Activist Wisdom

Sarah Maddison is a lecturer in Australian Politics at UNSW. A passionate believer in the possibility of social justice and social change, she has been politically active since she was a teenager. For the last 10 years Sarah has been active in the Australian women's movement and is currently a national media spokesperson for the Women's Electoral Lobby. Sean Scalmer is a lecturer in Sociology at Macquarie University. He has been researching class, social movements, non-violence and intellectuals in Britain and Australia for more than ten years. UNSW Press published his book on protest and the media, Dissent Events, in 2002. Since 1996, Sean has worked on the radical magazine of culture and politics, Overland.

• Biographies of interviewees; Acknowledgments; Introduction; Part One: Theory and knowledge; Chapter 1: Theory and history; Chapter 2: Practical knowledge; Part Two: Movement tensions; Chapter 3: Expressive and instrumental; Chapter 4: Organisation and democracy; Chapter 5: Unity and difference; Chapter 6: Reform and revolution; Chapter 7: Local and global; Chapter 8: Redistribution and recognition; Chapter 9: Counter-public and the mainstream; Chapter 10: Hope and despair.