So What? Lectures

By Simon TrevaksEducation

So What? Lectures episodes

April 18, 2014 Professor Quentin Skinner: So, what does freedom mean to us?
Perhaps the most widely accepted understanding of the idea of personal
freedom is that it can be defined in negative terms as absence of
interference. My lecture begins by noting that, because the concept of
interference is such a complex one, this general agreement has turned
out to be compatible with a great deal of disagreement about the
conditions under which it may be legitimate to claim that freedom has
been infringed. I am chiefly concerned, however, with those writers who
have wished to challenge the core assumption that freedom is best
understood as absence of interference. Some doubt whether the presence
of freedom is best defined in terms of an absence at all, and instead
attempt to connect freedom with specific patterns of moral behaviour But
other critics -- on whom my lecture will end by focusing -- agree that
the presence of freedom is best understood as the absence of something,
while arguing that freedom fundamentally consists in the absence not of
acts of interference but rather of broader conditions of arbitrary
domination and dependence. I conclude by noting some of the implications
of this view of freedom for the proper conduct of democratic
government.
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April 18, 2014 Dr Michele Bruniges: Teaching matters: The role of universities and education systems in lifting educational quality
We all know that education matters. In Australia, as elsewhere, an
individual’s educational attainment is a significant predictor of
success and wellbeing throughout life. At the same time, we know through
experience just how hard it is to lift educational outcomes in a
sustained way, and for all students. Research tells us the teachers are
the most significant in-school influence on student outcomes, but has
much less to say about how to improve teaching quality in ways that
directly raise student achievement. This lecture will look at the shared
role of universities and education systems as we seek to make a
critical difference in Australian education – one that will ensure our
ongoing prosperity, as individuals and as a society.
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April 18, 2014 Rory Medcalf: Grand Stakes: Australia's future between China and India
For Australia, the rise of China and India combines vast economic gain
with challenges in security and values. The Asian giants have become
principal markets for Australia's resources, major sources of human
capital, and critical strategic players in the region. China brings
Australia greater economic benefits than India, but its growing military
power, combined with differences over values, poses security anxieties.
Thus, Canberra has tried to intensify diplomatic engagement and
economic enmeshment with both powers, yet is also seeking to hegde
against Chinese power. This involves strengthening Australia's defence
posture, enhancing the U.S alliance and forging new kinds of strategic
ties with Asian partners, including India. In the wake of President
Obama's 2011 visit, Labor's policy shift on uranium exports to India,
and a challenging phase in China's regional diplomacy, this lecture will
raise questions about the nature and viability of an Australian
strategy to sustain good relations with the giants of the Asian century.
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April 18, 2014 Professor Eileen Baldry: Disabling justice: Social justice, human rights and mental and cognitive disability in the criminal justice system
Across the western world, since the latter part of the twentieth
century, people with mental and cognitive disabilities have been
funneled into criminal justice systems, remanded, sentenced and
imprisoned in larger numbers than previously and in far higher
proportions than their presence in the general population. Australian
criminal justice systems are no exception. The use of societal
punishment and control systems in this manner is a deeply disturbing
turn. People with these disabilities who become enmeshed with the
police, courts and prisons are largely from the most disadvantaged
backgrounds and communities, with Indigenous Australians significantly
over-represented amongst them. As criminal justice processes are
primarily to assess guilt and administer punishment, they tend to
intensify experiences of disability; prison is not a therapeutic place.
So why are there so many people with mental and cognitive disability
incarcerated? Evidence from recent studies and cases suggest that at
heart, this is a matter of how Australian society supports, enacts
social justice for and affords human rights to the most vulnerable
people.
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April 18, 2014 Professor John de Wit: Beyond the 'magic bullet': Social and behavioural approaches to the complexities of HIV prevention in an evolving epidemic
As the world enters the fourth decade of the HIV epidemic, progress is
finally noted in the fight against this global pandemic. Access to
effective treatment has in particular increased, with beneficial effects
on the health and life expectancy of people living with HIV. At the
same time, in Australia and other resource rich countries, new HIV
infections continue to occur at high rates and have been rising
throughout the last decade. Treatment can play a role in reducing the
transmission of HIV, but treatment alone is not enough and cost
effective behavioural prevention approaches are available that in recent
years have recieved much less priority. HIV prevention may in the
future benefit from new biomedical approaches, including those that
capitalise on the use of treatment. To date, however, evidence of the
success of biomedical HIV prevention in real-life conditions is limited
and many of those approaches will continue to rely on the behaviours of
individuals and communities. These behaviours are shaped by a myriad of
social factors and HIV prevention responses that reflect appropriate
understanding of the complexity of human behaviour remain critical in
achieving sustained success. This presentation will highlight the
exciting new contributions contemporary theorising of social behaviour
is making to HIV prevention.
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April 18, 2014 Professor Scott Lash: Urban Justice and the Crisis of Neo-liberalism
Three decades of neo-liberal privatization has meant the systemic
destruction of the public sphere. The global economic crisis presents
new possibilities for fundamental mutations of public/urban space,
driven by 'emerging' cities like Shanghai, Mumbai and Lagos. If the
global city was topographical, these mega-cities are topological,
spaces of infolded atmospheres. In Walter Benjamin's 'Critique of
Violence' justice was a violence that nullified the commodity and law.
Benjamin's was a temporal, messianic critique. We must ask what kind of
spatial violence can create a contemporary justice of new publics in
both the emerging world and the West.
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April 18, 2014 Professor Julian Murphet: Modernism, Now and Then
?The academic thesis of 'postmodernism' is some thirty years old, but in
the three decades since it was declared dead, Modernism has shown
distinct signs of life, if not 'undeath'. On the one hand, a new
academic industry has emerged, under the banner of the 'New Modernism
Studies', resurrecting and reframing countless acts of cultural
Modernism; on the other, the work of key contemporary artists such as J.
M. Coetzee, Michael Haneke and Gerhard Richter can scarcely be
accounted for outside of a broadly Modernist framework. Postmodernism,
as a distinct style of cultural reaction, today seems deader than
Modernism. In this lecture, I take stock of the current situation in
terms of the uneven development of geographical cultural domains, and of
media technologies, within an overarching economic drive toward
'convergence culture' and digitization. Rather than see Modernism as an
exhausted phase of cultural development, I argue that it is more
appropriate to understand it as an ongoing possibility within the
coordinates of the present—a possibility beset by drawbacks as much as
it is saturated with prestige value.
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April 18, 2014 Professor Fiona Williams: Who cares? Migrant workers in the transnational care economy
Increasingly the richer world has become dependent on migrant women
workers from the poorer regions to do their care and domestic work. As
developed countries face a 'care crunch' with an ageing population, more
women in paid employment and a squeeze on public expenditure, they are
turning, by design or by default, to this as a solution. What are the
dynamics behind these international 'care chains' and 'care drains'?
Drawing from her research Fiona will explain personal and political
consequences of this phenomenon. She will argue that it poses a major
challenge for global justice.
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April 18, 2014 Professor Ronan McDonald: Beyond Ireland: cultures of encounter and exchange
Often marketed as a rural idyll, with all the comforts of tradition,
Ireland has also been modelled as the crucible of high literary
modernism and, more recently, the high-tech gateway to Europe. Through
consideration of the anomalous branding of ‘Ireland’, and the increasing
involvement of the Irish diaspora, this lecture examines the shifting
and travelling meanings of Irishness in a global era.
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April 18, 2014 Professor Ann Orloff: Can we support care and gender equality?
Across the rich democracies, social policy changes over the last two decades have been driven by a concern with "activation" and economic self-sufficiency, for women and mothers no less than for men and fathers. This is an epochal shift in social policy, politics and gender relations. Earlier family and policy systems supported women's caregiving and met social care needs in ways that were accompanied by gender inequality. Today, state policies are only partly successful in supporting care needs and facilitating mothers' employment, and have contradictory effects on gender relations.
What would it take to develop political and policy support for both social care needs and gender equality?
Ann Orloff is Professor of Sociology, Gender Studies and Political Science at NorthWestern University, USA and chair of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee 19 on Poverty, Social Welfare, and Social Policy. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University and her B.A. from Harvard University.
Orloff's areas of interest include political sociology, social policy, sociology of gender, historical and comparative sociology, and social and feminist theory. Her research focuses on gendered social policies and feminist politics in the developed world.
Orloff is currently at work on a manuscript, Farewell to Maternalism? State policies, Feminist Politics, and Mothers' Employment, that examines the shifts in the gendered logics of welfare and employment policies in the U.S. and other capitalist democracies and the implications of those shifts for feminism.
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