Sydney Ideas

I’m not creative, but... playfully investigates the role of creativity in all career paths, well beyond the so-called creative industries. Academics Rick Benitez, Wendy Davis, Iain McCalman AO, Judy Kay, and Martin Tomitsch, representing diverse disciplines including design, history, IT and philosophy, explain their views on creativity and its role in their careers to date. A Vivid Ideas event.

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

The Australian Constitution has not been amended for more than 35 years. In fact, with only 8 of 44 total referendums successful, changing our Constitution is a notoriously difficult task. With a referendum proposed for the near future and the daunting task of achieving a ‘yes’ vote, what is the likelihood of constitutional change? Will Australians be ready to erase the racial discrimination in our founding document and include significant recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians? And what does it say about us as a nation if we don’t?

To celebrate Reconciliation Week 2013, join Dr Tom Calma AO, Associate Professor Sarah Maddison and Professor Anne Twomey in a discussion on national identity, Constitutional change and the next steps for reconciliation in Australia.

For more info and speaker's biography see this page:

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

Vivien Lovell is a visual arts curator and founder of Modus Operandi, an independent public art consultancy organisation based in the UK. She has managed numerous national public art commissions for clients including London Docklands Development Corporation. She explores the fundamentally positive contribution public art can make to creating communities.

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

Professor Rana Mitter, History and Politics of Modern China at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Cross College, explores how the battered China of wartime became today’s superpower in the making – and why.

For more information and speaker's biography see: tinyurl.com/jbga4ql

For decades, particle physicists have searched for the elusive Higgs boson, the missing piece to the "Standard Model" that explains the world we see. In July 2012, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva announced that they found it.

In this 2013 Sydney Ideas lecture, theoretical physicist Sean Carroll explained why the Higgs boson is so important, talked about the enormous challenge physicists overcame to build the LHC and get it running, and considered what the future of particle physics will look like.

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

American art historian and art critic, Professor Thomas Crow from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York, is best known for his influential writing on the role of art in modern society and culture. For this presentation he turns his attention to 1960s Pop Art, and examines it enduring legacy beyond the international counter-culture it originally represented.

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

A fascinating conversation with novelist and journalist Ahdaf Soueif who witnessed first-hand the Egyptian Revolution of January 2011. As the events in Egypt unfolded, she reported for The Guardian newspaper and her access to insider information played a key role in outsider understanding of the Arab Spring. Her published account of her participation in the revolution ‘Cairo: My city, our revolution’.

She talks frankly about her compatriots’ commitment to revolution, and the hopes and dreams for their country that remain two years later.

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

China is undergoing a radical transformation that is changing the lives of everyone who lives there – and reporters have a ringside sea. Five years as the BBC’s correspondent in China have given Michael Bristow a unique insight into daily life and the often perplexing political system in China.

For more information and speaker's biography see: tinyurl.com/jma6l5o

Professor Elizabeth Grosz addresses the complex relation between Francis Bacon and Gilles Deleuze, who wrote one of the most perceptive and sympathetic books on Bacon’s painting, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Both Bacon and Deleuze, argues Grosz were interested in the possibilities for presenting and perceiving forces that are normally imperceptible - forces of magnetism, gravity, causality and chance, forces of aging and disintegration.

The lecture was co-presented with the Power Institute and the Art Gallery of NSW exhibition 'Francis Bacon: Five Decades'.

For further info about this lecture and speaker's biography see this page: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2012/professor_elizabeth_grosz.shtml

The incoming Director of University of Sydney’s China Studies Centre Professor Kerry Brown explores the new leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in China. He offers an assessment of the Hu and Wen period, and suggests how the future leaders will deal with a transition into an era in which the greatest challenges will be socio-political.

SPEAKER: Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Sydney