Sydney Ideas

Good conversation is a rewarding and important part of social interaction. Professor Leanne Togher from the University of Sydney Faculty of Health Sciences shares her research into teaching people with brain injury the art and science of conversation, and shows how basic principles can benefit all who seek the rewards of satisfying conversation with the people close to them.

A Sydney Idea talk 14 May, 2014

http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2014/professor_leanne_togher.shtml

The year 2012 marked the 40th anniversary of UNESCO’s 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. It remains the only international instrument for safeguarding the world’s heritage.

Director of the Stanford Archaeology Center, Professor Lyn Meskell asks: how are emergent rights to the past being presented, promoted and prevented by particular actors internationally? One of UNESCO’s millennium challenges was the very issue of sovereignty in an increasingly transnational world and in the face of indigenous claims and rights that often conflict with nation states.

For more info and speaker's biography see this page: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2014/professor_lynn_meskell.shtml

What lessons should we draw from the First World War?

Professor Glenda Sluga will discuss the war's legacies from the perspective of its end, and the twinned principles on which a new postwar international order was to be established – namely nationality and the League of Nations. Her aim is to understand the relative significance of nationalism and of what contemporaries articulated as a 'new era of internationalism' in the last years of the war and in its wake.

For more info and speaker's biography see this page: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2014/professor_glenda_sluga.shtml

Lionel Shriver writes big, feelingful, socially and emotionally engaged novels of everyday horror, perversion and compulsion in the tradition of Flaubert and Wharton. We Need To Talk About Kevin, a novel in letters written by the mother of a school shooter, won the prestigious Orange Prize in 2005 and became an international sensation. In this Sydney Ideas session she talks to University of Sydney academic and poet, Associate Professor Kate Lilley.

For more info see this page: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2014/lionel_shriver.shtml

Deirdre McCloskey, a well-known economist and historian, was until 1995 known as Donald. She tells her story since then, of happy and unhappy endings–mainly happy–and how becoming a new woman affected her academic work and her spiritual life.

A Sydney Ideas talk from 28 November, 2013

http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2013/professor_deirdre_mccloskey.shtml

Since the fall of President Ben Ali in Tunisia, followed by those of President Moubarak in Egypt and Colonel Kaddafi in Libya, France has been one of the West’s strongest and most vocal supporters of the "Arab" street protesters against their leadership. This support, however, has proven to be more declamatory than tangible.

French diplomat EU chargé d'affaires to Syria, Anis Nacrour discusses the topic with Dr Rodger Shanahan, non-resident Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy.

For more info and speaker's biography see this page: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2013/anis_nacrour.shtml

In December 2001, after two years of searching for somewhere in Australia to put her archive, Germaine Greer was taken to the Numinbah Valley in South-east Queensland, to see an abandoned dairy farm that was for sale. It was the last thing she wanted, totally unsuitable as a site for a library, but the battered subtropical rainforest that clothed the upper slopes of the property needed her. Since then she has spent every spare cent on rehabilitating the forest, and set up a charity to continue the work after she has gone to be recycled.

White Beech tells the story of how Europeanisation has devastated our landscape and what we can do to restore its biodiversity and uniqueness. In Germaine's view conservation is too important to be left to politicians; it is time ordinary Australians began doing it for themselves.

THIS SYDNEY IDEAS LECTURE TOOK PLACE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY ON 27 October, 2013.

For further information and additional content see this page: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2013/germaine_greer.shtml

Historian and commentator on women, gender and feminism in Egypt, Margot Badran joins Sydney Ideas for a conversation with the University of Sydney’s Lucia Sorbera.

Held on 15 October, 2013

http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2013/margot_badran.shtml

One of Chile’s leading political scholars, Professor Ana Maria Stuven, joins Sydney Ideas for an informative presentation on the changing role of women in the public sphere in her country.

Held on 3 October, 2013

http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2013/professor_ana_maria_stuven.shtml

2013 marks 150 years since the first of 55,000 Pacific Islander labourers (known as Australian South Sea Islanders or ‘ASSI’) were brought to Australia between 1863-1901, partly by kidnapping and in slave-like conditions to develop the sugar cane, pastoral and maritime industries. Over the past 20 years numerous community members have been involved in “The call for recognition” – a community initiated movement seeking federal government recognition of this community as a disadvantaged ethnic identity within Australia.

A panel of representatives from current governments, historians and ASSI representatives to outline the present situation and plans that are in development for formal ongoing assistance to Australian South Sea Islander peoples.

For more info and speaker's biography see this page: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2013/the_call_for_recognition_of_the_australian_south_sea_islander_peoples.shtml