Give Theory A Chance

The guest for this episode is Anna Hickey-Moody, a Professor of Media and Communications at RMIT University and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. Anna is also the author of the recently published Deleuze and Masculinity. In our conversation, Anna discusses both the challenges and charms of Gilles Deleuze and how she has built on the concepts of affect and assemblages in her own research on youth education, art, and community.

“There is something about their writing style that I could be with. One is alone in a room with them for a long time. One is listening to what they are saying and speaking back to them…Also, I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to understand them.”

In this episode we are joined by Elise Paradis, Assistant Professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto. Elise introduces us to the work of John Meyer and the value of neo institutional theory as an alternative to more functionalist or conflict-oriented perspectives. In particular, Elise demonstrates the importance of the concept of “decoupling” through her work on the gap between policy and practice in the operating room.

In this episode we are joined by Stefano Bloch, Assistant Professor in the School of Geography & Development at the University of Arizona and author of Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA’s Graffiti Subculture.  Stefano reflects on his initial encounters with the writings of Henri Lefebvre as an undergraduate literature major and discusses how Lefebvre’s ideas have served as a foundation to all of his scholarly research and teaching since. Stefano also provides useful advice for how we need to approach theory as ideas and tools to be applied rather than eternal truths.

“It is as if the pages came alive. Everything that I had thought was drowning in jargon and overly convoluted… all of sudden started to make sense to me because I was hanging each of those words on this view of the world that I had already held inside me, which was the perspective of the world and the built environment as a graffiti writer.

In this episode we are joined by Clifton Evers. Clifton is a lecturer in media and cultural studies at Newcastle University and founding member of The Shadow Places Network. Clifton discusses how reading Raewyn Connell forced him to reflect on his own lived experience with and performances of masculinity and sent him down a research path that both builds on and complicates many of her foundational concepts.

“Her theory is very productive and that is the best thing you can say about a theory.”

In this episode we are joined by Tristan Bridges, editor of the Journal of Men and Masculinities and Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Bridges joins us to reflect on the influence Raewyn Connell has had on his understandings of masculinity and power from his initial encounters with her writings to his more recent scholarship.