Fifty years a sociologist: insight from the pandemic

Readable 3m

Three Minute Fellow’s Introduction. Wednesday 24 November 2021
Academy of Social Sciences in Australia
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I am fifty years a sociologist. The COVID-19 pandemic brought front of mind for me the reason why.

It started in April 2020. For days I watched the Ruby Princess cruise ship bobbing on the ocean off Coogee Beach near my home and painted a picture of it. Early reports from New York were that people of colour were succumbing to the disease more quickly and dramatically than richer White folks. So, race was a proxy for class and class underpinned vulnerabilities in a racially encoded society.

I wondered how the pandemic would play out in Australia, touted by our leaders as the most successful multicultural society in the world. What would the lockdown mean for our culturally diverse communities? Australia might be different. But was it? How? Why?

I started…

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