Hi there, I’m Aidan. I’m a social scientist and activist looking to create systemic change that serves the proletariat, particularly the intersectionally disadvantaged. I care about compassion, justice, genuine equity, reciprocity and radical social change and try to live my life according to these values.
I am fortunate to hold relative privilege and stability in my life. I am employed, housed, and in a partnership with an incredibly intelligent and caring human. I also sit uncomfortably in many spaces as a multiply neurodivergent person with health issues. But, I am lucky to have many friends, community members, and colleagues who share my values.
I come from working class roots: colonised and enclosed peoples from England, France, Germany, Norway and Australia. My family, for many generations, have been workers – most were coal face workers, quite literally, and nearly all were forcibly removed from families and displaced from their lands and homes. This familiar, and familial, enclosure/colonial process occurred multi-generationally. My parents, both starting as teachers from humble beginnings, have developed into relative privilege in later life. I currently reside in, and am a respectful guest on, Tardanya/Adelaide, Kaurna Country, Australia.
I work as an academic, though to be clear, work I do in this space is not related to my employment, and the views here are not those of my employer or its affiliates. I teach and research, design curriculum, and create policy. I’m a bit of an all-sorts, working across roles in various institutions in my time – with a constant flare for unionism, rebellion, and severe dispassion for the constant structural barriers which prevent transformative change through higher education.
This project is a space to advance radical thought in a praxis mode – bringing together my values, theory, and my own understanding of the world.
I also publish, particularly in Gramscian social science, in academic journals which relate to the work done in this blog, but, again, not in terms of a relationship to my employers.
Hopefully this positionality, blog, and my thoughts give you something to think about, I am interested in friendly discussion, stretching my thinking and work. If you liked something I wrote, please get in touch – it means a lot.