Teaching sociology - reflections on the discipline

The 1963 birth of The Australian Sociological Association (TASA, initially the Sociological Association of Australia and New Zealand) came at a time when sociology teaching in Australia was starting to gather pace, but could still best be described as patchy. Contemporary reports demonstrated that sociology teaching existed largely ‘in camouflaged form’ in a variety of other departmental guises (Encel, 2005 [2003]: 46). This had been the case for the nearly six decades since the first, but short-lived, course with a sociological moniker was taught at an Australian university. Francis Anderson’s 1907 ‘Elements of Sociology’, offered to undergraduate philosophy students at the University of Sydney,1 invited a Comtean exploration of sociology’s position ‘in a classification of the sciences’, the state of sociological theory, social and family evolution, and the ‘problem of the succession and causal relation of different social phenomena – economic, juridical, political, moral, religious and aesthetic’ (University of Sydney, 1907: 127).