Other People’s Ideas: An Introduction to Using Social Theory in Higher Education

In this introductory chapter, we explore our transformative early encounters with social theories and discuss what social theory is, the different ways it can be used in the context of higher education, and its limitations. The chapter explains how the authors in this book put social theories to work to think through issues that are emerging as key social and political concerns in a higher education context. We provide a brief overview of each chapter and present the social theorists that each author engages with, including Indigenous Australian scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Māori academic Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, British sociologist Nikolas Rose and Lebanese history of medicine scholar Joelle M Abi-Rached, and the Australian sociological theorist Raewyn Connell. Along the way, we offer some advice on how to (and how not to) think with theory.