I’m a Linguistics academic at the University of Sydney, and a long-time participant in campaigns for social justice in Australia and overseas. Politically, I’m a socialist. I’m not a member of any party.

My longest-standing political commitment is to refugee rights activism. For over 15 years, I have been a member of the Refugee Action Coalition Sydney, the oldest grassroots refugee rights group in the country. Whether over refugee rights or other issues, I’m committed to the centrality of grassroots, democratic action by ordinary people as a lever of political change. I have participated in numerous campaigns of different kinds, on issues ranging from antiracism, opposition to war, defence of public spending on education and health, and many others.

I got into Palestine activism when my colleague at Sydney University, Jake Lynch, was sued for racial discrimination by Zionists in the early 2010s. Up till then, I’d been sympathetic to but largely ignorant about the Palestinian cause. The attack on Jake opened my eyes. In 2017, I was the main organiser of the first academic conference in Australia on the BDS campaign. For some years I was on the board of BDS Australia. My book on the academic boycott of Israel was published in 2023. I’m increasingly asked to contribute academic work on questions of the boycott, academic freedom, and the politics of knowledge. You can see some examples here and here.

I’m also heavily involved in the union movement through the National Tertiary Education Union. I have been president of the union’s large University of Sydney branch, and am currently its academic vice-president. Under my presidency, the branch conducted the longest-running strike campaign to date in Australian higher education, including the first ever strike in a university specifically over Indigenous employment targets. It was also while I was president that the University of Sydney branch became the first in the country to formally adopt the academic boycott of Israel as branch policy, something that has now been taken up by the union at the national level.

I have consistently taken part in political initiatives against the far-right. I was one of the main opponents of the ‘Ramsay Centre for Western Civilization’, an attempt by openly far-right political forces to establish a foothold in major Australian universities. It seems to me that the success of our campaign against Ramsay was an important blow to the influence and legitimation of Western-supremacist ideas in Australia.

If you’re interested in my academic work

I originally worked on semantics, which is the study of meaning in language. I regularly teach semantics and pragmatics (its counterpart subject). I’m currently working on a second edition of my introduction to the field. You can see other examples of my work in semantics here and here. More recently, I’ve become interested in the history and philosophy of Linguistics. I’ve written on linguistics and politics (pdf) and linguistics, ideology and racism, among other things. My overall approach to the discipline is described in this (French-language, open-access) book. At the moment I’m working on a political history of linguistics in the twentieth century for Verso.

Audio links

An interview for New Books Network on my book on the academic boycott. Another one for Sound of Solidarity.

An interview for the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast on politics, linguistics and ideology.

An interview with ABC Radio National Breakfast (Patricia Karvelas) about the academic boycott of Israel.

An interview with 3CR (Jennifer Borrell) on antisemitism definitions in universities.