Ideas at the House

Recorded at All About Women Festival on March 5th, 2017.

Entering its sixth year and with no resolution in sight, the Syrian Civil War has already killed an estimated 400,000 people.  Foreign correspondent Janine di Giovanni bears witness to the lived reality behind the headlines. With her courageous fieldwork and on-the-ground reporting, she offers a unique opportunity to understand this tragic conflict through the eyes of the people living at its very centre.  Chair: Geraldine Doogue

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Recorded at All About Women Festival, March 5th 2017.

Queen Victoria wielded enormous power during her 64 year reign. Yet she still had to negotiate with her husband, fit in work around her nine children and manage the expectations of 10 Prime Ministers and her public. What can we learn about women and power from this 19th century monarch?

Watch as journalist and biographer Julia Baird explores Victoria’s journey from teenage queen to the most powerful woman of her era.

Chaired by Sarah Macdonald.

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TV speaks to us all – it shapes our dreams, confronts our fears and reflects the world we live in. Every year we hear of a new era and the death of a media industry, yet TV always has the last laugh. Why? Christopher Borrelli is a reporter and columnist for the Chicago Tribune, providing a refreshingly earnest voice to the world of video games, toast, Netflix, location scouts, shadow puppet theatre companies and people who hoard copies of Jerry Maguire. As a man who has written an article on the mathematic formula behind suspense, it’s safe to say that Borelli will deliver, giving us a reason to never listen to ‘turn off the TV and go to bed’ ever again. http://sydneyoperahouse.com/ideas

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Is American politics dysfunctional or does it just look that way? What happens when aggressive hyper-partisanship collides with a political system that can only work co-operatively? Is the damage fatal to the democratic system? 

This session was presented in partnership with The United States Studies Centre. 

Shanto Iyengar holds the Chandler Chair in Communication at Stanford University, where he is also Professor of Political Science and Director of the Political Communication Laboratory. Iyengar’s areas of expertise include the role of mass media in democratic societies, public opinion and political psychology. He has received professional awards including the Philip Converse Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book in the field of public opinion, the Murray Edelman Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Goldsmith Book Prize from Harvard University. Iyengar is author or co-author of several books, including News That Matters, Is Anyone Responsible?, Explorations in Political Psychology, Going Negative and Media Politics: A Citizen’s Guide.

Simon Jackman became CEO of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney in April 2016. Born and raised in Australia, he went to the United States for his PhD (Political Science, Rochester) in 1988. From 1996 to 2016, Jackman taught Political Science and Statistics at Stanford University. Jackman’s research focuses on public opinion, political participation, and electoral systems, in both the United States and Australia. Since 2009, Jackman has been one of the Principal Investigators of the American National Election Studies, the world’s longest-running and most authoritative study of political attitudes and behaviour.

Norman Ornstein is a long-time observer of US politics. He is a contributing writer for The Atlantic, a contributing editor and columnist for National Journal, and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Ornstein served as co-director of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project and participates in AEI's Election Watch series. He also led a working group of scholars and practitioners that helped shape the law, known as McCain-Feingold, that reformed the campaign-financing system. His many books include The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track, and, most recently The New York Times bestseller, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, both with Thomas E. Mann.

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Is innovation overvalued? It is the dominant ideology of our era. But what if building, maintenance and repair prove much more important to our daily lives than the vast majority of technological innovations?

Chaired by Natasha Mitchell 

Co-founder of The Maintainers themaintainers.org, a research group focused on maintenance, repair, infrastructure and mundane labor, Lee Vinsel is an Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Stevens Institute of Technology. His research focuses on science and technology policy, and his first book examines the history of government regulation of the automobile in the United States, from the birth of the internal combustion engine to the Google Car. His work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Le Monde, Fortune and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Natasha Mitchell is a multi-award winning journalist and presenter of flagship ABC Radio National programs including the daily morning show, Life Matters (2012-15), and the popular science, psychology & culture radio program, All in the Mind (2002-12). She was vice president of the World Federation of Science Journalists, and a recipient of the MIT Knight Fellowship. 

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Will we run out of water – and if so, when? Will the Earth suffer? Explore how water drives modern conflict and is not about to stop.

Chaired by Sarah Macdonald

Alok Jha is the science correspondent for ITV News in the UK. Before that, he did the same job at The Guardianfor a decade, where he wrote news, features, comment and presented the award-winning Science Weeklypodcast. He has also reported live from Antarctica and presented many TV and radio programmes for the BBC. Alok's latest book The Water Book  looks into water, a profoundly strange substance that defies the normal rules of chemistry, and how it has shaped the Earth, its life and our civilisation. 

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Today the human race faces existential challenges. Our prosperity has been built on unsustainable economic and environmental practices — but our social and political processes seem incapable of fixing anything. Why are we unable to even acknowledge the truth of our predicament?

Chaired by Rebecca Huntley

Satyajit Das is a former financier. He anticipated the 2008 financial crisis and has been prescient in outlining subsequent developments. In September 2014, Bloomberg included him as one of the 50 most influential people in international finance. He was featured in Charles Ferguson’s 2010 Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, the 2012 PBS Frontline series ‘Money, Power & Wall Street’, the 2009 BBC TV documentary Tricks with Risk, and the 2015 German film Who’s Saving Whom. He is the author of Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006) and Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk(2011). His latest book is A Banquet of Consequences: Have We Consumed Our Own Future? (2015).

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#BlackLivesMatter has become the call to action for a generation of US human rights activists to denounce the violence and prejudice still experienced by African Americans. In the wake of the violent deaths of African Americans Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and many others call for change is insistent and consistent.  So what does need to change in politics, in the media and in everyday lives to transform race relations and ensure justice and recognition for all?

Following the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, Alicia Garza took to social media to express her outrage. With Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, she turned the powerful words “Black Lives Matter” into a social media phenomenon and an organizing network that boasts more than 26 chapters internationally. Currently the Special Projects Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Alicia previously served as Executive Director of People Organized to Win Employment Rights, where she led the charge on significant initiatives, including organizing against the chronic police violence in black neighborhoods.

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Popular culture is obsessed with easy sex and the importance of dating, implying that we live in a new enlightened age of sexual promiscuity.  As an investigative journalist, if you penetrated the inner sanctum of a secret society and discovered the key to picking up women would you use it for good or bad?  Can too much sex and dating damage you irreparably?  What is the deep psychology behind our quests and fears of love and sex and who are the people making use of this knowledge.

Chaired by Sarah MacDonald 

Neil Strauss is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Game and Rules of the Game. He is also the co-author of three New York Times bestsellers—Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt, and Marilyn Manson’s The Long Hard Road Out of Hell. Strauss' highly anticipated The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book about Relationships came out in October 2015. A writer for Rolling Stone, Strauss lives in Los Angeles.

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What is the place on our stages and in public life for performers who don’t fit the conventional view of what an artist should be? In the past, ‘natural born freaks’ were the stars of sideshow performances, but this is now buried as the embarrassing past. Why should we ignore this history of performers with disability? And if we do, how can we celebrate the unique artistry of those who are different, who are ‘freaks like me’?

Sarah Houbolt is an accomplished international circus and physical theatre performer, trained in aerials, acrobatics and hula hoop. By day she works at Accessible Arts in Sydney, and by night she is KooKoo the Birdgirl. Her show reel consists of everything from Cirque du Soleil to corporate aerials to starring as Hairy Maclary in children's theatre. Sarah loves bed of nails, angle grinding and blockhead. Sarah worked with Sideshow Wonderland at Adelaide Fringe 2015, and has created a one-woman show based on KooKoo the Birdgirl, a character from the controversial film Freaks (1932).

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