Dr Neville Buch

The role of the intellectual in the economy will always spiral but the upward lift is to contract or otherwise employ the intellectual.

What business persons and government persons say to me when there is not the stupefied silence is:

“But if the abstraction in the model is insufficient to describe at least the important and relevant aspects of reality, then what usefulness or validity does the model still have?”

I always wonder when a person speaks disparagingly about abstraction on their meaning and what each thinks is being expressed, what they are trying to point to. The concrete is discrete and exact in particular, and without abstraction there is **no intellectual sense**. It is impossible to embrace life in such an atomistic outlook. The intellectual outlook is pretty useful and valid.

Businesses and government are missing out in not contracting or employing a sociological-philosophic historian.

CURRENT WORK NOT PAID BY EXPLOITERS IN A FAILING ECONOMY

1. On the Governance Committee for a new, unique, and emerging urban coalition;
2. President of the Southern Brisbane Suburban Forum Inc;
3. Convenor, Sociology of Education, The Australian Sociological Association;
4. Local Historian, on several governance ‘boards’ of local history associations;
5. Registered director and Communities Program Manager for Humanist Australia;
6. A historian for Fellowship of Australian Writers Queensland (FAWQ); and
7. an active member of Australian Association for the Study of Religion (AASR), Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society (ANZHES), Australian and New Zealand Studies Association of North America (ANZSANA), Professional Historians Australia (PHA Queensland), Australian Historical Association (AHA), and the International Society of Intellectual History (ISIH), International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE), and International Federation of Public History (IFPH);

And in the last decade: I have in the fields of:

HIGHER EDUCATION INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES

8. A significant published paper on “Economic Rationalism and University Course Pricing 1989-2020” and a significant essay on “Anglo-American Major Belief-Doubt Systems”;

GLOBAL EDUCATION THEORIES AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

9. Six academic papers and two large published books, not including another unpublished school study;

STUDIES IN RELIGION

10. Two published book chapters, three review essays in an academic journal, and five other academic papers;

HISTORY AND SOCIOLOGY

11. One published book, eight published articles in scholarly journals including one ADB entry, and nine other scholarly substantive scholarly papers (much more than the other blog articles and essays on this site).

You have to ask what the hell is going on in Australian higher education employment practices?

Dr Neville Buch is an expert on histories and historiography of big belief and doubt, researching on Personalism, Evangelicalism, Freethought, Rationalism, Humanism, Unitarian-Universalism, and Progressivism, during the 20^th century. He has been a scholar in studies in religion and Australian-American intellectual history for 41 years, as well as a community participatory teacher. His work has internationalising with a collaboration of the Free Thinker Institute (New York City), in the production of a 1,000-page curriculum package manuscript into a commercially-viable guidebook for community education, based in Lebensphilosophie and Wissenschaft.

He has been a Q ANZAC Fellow at the State Library of Queensland (2015-2016), and a speechwriter and higher education researcher, working with four Vice-Chancellors. He is well-published and recognised for his contribution in the histories of both Catholic secondary and state primary education in Queensland, as well as histories in the cultural and religious shaping of Protestant and Catholic organisations.

Dr Buch is affiliated with the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, University of Queensland as a former post-doctorate fellow and an associated researcher in Queensland history.

He is a Convenor, Sociology of Education Thematic Group, The Australian Sociological Association (TASA).

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Looking for something different?
How do you know what is different unless you understand the past?
How can you understand the past unless the fragments join together?

Professional historians know where to find those missing pieces and are able to interpret accurately to produce precise & interesting narratives. All histories are like jigsaw puzzles, with the right pieces perfectly suited to fit together to show the world-picture; a picture that may never be complete, but does have integrity and a perspective towards the unfolding horizon.

A professional historian, such as Dr Neville Buch, is a person who puts such a jigsaw puzzle together better than others.

What Time Is It?

Anniversaries and commemorations come and go daily. Most of us, even the best historians, miss most occasions. If we think of history as events then we are faced with a continually showering in the grains of sand. Nevertheless, we do pick out certain patterns in the remembrance of historical dates. The blog here reminds us of some dates where the local, state, national, and global perspectives entwine.