Class Structure in Australian History has been ignored for most of its life as an academic publication. Historians argued the text was not empirically rigorous; left-wing commentators that it lacked a sufficient account of race, class, gender, the mode of production, the world-system [...]
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Over the last year, the Past & Present Reading Group has taken a spatial turn, with a triad of three books of spatial theory from different disciplinary and theoretical frameworks: Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, Doreen Massey’s Spatial Divisions of Labour, and most [...]
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Discussing the analytical and political challenges
It is important to have a spatial or geographical dimension to political economic analysis, just as it is important to recognise its temporal dimension. In the real world, all human activity occurs in both space and time. Any [...]
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What is the unitary theory of space that is awaiting to be discovered in The Production of Space?
“Intellectual labour, like material labour, is subject to endless division”, Lefebvre says. “The aim is to discover or construct theoretical unity between ‘fields’ which are apprehended [...]
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I first became aware of the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham a few years ago, when a friend recommended that I read their seminal work The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A feminist Critique of Political Economy. Being instantly fascinated by what the book suggested, I bought a copy and began [...]
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In high school, like many young women, my friends and I developed a fascination with witches. Years before we knew what feminism was, a sense of foreboding had developed among us, about our place in the world and our power relative to adults and to our male peers. As ambitious teen girls [...]
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In the first semester of this year, the Past & Present Reading Group chose to tackle the newly published Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, a collection of work by five thinkers, Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancière. Their [...]
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The Past & Present Reading Group at the University of Sydney has just completed reading Jason W. Moore’s major new book Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015). The book provided very fertile ground for lively and critical discussions on [...]
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