Gavin Kitching

Emeritus Professor of Politics, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. A well-known political scientist and political theorist.

Born in 1947 and received his bachelor's degree from Sheffield University, UK and his D Phil from St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He is now retired from his Chair of Politics at the University of New South Wales in Australia, and currently affiliated to an international sports research centre in Leciester, UK, where he is writing a social history of the English region in which he was born, as seen through the lens of football. He is an internationally recognized scholar of Africa and of development theory. His major work on Africa won the coveted Herskovitz Award of the US African Studies Association in 1980, and he has also written prize-winning books on development theory and on socialism. In more recent years he has written extensively on the philosophy of social science, and especially on the implications of the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein for social and political theory. His university teaching career has mainly been conducted in the UK and Australia, but he has also held visiting and research positions at the Universities of Nairobi (Kenya), Belem (Brazil), and in the Universities of Moscow, New York, Toronto and Cornell. He was Director and Head of the School of Politics and Social Science at the University of New South Wales until his retirement in 2012. He has served on the editorial boards of a number of journals and currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Journal of Agrarian Change. In 2007 he was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. His publications include, Class and Economic Change in Kenya: The Making of an African Petite-Bourgeoisie 1905-70 (1980), Development and Underdevelopment in Historical Perspective (1982,1989), Rethinking Socialism (1983), Karl Marx and the Philosophy of Praxis (1988), Marxism and Science: Analysis of an Obsession (1994), Seeking  Social Justice through Globalization: Escaping a Nationalist Perspective (2001), Marx and Wittgenstein: Knowledge, Morality and Politics (2002), Wittgenstein and Society: Essays in Conceptual Puzzlement (2003), The Trouble with Theory The Educational Costs of Post-Modernism (2008), as well as a host of academic articles.