Survival against the Odds: a Case Study of Sociology at the University of Sydney

Abstract

This chapter offers a more thorough examination of just how sociology has survived in this country, despite that prospect often looking unlikely. The examination features a detailed case study of one institution, the University of Sydney. Here, we present a body of concentrated evidence towards our proposition that Australian sociology always gets up when it gets knocked down, even at a university where it was firmly rejected in the mid-twenties after an extremely unsuccessful trial. We show that at Sydney, in the years between its unsuccessful trial and its successful return in the early 1990s, sociology survived in the cracks, as it were, especially the cracks of those other disciplines which were sympathetic to its broader aims, in particular philosophy, anthropology, and social work/social studies.