A Model of Reading Practice in the Australian Labour Movement During the First Half of the 20th Century

This paper aims to contribute to the growing field of scholarship that examines reading within the labour movement. However, unlike earlier contributions, which have focused on what is read rather than how it is read; on the nineteenth rather than twentieth century; or on specific individuals rather than common actions, the analysis presented here examines the dominant, distinctive form of reading that developed within the Australian labour movement during the first half of the twentieth century. I This reading practice is contrasted with an ideal type of bourgeois reading, as a means of illuminating what is particular and historically significant in the practices of working-class readers

Labour Historians as Labour Intellectuals: Generations and Crises

Over the last nine decades or so, Australian labour historians have been involved in a massive, ongoing, fractious, collective intellectual project. Together, they have written the history of Australian labour institutions; the history of class relations; the history of work; the history of community; the history of labour\u27s political thought; the history of working-class culture; and the history of how class intersects with gender, race and sexuality. At various moments, the project has been criticised, defended, ironically eulogised, remade and recovered. It has been attacked as politically-motivated; theoretically underdeveloped; communistic; nationalistic; masculinist; naive; overly critical; overly celebratory; old-fashioned and intellectually marginal

Labour intellectuals in Australia: modes, traditions, generations, transformations

The article begins with a discussion of labour intellectuals as knowledge producers in labour institutions, and of the labour public in which this distinctive kind of intellectual emerges, drawing on our previously published work. Next we construct a typology of three ‘‘modes’’ of the labour intellectual that were proclaimed and remade from the 1890s (the ‘‘movement’’ the ‘‘representational’’, and the ‘‘revolutionary’’), and identify the broad historical processes (certification, polarization, and contraction) of the labour public. In a case study comparing the 1890s and 1920s we demonstrate how successive generations of labour intellectuals combined elements of these ideal types in different ways to develop traditions of intellectual work. The article concludes with a sketch of the labour public after the crisis of the 1920s. It considers the rise of the ‘‘militant’’ intellectual in the 1930s, the role of publicists, planners and experts in the 1940s, the skill of ‘‘generalship’’ in the polarized 1940s and 1950s, the failure to meet the challenge of the new social movements in the 1970s, and the decline of the agitational, movement-identified intellectual

New South Wales : July to December 2003

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Political chronicles : New South Wales : January to June 2003

The campaign for the New South Wales state elections officially began on February 28. In truth, however, it dominated political life from the first days of the New Year.9 page(s

The Labor of diffusion : the peace pledge union and the adaptation of the Gandhian repertoire

The history of the Peace Pledge Union of Britain illuminates the process of social movement repertoire diffusion. In the late 1950s and 1960s British pacifists successfully used nonviolent direct action, but this was based upon a long-term engagement with Gandhism. Systematic coding of movement literature suggests that the translation of Gandhian methods involved more than twenty years of intellectual study and debate. Rival versions of Gandhian repertoire were constructed and defended. These were embedded in practical, sometimes competing projects within the pacifist movement, and were the subject of intense argument and conflict. the relevance of Gandhism was established through complex framing processes, multiple discourses, and increasing practical experimentation. This article offers methodological and conceptual tools for the study of diffusion. A wider argument for the importance of the reception as will as performance of contention is offered.18 page(s

Students, Teachers, and (Social) Classes

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From Contestation to Autonomy: The Staging and Framing of Anti-Hanson Contention

16 page(s