Grant Banfield has been a university academic, educator and activist for more than 40 years. Previously, he was a high school teacher teaching in rural and urban disadvantaged Australian schools. After retiring in 2019 from full-time academic work at Flinders University in South Australia he took a position as an adjunct scholar at the University of South Australia. Grant’s research, teaching, and writing contribute to the fields of educational sociology and the political economy of education. This ongoing work is characterised by an active application of Marxian social theory to educational praxis and the possibility of ethically driven progressive societal change. Grant is probably best known for his use of philosophy of critical realism to ‘underlabour’ Marxist education and finds its most complete expression in his Critical Realism for Marxist Sociology of Education (Routledge, 2016). His most recent book, Working with Critical Realism (Routledge, 2023 – with Alpesh Maisuria), is an edited collection of stories from researchers, post-graduate students, and education practitioners bringing critical realism to their work and their lives.