Australian National University School of Sociology presents Thesis Eleven founding editor Prof. Peter Beilharz (Sichuan University) as a part of the ongoing ANU Sociology Seminar Series.

Date: Wednesday 19 August, 2026
Time: 12 – 1pm (AEST)
Location: RSSS Room 4.69, and Zoom
Free to register. All welcome.

Register here

Little Public Spheres, Radical Projects: Looking Back, Looking Forward at Alternative Spaces, e.g. Thesis Eleven

Let me tell you a story. I was a founding Editor of Thesis Eleven in Melbourne in 1980. It has been the project of my life. In this presentation I want to use the journal as a mirror of its times, universities and intellectual life and projects. In the early days we were abused for all kinds of sin. Those who passed us in the fast lane laughed at keywords like Theory, Practice, Changing the World. And it was indeed true that the world was changing, and we were having trouble keeping up. Globalization, neoliberalism, etc. In this, however, we were not alone. 

I first presented in RSSS I think in 1988. I gave a paper for a project I was working on, called Heroes and Pedestrians in Social Theory, with Stuart Macintyre. It was an enthusiasm for the latter, the pedestrians. A senior in attendance confidently dismissed it, and me, as neither coherent nor convincing. This confirmed I was onto something. Working in the rich culture of La Trobe, I visited RSSS regularly, not least with the summer support of Barry Hindess and Judy Wajcman. Across this span I published 30 or more books. Some, like my first Bauman book, 2000, I wrote here in Coombs. Across the period from 1980 I edited Thesis Eleven together with many others. It was a collective project, mountains of voluntary labour, which in its own small way sought to combine theory and practice. For we had to make the journal, especially for the first ten years of self-production, followed by a decade with MIT Press and since then with Sage, all part of our own globalization story. There were serious changes in intellectual fashion across these years; for us, from Marxism to modernity. There were also radical changes in the mode of production and mode of consumption of the journal, to the point that the very notion of the journal as such itself may appear under question. What happened to this project?

For the last decade, I have taught critical theory at Sichuan University in Chengdu. This is another complication. Earlier my addressee was antipodean, both with reference to Australasia and the transatlantic, as well in Manila, India, and South Africa, etc. Are my new antipodes in China?

These reflections coincide with the shared Thesis Eleven/ANU event with James Smithies and his crew, Digital Modernities, Alternative Futures.

About the speaker

Peter Beilharz is an Australian sociologist. He is currently Professor of Critical Theory at Sichuan University in Chengdu, PRC. He was previously Professor of Culture and Society at Curtin University, and was for many years Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, where he remains emeritus. Peter is Founding Editor of the international journal of social theory, Thesis Eleven (b. 1980) published by MIT Press and now by Sage. From 2002–2014 he was the Director of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology at La Trobe University. He is best known for his work in social theory and socialism, for his intellectual biography of the Australian art historian, Bernard Smith, and his eight books on Zygmunt Bauman. He is author or editor of more than thirty books, including Labour’s Utopias , 1992, Postmodern Socialism, 1994, Transforming Labor, 1994, Imagining the Antipodes, 1997, Zygmunt Bauman, 2000, Socialism and Modernity 2009, Thinking the Antipodes 2014, Circling Marx 2020; Intimacy in Postmodern Times, a memoir of Bauman, 2020; Chain’s Toward The Blues, 2023; The Photographs of Zygmunt Bauman, 2023, Alastair Davidson – Gramsci in Australia, 2024. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. In 1999–2000 he was the Harvard Chair of Australian Studies. In 2015 was a Research Fellow at STIAS, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. He is Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale since 2006, and is Visiting Professor of the Bauman Institute at the University of Leeds. His work is profiled in the Festschrift issue of Thesis Eleven, #179, 2023.