Eavesdrop on Experts

“One of the biggest problems we face is people thinking ‘we’ll just throw mindfulness at them and it’ll fix the problem’ or at least it feels like it’s fixing the problem,” says Dr Nicholas Van Dam, Senior Lecturer at the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne.

“We’re increasingly seeing that [mindfulness] isn’t a silver bullet, it’s not a panacea. It won’t fix every problem for every person and it probably shouldn’t be for every child in every school. That kind of thinking just probably isn’t going to work and the science doesn’t support that, but we’re starting to get better.”

Dr Van Dam is the inaugural director of the Contemplative Studies Centre at the University of Melbourne, a first point of entry into the world of mindfulness, meditation and contemplative practice.

The Centre focuses on interdisciplinary, evidence-based research into contemplative practice and methodology.

“We’re trying to understand these practices - we’re starting to actually look at comparing meditation practices against good active controls, which is something that’s been lacking,” he says.

“This combination of mindfulness (and) meditation is important, but the confusion is very real. People often think they’re interchangeable when they’re not. Often when people are talking about mindfulness, they’re talking about the quality or the activity, it’s a way of engaging with the world. Meditation is a much broader set of largely introspective practices, where you’re looking inside.

“So mindfulness isn’t as present moment as people often think it is. It’s kind of like a remembering to pay attention, a remembering to be present, a remembering to be aware. However what you’re aware of, what you’re attending to, doesn’t necessarily have to be the present.

“That’s often the goal, but as you’re sitting thinking or as you’re going about your day, the mind will wander to the past, it will wander to the future. That’s fine. It’s all about how you engage with that.”

Episode recorded: April 8, 2021.

Interviewer: Dr Andi Horvath.

Producer, audio engineer and editor: Chris Hatzis.

Co-producers: Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath.

Banner: Getty Images.

“There’s nothing inevitable about any form of sexual violence,” says University of Melbourne criminologist Professor Bianca Fileborn.

Professor Fileborn researches the range of factors surrounding how sexual violence occurs – from gender, sexual orientation and identity, to societal attitudes, and the locations where it happens. But Professor Fileborn has a particular focus on the sexual violence occurring on the street and at music festivals.

For her, a critical question is what can be done to counter the sexual violence we see in society, which is perpetrated predominately against women and the LGBTIQA+ communities. She says we can’t just rely on law reform, which has for decades failed to deliver substantive change.

“I’m much more interested in, firstly, what can we do around preventing sexual violence and in changing those norms, attitudes and structural factors that drive sexual violence in the first place.

“Secondly, how might we develop alternative avenues for achieving a sense of justice, because it’s pretty clear that the mainstream justice system just isn’t up to task.”

One alternative is “transformative” justice, which she says is “aimed at actually challenging and undoing those structural factors that underpin sexual violence.”

“It could involve working with a perpetrator to challenge and change their understandings of masculinity that led to them perpetrating in the first place. It can also involve supporting perpetrators who might be marginalised in other ways, for example in relation to mental health or, say, a lack of employment.

“Finally, it’s also focused on working with survivors to help them to heal and recover and to ensure that they’re safe in the community at all times.”

If you need support or more information on this issue, please contact 1800 Respect national helpline: 1800 737 732 or Lifeline: 131 114.

Professor Fileborn is the author of Reclaiming the Night-Time Economy - Unwanted Sexual Attention in Pubs and Clubs, and Co-editor of #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change.

Episode recorded: March 30, 2021.

Interviewer: Dr Andi Horvath.

Producer, audio engineer and editor: Chris Hatzis.

Co-producers: Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath.

Banner image: Getty Images.

Queer performance is one space that queer identifying people will go to to be with their tribe, says Alyson Campbell, Associate Professor in Theatre (Directing and Dramaturgy) at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne.

“Theatre is a way of collectively thinking through the world. We’re actually in a space together and something is in front of us and we’re kind of working our way through it together.

“It’s actually trying to work in different ways from normative theatre. It’s about the processes of making and that is largely around collaboration and who else is in that team and is this being driven by this kind of commitment to challenging normative forms and structures as well as perhaps, say, telling gay stories.”

In 2021, Alyson and Steve Farrier will lead a hybrid digital/face-to-face version of their Feral Queer Camp, hosting activities about what makes performance queer, and how we might develop a network of queer thinkers, all stemming from the performances in the Midsumma Festival in Melbourne.

“Performance can teach us things about queerness and that we can speak back or have a dialogue with theory. It’s not that one has a hierarchical position above the others.”

“I will just really strongly emphasise here that Steve and I might be facilitators, but we are learning as much from everybody who comes to the Feral Queer Camp as they are learning from us.”

For more information, go to Feral Queer Camp.

Episode recorded: March 22, 2021.

Interviewer: Dr Andi Horvath.

Producer, audio engineer, editor: Chris Hatzis.

Co-producers: Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath.

Banner: Getty Images.

“All democratic constitutions, including ours, contain some protection of freedom of speech. It’s a really central democratic value and so that’s not surprising,” says Adrienne Stone, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor and Director of the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne.

“Understandings of freedom of speech have for a very long time been dominated by the law and theory of the first amendment to the constitution of the United States,” Professor Stone says.

But the Australian constitution addresses freedom of speech in a unique way.

“Unlike most constitutions, it doesn’t have a provision that says there shall be freedom of speech, or everyone has the right to freedom of expression,” Professor Stone says.

“Our constitution simply says that the two houses of parliament shall be directly chosen by the people, and that has formed the basis of a very interesting body of law, a lot like a right to freedom of speech.

“The High Court has said, not at all unreasonably, that if we’re serious about having a parliament that’s directly chosen by the people, we ought to be able to be free to discuss political matters amongst ourselves and it’s developed something called the freedom of political communication.”

“Any serious thinker, any serious judge, who has had to implement the principles always recognises that freedom of speech operates over a limited field and the task of determining the boundaries is the hard bit. Merely asserting a right to freedom of speech doesn’t make it true.”

Professor Stone points out that many people think that there is a settled idea about what freedom of speech is. “But I can’t think of any area of political thought that is more contested than freedom of speech, so there isn’t a correct answer,” she says.

“We need to be very careful about taking the view that there are positions that are so wholly unacceptable that they don’t receive the protection of freedom of speech.

“But saying that we allow people to put out views about climate change, not getting vaccinated or strange views about COVID, for example, by saying that they’re protected by freedom of speech doesn’t necessarily mean that the idea is accorded any respect.”

Episode recorded: February 4, 2021.

Interviewer: Dr Andi Horvath.

Producer, audio engineer, editor: Chris Hatzis.

Co-producers: Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath.

Banner: Getty Images.

“When I get an idea, it comes to me as a still image,” says Dr Laura Jean McKay, winner of the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for her debut novel ‘The Animals In That Country.’

Dr McKay is now a lecturer in creative writing at Massey University in New Zealand, after completing her PhD at the University of Melbourne focusing on literary animal studies.

“This novel took seven years to write, but that image is very, very clear and stays very, very true the whole way and it really keeps me going through the whole writing process,” she says.

Dr McKay says her initial inspiration was, what would happen if we could finally understand what other animals were saying?

“Not with their mouths but really saying with their bodies and the way they are in the world, what are they saying to us and what are they saying to each other?” she adds.

Her novel is an eerily-timed tale about a world in the throes of a pandemic, exploring other consciousnesses, and the limits of language.

“It’s been a very, very strange time to launch this book into that world. On the one hand, it’s been really interesting to see what aspects of the novel are similar, but on the other hand, it’s really heartbreaking to see people suffering throughout the world.”

On the process of writing, Dr McKay says it can be a very lonely activity.

“When you’re doing it, you need to be alone. There can be a sense of isolation in creating a new work and something you really believe in but that nobody else really cares about until you publish it and hopefully it’s read,” she says.

“I think the really surprising thing is the incredible connection that you can have with other people who read your work or who write work that really inspires you.”

The Animals In That Country by Laura Jean McKay is published by Scribe.

Episode recorded: February 16, 2021.

Interviewer: Dr Andi Horvath.

Producer, audio engineer and editor: Chris Hatzis.

Co-producers: Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath.

Banner: Getty Images.

“Everything surprises me about my research. Every time I dive into a new archive or pick up a set of newspapers, talk to a person who I’ve just met, I’m constantly being surprised."

So says Dr Nick Tochka, Senior Lecturer in Music and Head of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music at the University of Melbourne.

Dr Tochka researches popular, traditional and art musics in Europe and the Americas, with a particular emphasis on the politics of music-making since 1945.

“In terms of how a political economic system like communism in Albania or the Soviet Union shaped music making, I look at the institutions and the kinds of political and economic logics that organise the activities of the musicians,” says Dr Tochka.

Currently working on a book manuscript titled “Rocking in the Free World: Popular Music and the Politics of Freedom in Postwar America,” Dr Tochka is looking at how post-war politics influenced the reception and practice of rock genres in the US between the 1950s and 1980s.

“There is an idea that music and especially certain kinds of popular music, might function as a form of self-expression or they might function as a form of therapy...in a way that we connect with on records or on MP3s or however we listen to that music.

“One of the roots of this idea comes from the 1960s folk music movement where a guy or a girl with an acoustic guitar are singing into a microphone, that kind of unmediated presence, a live, first-take connection with an audience.”

Episode recorded: January 28, 2021.

Interviewer: Dr Andi Horvath.

Producer, audio engineer and editor: Chris Hatzis.

Co-producers: Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath.

Banner: Getty Images.

“One of the things I’m continually surprised about is just how creative and resilient people can be around death, dying and memorialisation,” says Dr Hannah Gould, ARC Research Fellow at the DeathTech Research Team, based at The University of Melbourne.

“I think there’s a kind of belief that death is very taboo... but actually, we continually encounter a great degree of creativity in how people want to memorialise the dead, how people want to be remembered themselves and how they feel about the future of our cemeteries and cemetery spaces.

Dr Gould’s work shows that two-thirds of Australians are open to new and perhaps innovative uses for cemetery spaces including walking tours, botanical gardens, fitness classes – or even public events like theatre or festivals.

“Our word for cemetery comes from the Greek for ‘a sleeping place’,” says Dr Gould. “So the dead are at peace, for example. But now, they’re also popping up with Facebook notifications or you might even have an AI bot that Tweets out for you after you’ve passed. If you can continue participating in contemporary debates, well, when does your identity end?”

Dr Gould says that the COVID pandemic has changed some of our attitudes to death and dying.

“During the pandemic, we have had the ‘clap for the carers’ or frontline heroes events. That’s often really focussed around healthcare professionals like doctors who are doing extraordinary work.”

But Dr Gould says it should also be noted that the end-line, the frontline workers who work in death care have been putting themselves on the line to care for the dead.

“They have an extreme level of respect, care and love for the dead, particularly when they know that that person has not seen any bereaved family member for a very long time because of lockdown,” says Dr Gould.

“I’d love for people to think more about their own death and mortality and how that might affect future generations and what they’d like to happen for them.”

Episode recorded: Jan 14, 2021.

Interviewer: Dr Andi Horvath.

Producer, audio engineer and editor: Chris Hatzis.

Co-producers: Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath.

Banner: Getty Images.

“I tend to focus on communities of people and how they mobilise around and interpret technologies,” says Associate Professor Dunbar-Hester, from the School of Communication at the University of Southern California.

Her writing and research centres on the politics of technology in culture, especially media and technology activism.

“If we take a fairly conventional view that hacking has to do with computers, programming and hardware, the longer trajectory in North America and Europe was that actually women were some of the earliest professional programmers during the war effort in World War II. And when programming was a new occupation, it wasn’t gendered and computers weren’t gendered,” Professor Dunbar-Hester says.

She says another of the really interesting things that came up during her research was that if you’re teaching people to program and hack because it’s fun, where does that lead?

“I had spoken to people who were saying, well, you can wind up working for Silicon Valley,” Professor Dunbar-Hester says. “And a lot of their contracting work, as we know, not all of it, but a lot of it might have surveillance or military implications. Where does the line get drawn between when you’re really enjoying solving this technical problem and your responsibility for an application for it?”

Professor Dunbar-Hester says an important thing to note is that we tend to grant technology and technologists so much power and special status in society that if we want to change society, we need to change who the technologists are, or we need to open that seat up to new kinds of people.

“And that may well be true and I have nothing against it, but the other thing that I would ask us to maybe step back and think about, is how did that segment of society come to be so powerful in the first place and is that really what we want?”

Episode recorded: November 17, 2020.

Interviewer: Dr Andi Horvath.

Producer, audio engineer and editor: Chris Hatzis.

Co-producers: Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath.

Banner: Getty Images.

More epidemics like COVID-19 are inevitable unless we reassess our relationship with the natural world.

That’s according to Gerry Ryan, a PhD student in the School of Biosciences, a conservation scientist working on Southeast Asian and Australian biodiversity and a board member for the Society for Conservation Biology Asia.

He employs statistical, mathematical modelling to look at how we can improve making decisions for wildlife conservation, particularly as competition for space between people and wildlife increases – both here in Australia and across South East Asia.

But while the illegal wildlife trade flourishes, we will continue to see problems like we’ve seen during this pandemic; and governments must use this as an opportunity to improve their regulations and enforcement in order to protect the health of wildlife and humans in the future.

Episode recorded: November 16, 2020.

Interviewer: Dr Andi Horvath.

Producer, audio engineer and editor: Chris Hatzis.

Co-producers: Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath.

Banner: Getty Images.

"I see Country as the world around us, what we live in, but also ourselves," says Associate Professor Michael-Shawn Fletcher, descendant of the Wiradjuri, Director of Research Capability at the Indigenous Knowledge Institute and Assistant Dean (Indigenous) in the Faculty of Science at the University of Melbourne.

“Country recognises the role and the obligations that people have in the world around them. It doesn’t abstract the world from ourselves, it actually embeds us within the world around us and reveals the kind of reciprocity or the obligation that we have to the world in caring for it and looking after it."

Associate Professor Michael-Shawn Fletcher explains that one of the things that Aboriginal people did was to maintain open landscapes with fire.

“To care for Country, but also to increase green pick for animals, to increase grains, and there are a whole suite of species that Aboriginal people used in this Country that depend on fire at some stage in their life cycle.”

“There are areas that were described and which my data shows that are now forested, be that rainforest in Tasmania, or eucalypt forest on the mainland, that were forest-free. They were grasslands under Aboriginal management,” he says.

He adds that the very biodiversity that we love and appreciate in this Country is the direct product of Aboriginal management.

“We need to look to the Country that we’re in and talk to the traditional owners. In the circumstance where there might not be the continuance of knowledge because colonisation was so effective, then you’ve just got to roll your sleeves up and experiment.”

Episode recorded: November 25, 2020.

Interviewer: Steve Grimwade.

Producer, audio engineer and editor: Chris Hatzis.

Co-producers: Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath.

Banner: Getty Images.