Book Launch: Pierre Bourdieu's Political Economy of Being

Room 203, RD Watt Building

The University of Sydney

Thursday 8 October, 3:00 - 4:30 pm

Please join us for the launch of Prof. Ghassan Hage's latest book, Pierre Bourdieu's Political Economy of Being (Duke University Press, 2025).

Book praise

“a thoughtful intellectual enterprise by one of the most original anthropologists of our time.” - Didier Fassin, Professor at the Collège de France and the Institute for Advanced Study

“a fresh reading of Pierre Bourdieu’s work in light of the most recent currents in anthropology.” Frédéric Keck, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale “A brilliant book.” - Françoise Vergès, author of A decolonial feminism

Author bio

Prof. Ghassan Hage is currently Affiliate Professor at the University of Sydney and Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute of Anthropology at Zhejiang University in China. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a fellow of both the Australian and the British Academies of the Social Sciences. He is the author of many books, most recently, The Diasporic Condition (Chicago, 2021), The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism (Sweatshop, 2023) and Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Being (Duke, 2025).

Discussant and Chair bios

Dr. Ihab Shalbak is a lecturer in human rights and social justice at the University of Sydney. Before joining the University of Sydney, Ihab worked both in community and government positions including as a Senior Research and Policy Advisor at the Australian Human Rights Commission. Ihab is currently working on a book project that traces the emergence of the think tank form and demonstrates that it emerged as a distinctive response to the crisis of authority and the problematic of governmentality in American society in the twentieth-century.

Dr. Sophie Chao is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates ecology, capitalism, health, food, and justice in the Pacific. She is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (2022), Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger (2025), and Plantations: Extraction, Extinction, Emergence (2026), and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice (2022) and Worlds Beyond Bios: The Life of Matter and the Matter of Life (2026). 

This event is hosted by SSSWARM - The Sydney Staff and Student Workshops in Anthropology, Research, and Methods in partnership with Sydney STS - the Sydney Science and Technology Studies Network. For queries, please contact sophie.chao@sydney.edu.au.