Confronting Equality

What does social equality mean now, in a world of markets, global power and new forms of knowledge? In this new book, Raewyn Connell combines vivid research with theoretical insight and radical politics to address this question. The focus moves across gender equality struggles, family change, class and education, intellectual workers, and the global dimension of social science, to contemporary theorists of knowledge and global power, and the political dilemmas of today's left. Written with clarity and passion, this book proposes a bold agenda for social science, and shows it in action. Raewyn Connell is known internationally for her powerfully argued and field-defining books Masculinities, Gender and Power, Making the Difference, and Southern Theory. This new volume gathers together a broad spectrum of her recent work which distinctively combines close-focus field research and large-scale theory, and brings this to bear on those questions of social justice and struggles for change that have long been at the heart of her writing, and will have wide-ranging implications for the social sciences and social activism in the twenty-first century. Visit http://www.raewynconnell.net/

Introduction page 1 1 Change among the Gatekeepers: Men, Masculinities and Gender Equality 7 2 Steering towards Equality? How Gender Regimes Change inside the State 25 3 The Neoliberal Parent: Mothers and Fathers in Market Society 41 4 Working-Class Families and the New Secondary Education 58 5 Good Teachers on Dangerous Ground 73 6 Not the Pyramids: Intellectual Workers Today 89 7 Sociology has a World History 103 8 Paulin Hountondji's Postcolonial Sociology of Knowledge 119 9 Antonio Negri's Theory of Empire 136 10 Bread and Waratahs: A Letter to the Next Left 154 Acknowledgements 167 References 170 Index 187