Conferences are an important part of university life. They are where you get know-how, visibility and connections. In co Introduction to Raewyn. Copyright Raewyn Connell. Designed by Georgia Lou Studios. Raewyn Connell. Almost everything I have done in this area is connected to practical or political questions. Even my first research publication on gender, a naive sex-difference study based on a survey of Sydney teenagers, came from a project intended to help teachers understand kids in school.
In the late s I was involved in research on social inequalities in Australian schools that gave a vivid picture of gender regimes in operation. The in-your-face realities of school and family life made me think harder about gender as a social process, and how its dynamic related to the dynamic of class. Social action was vital for stopping the epidemic, but needed a research base. We designed field studies of sexual practice and its social contexts, both in the gay community and beyond, using current theory in sociology and psychology.
The results were immediately wanted in peer education and policymaking, so we had to make our work meaningful for action. Some time later I was involved in a project on gender relations in the public sector, intended to provide a research bas for new gender equity initiatives.
The project ran into political trouble, but did some beautiful fieldwork on how gender embeds in institutions and policy processes. All these studies raised theoretical problems, which had to be worked out in parallel with the field work. I came to understand gender as a multi-dimensional, historically changing structure of social relations β relations constructed in active social practices.
Such a concept seemed to make most sense of what I was seeing in empirical work, and in gender politics. It seemed to find an audience, since that is my second most cited publication. I continued to think about the conceptual model, especially its unsatisfactory treatment of culture.
