Ghassan Hage is a Lebanese-Australian academic serving as Future Generation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
We worked with Ghassan on our first documentary, Holiday Camp (2002), about the Woomera detention centre jail break, racism and whiteness. He has been an inspiration aver since, especially his thoughts around ‘the sensitivity of thieves’ in context of Australia’s refugee policies and colonial guilt.
Straight from his Wikipedia entry:
Ghassan Hage works on the comparative anthropology of racism, nationalism and multiculturalism, particularly in Australia and the Middle East. He has written and conducted fieldwork on the Lebanese transnational diaspora in Australia, the US, Europe, Canada and Venezuela. He also researches and writes in social theory, particularly the work of Pierre Bourdieu.
He has been a high-profile contributor to debates on multiculturalism in Australia and has published widely on the topic. His most influential work is White Nation, which draws on theory from Whiteness studies, Jacques Lacan and Pierre Bourdieu to interpret ethnographic work undertaken in Australia. The book has been widely debated in Australia, with many of its themes picked up by anti-racism activists in other countries. The follow-up Against Paranoid Nationalism is an analysis of certain themes in Australian politics that became prominent under the government of John Howard.
He has also written on the political dimensions of critical anthropology (His work in this area appears in the volume Alter-Politics: Critical Thought and the Radical Imagination (Melbourne University Press 2015)). His most recent writing, Is Racism an Environmental Threat?, is concerned with the intersection between racism and the ecological crisis.
