The newly established Australian Centre for Gender Equality and Inclusion at Work at the University of Sydney is recruiting a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow to join and to help lead our growing team. The Centre builds on a significant body of research at the University which has investigated the nature of gender inequality at work, its causes, and potential pathways to better practice and outcomes. This research will be scaled in 2024 under the leadership of Centre Director Professor Rae Cooper and Deputy Director Professor Elizabeth Hill. As a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, you will play a critical role at this exciting time as the Centre establishes and grows.

Projects you undertake as part of the Centre’s research program will contribute to driving positive change in workplaces and labour markets. The Centre aims to generate new data-informed knowledge able to inform and improve gender equality at work. The Centre’s research is organized around four key themes:

• designing gender equality into the future of work;
• addressing gender disparities and segregations to build equal and sustainable careers;
• build alignment in work and care regimes that work for people and organisations;
• motivate respectful, inclusive work cultures where all people thrive.

Your key responsibilities will be to:

• lead the research program in one of the research themes
• undertake data collection, analysis and co-authoring academic papers with senior researchers at the Centre
• lead the preparation and submission of applications for competitive research grants/fellowships
• work with research assistants to develop ethics submissions and satisfy reporting requirements
• further the vision and objectives of the Australian Centre for Gender Equality and Inclusion at work

About you

• Holds a PhD or nearing completion (submitted thesis) in one of the following fields: Employment relations, Economics/ Political economy, Sociology of work/ professions, Management). Other fields may be considered where relevance can be demonstrated to the Centre’s work
• research experience working on issues related to gender in/equality in work, occupations, the labour market
• high level skill in either/both quantitative or qualitative methods
• skills and capacity to design, manage and disseminate findings from research projects including experience in working on mixed method teams
• demonstrated capacity to write grant applications and research proposals
• demonstrated capacity to lead the writing of academic articles for publication in leading journals, as both single author and co-author
• interest in working with stakeholders on research in organisations and industries to build positive change for gender equality
• interest in working in a high performing multi-disciplinary research team employing mixed methods approaches.

Most members of our Centre work on a hybrid basis and we are comfortable with this way of working, noting that ‘in person’ working is required on a regular weekly basis as agreed within the team.

Full information about the role and how to apply is available on the University of Sydney careers website.

The post Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Gender Equality at Work appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

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Above: Getty Images result for "knife head"

Longtime readers know the Headstabbers literary/cinematic franchise is extremely popular (and prolific) in whatever time and place Wondermark occurs.

But a reader wrote in to let me know that it may actually be a remake! There is a 1978 German film called Messer im Kopf – in English, Knife in the Head.

As this review raves, the film contains, at least for the time:

“…arguably the most realistic enactment of a brain injury ever depicted in the cinema.”

A more succinct summary of Headstabbers you would be hard-pressed to find.

Please join us for the Sydney book launch of Climate Finance: Taking a Position on Climate Futures (Agenda Publishing).

Co-authors Gareth Bryant and Sophie Webber (University of Sydney) will be joined by Adrienne Buller (author of The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism) and Jenny Leong (Greens MP for Newtown) to launch the book.

Where: Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Road, Glebe (now fully accessible)

When: Wednesday 3rd April 2024, 6pm for 6.30 start

RSVP: https://www.gleebooks.com.au/event/gareth-bryant-sophie-webber-climate-finance/

The post Book Launch: Climate Finance appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

The conjucture of the first few decades of the twenty-first century witnessed Alex Callinicos usefully mapping the contours of imperialism as set out in his pivotal book Imperialism and Global Political Economy. As somewhat of a successor text, this is now accompanied by The New Age of Catastrophe that seeks to address today’s conjuncture of the multidimensional crisis (or polycrisis), the conditions of which are situated as immanent to capitalism as a totality. The creativity of Imperialism and Global Political Economy flowed from Callinicos offering an innovative reading of Nikolai Bukharin to propose a theory of imperialism at the intersection of two logics of power: capitalistic and territorial, or two forms of competition, economic and geopolitical. The book bears repeated revisiting. Indeed, I have done so recently in an article for the pages of International Affairs (see ‘Mainstreaming Marxism’, International Affairs 99: 3, 2023). There I demonstrate how unique Marxist approaches to both the structural theory of anarchy (drawing from Nikolai Bukharin) and racial capitalism (drawing from C.L.R. James) have been silenced by mainstream imitators (namely, Kenneth Waltz and E.H. Carr). There is also much wider engagement with Callinicos’ theorising on capitalism and the state-system in Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2018), co-authored with Andreas Bieler.

As an ‘antechamber’ to the present, the Introduction and Chapter 1 of The New Age of Catastrophe offers a theoretical framing of the argument by recovering and reasserting a discussion of totality as a category in order to overcome the atomisation and isolation-effect of capitalism. Drawing from Lukács and others the method of totality is legitimised in order to constitute capitalism as a comprehensive system of multiple mediations rather than as a set of separate, independent, isolated categories and facts. As Callinicos wonderfully puts it, ‘even the best mainstream scholarship tends to fragment the totality’ (p. 8). This reader was left wanting more on the methodological standard of totality as emblematic of a dialectical critique of the slicing-up and fragmentation of knowledge by mainstream perspectives.

In The New Age of Catastrophe Callinicos endeavours to engage with the developing totality of the crisis of capitalism through a set of conjunctural moments that encompass the destruction of the biosphere (concentrating on the metabolic rift with nature); economic stagnation (converging in the tendency for the rate of profit to fall); geopolitical conflict (focusing on inter-imperialist rivalry); political reaction (addressing contemporary right-wing populism); and ideological contestation (questioning gender and race as intersecting or interweaving forms of agency with class antagonisms). The book offers individual chapters on each of these five moments in the present conjuncture of the multidimensional crisis of capitalism.

The main theme to pick up on for the rest of this review is the recognition of the conjuncture as a fusion of different moments of crisis within the totality of capitalism and how contemporary right-wing populism and far-right politics is treated in the book. Throughout The New Age of Catastrophe the long-term trend of neoliberal authoritarianism is addressed, whether it be through some of the earlier work on authoritarian statism on the eve of the neoliberal era (drawing from Nicos Poulantzas), the COVID-19 pandemic (drawing from Paul Passavant), or the rise of the far-right under neoliberal authoritarianism (drawing from Priya Chacko and Kanishka Jayasuriya). One conclusion, for Callinicos, is that ‘all advanced capitalist states are structurally racist’ (p. 134). The final chapter of the book attempts to assess the intersection of race and class through movements such as Black Lives Matter (BLM), or how class antagonisms are interwoven with race and gender. ‘The BLM explosion is suggestive of how the racial fracture increasingly condenses all the antagonisms of contemporary society’ (p. 161).

My main frustration with the conjunctural framing is the omission of two crucial sources. The first is from the conjuncture of yesterday; the second is from the ongoing conjuncture of today. It was Stuart Hall that so eloquently drew from both Althusser on conjunctural analysis and Poulantzas on authoritarian statism to move from the abstract to the concrete in tracking the Thatcher counter-revolution. Most crucially, the creativity of Hall was to display how authoritarian statism (from above) was secured at the base by a complementary shift to authoritarian populism (from below). This tracing of the lineaments of the “great moving right show” began with Hall’s political interventions as early as 1979 to detail authoritarian populism and how it built support for attacks on social welfare by renewing personal responsibility for effort and reward, creating the notion of the over-taxed individual, purveying anti-statist elements based on entrepreneurship and competition, and propagating spurious notions of “rolling back the state” while increasing state power through law and order and policing the crisis. Central to this authoritarian populism was an incipient racism that the media reproduced in the very “whites of the eyes” of British society. The wealth of these essays are collected in a multi-volume series of writings published by Duke University Press.

Fastforward to the ongoing conjuncture today and it has been Ian Bruff who, in the most original way, has contributed to analysing the rise of authoritarian neoliberalism, drawing from Hall and Poulantzas. In a break-out 2014 Rethinking Marxism article (now with nearly 20,000 article views), Bruff was the first to trace in the authoritarian neoliberalism debates ‘the reconceptualisation of the state as increasingly nondemocratic through its subordination to constitutional and legal rules’ in moving away from consent to ‘favouring instead the explicit exclusion and marginalisation of subordinate social groups’. This has since been expanded and refined across multiple publications not least in the volume States of Discipline: Authoritarian Neoliberalism and the Contested Discipline of Capitalist Order edited by Cemal Burak Tansel (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017) and a special issue of Globalizations, (2019) where attention is refocused on the question of state power and the pre-emptive discipline of authoritarian neoliberalism to limit spaces of popular resistance. My point here is that the Hall-Bruff axis and their analyses of the slide from authoritarian populism to authoritarian neoliberalism whilst addressing logics of racial oppression goes to the heart of the present conjuncture and its crisis conditions. To miss this scholarship gives the sense that the contribution of The New Age of Catastrophe is seemingly all a bit too post festum, dealing with the results of the polycrisis of neoliberalism ready to hand whilst neglecting the collective intellectual labour that has gone before it.

This review is the original longer version that was edited and cut for publication in International Affairs, 100:2, 2024.

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