David Freeman - Director

Biography

David Freeman is Director of the Edmund Rice Institute for Social Justice, Fremantle. Social justice has been the main focus of David’s work over three decades, providing the motivation and unifying focus across social and political activism, study, teaching and writing, and paid and volunteer work.

David has taught Sociology and/or Political Science at Murdoch, Melbourne and La Trobe Universities and Ormond College, and has been a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Fellow at Harvard University. He has worked in, or consulted to, the government, community, church, youth and trade union sectors, and been deputy director of an applied ethics centre. Volunteer commitments have included being secretary of an Amnesty International branch, working at an Indochinese refugee hostel, being a member of the Aboriginal Treaty Support Group, and involvement from 1976 in campaigns to build support for a UN-supervised act of self-determination by the East Timorese (as occurred in 1999).

David has over 90 publications, the majority pertaining to social justice. His work has been used in every continent, and translated into several languages. Most recently, he has a chapter in a forthcoming Greek-language book on contemporary developments in democratic concepts and practice.

Autobiography

(Refer also to the selection of over 100 Publications by David Freeman)

Rather than do it here, the sample publications that follow convey some of my thoughts about social justice matters. I’ll use this space to tell a more personal story about my journey into social justice.

I was born in 1958 in Montreal, the second of six born in nine years. Presumably, my Mum was tired! Mum and Dad married in Montreal in 1953, after immigrating from Hobart and Sydney respectively. In 1973, they re-immigrated to Australia, our family making the voyage to Hobart on an Italian migrant ship that we boarded in Puerto Rico. The ship, like the ports along the way, provided a fourteen year old with an epic adventure.

I had been interested since childhood in current affairs and ‘meaning of life’ sorts of questions (along with many much more frivolous pursuits). Sometime after arriving in Hobart, I attended a local group of the Young Christian Students Movement. This would provide a wonderful conduit for both these interests – not to mention the much more pressing requirement of a pretext to meet girls. This worldwide youth organisation has been, since the 1920s, one of the prime movers in Church engagement with justice and peace. Along with several other lay organisations, it had grasped early that deep formation for social engagement is a lengthy process whose correlate is a considered approach to human development. The expectation of simple, regular, justice-oriented social action in one’s daily milieu, followed by debriefing and value-based reflection the following week and culminating in the identification of a new action for the coming week, was life-changing. This experience was augmented by voracious reading about such exemplars of non-violent SJ practice and spirituality as Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Mahatma Gandhi.

After completing Grade 12 in 1976, I worked for this organisation in Tasmania for 18 months and was then asked to join its National Team in Melbourne. I had the privilege of being elected National President in 1978, when I was also elected to the 3-member Praesidium of its 1978 World Council in Spain. Anyone who works in social justice will tell you that one of its privileges is the calibre of people you meet along the way. This month-long, intensely reflective, meeting with 200 such persons was an experience that ‘money can’t buy’. The daily courage of many participants was something that we can scarcely imagine in Australia. For example, several months after returning I was informed that another participant my age, Dora from Guatemala, had been found ‘salvaged’ by the road following paramilitary assassination of her because of her SJ activism.

My colleague Frank Johnson and I went to Lisbon after the World Council to conduct a series of interviews. We were to stay for 10 days at the Quinta de Graca and Quinta de Balteiro refugee camps run by the International Red Cross for refugees from East Timor, Mozambique and Angola. We conducted interviews and took photos among the 1650 or so East Timorese seeking relocation to Australia for the duration of the Indonesian occupation. The ridiculous generosity of these people, who literally possessed nothing other than the food or drink they insisted we consume before them, remains with me to this day – as does the ‘uncrushability’ of their spirit. When we returned to Australia, we presented their stories to the Fraser Government’s then-Immigration Minister, Michael Mackellar. These and many other experiences capture how fortunate I was to have these experiences at a young age, rich in practical and conceptual education alike about politics and public policy-making.

I commenced an Arts/Law double degree at the University of Tasmania in 1981, the Arts component in Sociology, Politics and Philosophy. I was very involved in campus life, social justice campaigns and sport. In the summer holidays of 81-82, I accepted an invitation to go to Melbourne to interview recently-arrived Timorese refugees. The objective was specific: to document via eyewitness testimony what was understood from smuggled letters and escapees to be a cultural strategy of forced 'Indonesianisation' of East Timorese youth, and especially the daily routines of school life and youth organisations. (My invited testimony about this research to a 1982 Australian Senate Enquiry is one of the publications to which I provide a link below.) In The War Against East Timor (Zed Books, London, 1984), authors Carmel Budiardjo and Liem Soei Liong spend pages 110-113 analysing my findings and their implications.

In late 1983/early 1984, I was appointed as the Tasmanian delegate to the Australian Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (the predecessor of today’s Australian Catholic Social Justice Council). Disappointingly, I had to immediately resign when I contracted Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I was bedridden for the next three years, and subsequently able to undertake only one subject per semester for a further two years. To provide just one example from this weirdest of experiences, for ten years I had scarcely a good night’s sleep; however counter-intuitively, insomnia can be one of CFS’s more pronounced symptoms. On the upside, the journey through CFS provided me an opportunity to develop – of necessity – deeper inner and spiritual resources and practices, as well as revealing various positives in solitude and ‘desert spirituality’. CFS gave me an interest I retain to this day, in techniques and narratives that people forge in their darker hours. I came to be in awe of such people as concentration camp survivors, not least those who retain optimism about humanity, and such accounts as those of Sheila Cassidy explaining various mental and spiritual exercises she deployed while tortured in Latin America.

I eventually recovered, and ‘the rest is history’. Corny as it sounds, you do not see the world quite the same thereafter. Such previously assumed simplicities as good weather, birdcalls, decent coffee and a spring in your step now felt akin to winning the lottery. As the 1990s unfolded, I had many learning experiences in public policy and academia, challenging and sharpening my thinking, writing and other skills. I had a hyper-stimulating apprenticeship in sociology and political science over eight years in Melbourne, living as a residential tutor at Ormond College (University of Melbourne) and variously teaching sociology and/or political science at Ormond, Melbourne and La Trobe, being part of the teaching and postgraduate cultures at each institution, and involved in the academic journals Thesis Eleven (an international journal of social and political theory) and Ormond Papers. University colleges are one of the last remaining places in Australia where undergraduates can routinely access what all Universities used to virtually guarantee: frequent opportunities to test their ideas in a nurturing yet challenging space and receive spirited engagement that encourages and pushes students to a deeper place.

When asked to apply for my current position and return to Perth (where I had lived from 1989-1997), I couldn’t resist the opportunity once informed of the Board’s aspirations for a social justice centre that enjoys community support because of its excellence and substance. Upon my appointment as Director, one Board member said to me “we want you to build the Sistine Chapel of social justice centres”! Yikes! What to say but that my colleagues and I hope that we have been doing just that in the interim? It will be for you to judge the results over time, not least when we shortly launch our 32-page catalogue of education and training offerings. We have grouped these offerings around 23 Certificates of various requisite skills and experiences for effective social justice work.

While Melbourne provided extraordinary people and stimulation, returning to Perth is also a joy. It is that rare phenomenon: a city that often lives outdoors, engaged with its natural environment. Growing up on the outskirts of Montreal, I’d had the privilege of accessing city and country; the Canadian outdoors and four seasons are a many-splendoured thing. I rapidly grew to love Hobart, not least because it, too, offered such things. As in those places, I am spoiled rotten in Perth and Fremantle by easy access to the natural world yet simultaneously many of the good things about cities that remain modestly sized and avoid the megacity nightmare. It is pretty clear that sane, liveable cities are at the frontline in the battle to reduce modernity’s ecological footprint. If we still tend to conceive the environment as arcadian idyll, in truth most of us choose to live in environments that mix the urban and natural worlds. The combination of affluence and exquisite natural beauty places, I think, a special responsibility upon those of us living in cities like Perth and Hobart, or entire countries like New Zealand, to be truly creative and get it right.

Some of my publications will convey some of the substance of my research. Permit me a few words here by way of overview. While my research interests have shifted over time, there are also continuities and recurrent themes:

• I’ve been interested on the one hand in documenting social practices that diminish human dignity and wellbeing, and, on the other, fossicking for spaces and exemplars, new and old, in which communities find better ways of ‘doing society’ from their available options.

• I have a lengthy interest in the chameleon-like propensities of subtle forms of domination and manipulation. Their ideology and rhetoric forever self-reinvents to assume the terminology of the moral high ground of the moment. If, for example, it was vital twenty years ago to represent one’s activities as democratic, today it is vital to represent them as ‘empowering’. My interest in discourse whose effect is to legitimise one’s activities has straddled such research projects as Indonesian attempts to represent the Timorese as victims of international manipulation of their wishes, my study of forty-seven discrete schools of rhetoric and ideology around workplace democracy debates, and my research of newly emergent management philosophies at the Harvard Business School. The latter included interviews of HBS staff who have authored textbooks used in Masters of Business Administration programs in numerous countries. As others have pointed out (Hull, Gee and Lankshear 1996; Boltanski and Chiapello 1999), something extraordinary is afoot when new management philosophies and techniques self-describe via the language of 1960s progressive educationalism and counter-cultural critique.

• I have a curiosity that arcs across sociology, political science, public policy, social action and theology. I’m interested in new openings, new signs of hope, for decent societies and mechanisms that work for all. It will be obvious from various publications posted below that I believe that social justice advocates must be capable not only of critique, but of specification of various characteristics of the society they will be relatively satisfied with. One of the privileges of my job is that I am in a position, with colleagues and our Board, to promote such activities. Thus, and to continue the example, we plan to develop an Alternatives Thinktank as one of our services to the public.

• It will also be obvious from my publications posted below that I have a three-decade interest in formation and induction into social justice. The ‘democratic promise’ is that all able-bodied adults can, and indeed should, be capable of contributing to their society’s notions and practices of ‘the good life’ and ‘the common good’. People of most societies and political persuasions concur that it is no mean feat to build a capacities for substantial public sphere deliberation across entire societies, especially in forms that are entirely invitational, respectful, open-ended and non-manipulative.

• Cross-disciplinarity and multiple research methods are important. Understanding and influencing the social world is greatly enriched by a basic social science literacy one able to simultaneously draw from conceptual and empirical work, and informed by a sensibility that is both historical and forward-looking. Both kinds of social science resources are vital to social justice: empirical research and a worthy set of tools to think with.

I’ll add further autobiographical details and reflections at another time. For now, that’s me, over and out. I look forward to meeting readers at one or another Centre activity, and hope that we might journey together toward societies able to do justice to and by all people.

Follow this link to my Publications.