Hi there, I’m Aidan. I’m a social scientist, activist and creative sort looking for systemic change that serves the proletariat, particularly the intersectionally disadvantaged. I care about compassion, reciprocity and respect 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. I find lengthy interactions, public spaces, and the world drain me, and for all the trying I can muster, I am often perceived negatively by strangers – though am lucky to have many friends who share my values.
I come from working class roots. 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 to my family who originate in Australia, England, France, and the broad Germanic region. 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. Commentary on bookmarks is provided as a radical look-in to the way I see the world, and Dispatches offer snapshots of moments in time in a semi-journalistic mode.
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 – though I’d hate for you to “just agree” with me. Rather, I am interested in friendly discussion, stretching my thinking and work. In the future, this website will enable comments to build threaded conversations about my work, but for now if you liked something I wrote, please get in touch – it means a lot.