Confronting Equality: Gender, Knowledge and Global Change

What does social equality mean now, in a world of markets, global power and new forms of knowledge?

In Confronting Equality Raewyn Connell combines vivid research with theoretical insight and radical politics to address this question. The focus moves across family change, class and education, intellectual workers, and the global dimension of social science, to contemporary theorists of knowledge and global power, and the political dilemmas of today’s left. Written with clarity and passion, the book proposes a bold agenda for social science, and shows it in action.

Raewyn Connell is known internationally for her powerfully argued and field-defining books Masculinities, Gender and Power, Making the Difference, and Southern Theory. This new volume gathers together a broad spectrum of her recent work which distinctively combines close-focus field research and large-scale theory. It brings this to bear on those questions of social justice and struggles for change that have long been at the heart of her writing, and will have wide-ranging implications for the social sciences and social activism in the twenty-first century.

‘[This is] social science at its best: characterised by richly theorised empirical research, and carving out a place for a radically generative and engaged world sociology.’ - Professor Michael A. Messner, University of Southern California