Transgender health: on a world scale.

Understanding transgender health on a world scale requires an adequate conceptualisation of gender as an embodied social structure, and an awareness of imbalances in the global economy of knowledge. Four major clusters of health issues are identified for trans groups in the majority, postcolonial world: staying alive in the face of violence and disease, keeping a trans life afloat in practice, facing pressures including rising populism, and making transitions work. Familiar models of professional health care are not adequate to these issues across much of the world; social action and organising are required.

Re-making the global economy of knowledge: do new fields of research change the structure of North-South relations?

How is global-North predominance in the making of organized knowledge affected by the rise of new domains of research? This question is examined empirically in three interdisciplinary areas - climate change, HIV-AIDS, and gender studies - through interviews with 70 researchers in Southern-tier countries Brazil, South Africa and Australia. The study found that the centrality of the North was reinstituted as these domains came into existence, through resource inequalities, workforce mechanisms, and intellectual framing. Yet there are tensions in the global economy of knowledge, around workforce formation, hierarchies of disciplines, neoliberal management strategies, and mismatches with social need. Intellectual workers in the Southern tier have built significant research centres, workforces and some distinctive knowledge projects. These create wider possibilities of change in the global structure of organized knowledge production.

Reflecting on twenty years of Masculinities: an interview with Raewyn Connell.

Raewyn Connell is very well known for her work on social theory and gender studies, and more specifically on masculinities. She was one of the founders of masculinities research and her 1995 book Masculinities is considered one of the most important references on the topic. Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity has been particularly influential and has attracted much debate. She has written extensively about its applications to education, health, and violence prevention. Our conversation was about her trajectory as an intellectual, her commitment to gender justice, and the development of her work from Australia to the global scale.

In Praise of Sociology.

This reflection on the relevance of sociology starts with the different forms of social knowledge, and some autobiographical reflection on my engagement with the discipline. A research-based social science is made urgent by the prevalence of distortion and pseudoscience in the public realm. However, the research-based knowledge formation is embedded in a global economy of knowledge that centers on a privileged group of institutions and produces major imbalances on a world scale. Sociological data collection has important uses in policy and public discussion. But data need to be embedded in a larger project of understanding the world; this is what gives excitement to the work. Sociology has a potential future of marginality or triviality in the neoliberal economy and its university system. There are better trajectories into the future-but they have to be fought for. Cette réflexion sur l'utilité de la sociologie commence avec les différentes formes de savoir social, ainsi que quelques réflexions biographiques sur mon engagement avec la discipline. Le besoin d'une science sociale orientée vers la recherche est devenue nécessaire suite à la prédominance de la distorsion et de la pseudoscience dans la sphère publique. Par contre, ce savoir centré sur la recherche est lié à une économie globale de la connaissance qui est proche d'un groupe privilégié d'institutions et produit des déséquilibres majeurs au niveau mondial. La collecte de données sociologiques a une grande utilité en politique et dans les discussions publiques. Mais ces données doivent être liées à un projet plus large de compréhension du monde ; c'est ce qui rend ce travail excitant. La sociologie risque la marginalisation ou la trivialité dans une économie néo-libérale et son système universitaire. Il existe de meilleures trajectoires pour l'avenir - mais elles doivent être défendues.

Gender, health and theory: conceptualizing the issue, in local and world perspective.

Public policy documents on gender and health mostly rely on categorical understandings of gender that are now inadequate. Poststructuralist thought is an advance, but relational theories of gender, treating gender as a multidimensional structure operating in a complex network of institutions, provide the most promising approach to gendered embodiment and its connection with health issues. Examples are discussed in this article. A crucial problem is how to move the analysis beyond local arenas, especially to understand gender on a world scale. A relational approach to this question is proposed, seeing gendered embodiment as interwoven with the violent history of colonialism, the structural violence of contemporary globalization, and the making of gendered institutions on a world scale, including the corporations, professions and state agencies of the health sector. Gender is seen as the active social process that brings reproductive bodies into history, generating health consequences not as a side-effect but in the making of gender itself.