book is thus not meant to provide a ‘how to’ manual on using the work of these particular social theorists. Rather, it is a humble offering of our experiences of grappling with the ideas of others, on the one hand, and our own work in higher education on the other. What has emerged from that two-handed grappling are insights that have been useful to us, each in our own ways. We trust that you too will find grappling with social theory useful in the work you do in higher education.