Progressive culture since 1954
Prior to these announcements, we would have told incoming minority students that, despite its problems, academic philosophy is worth their while. Things are now made bearable given supportive faculty and the on-going project of disrupting oppressive philosophical norms. Persevere and you might just be able to crack into a profession that does a hell of a job trying to keep you out.
There was a stink around. A pong. Mum had that sour look on her face she got when she hadn’t decided how mad she would get about something yet. Sort of angry and confused but like she might just decide to have a laugh instead. Imagine biting into an orange then realising it’s a lemon, that’s what her face looked like. Mum said the septic tank was on the fritz. That might sound funny but it didn’t smell funny.
We are deeply concerned by the Australian government’s complicity in enabling the Israeli state to suppress the aspiration of the Palestinian people to self-determination. Last week, Australia was one of only two countries (with the Marshall Islands) to vote against a UN Human Rights Council resolution condemning the illegal annexation of significant parts of the occupied Palestinian West Bank by Israel.
If caring is insurrectionary, and insurrection is a multiplicity of interrelated acts of care, it follows that insurrection is built out of care itself and an understanding of its revolutionary and transgressive potential. Care is therefore always militant.
Displacing the queer is not a new phenomenon. What has changed in recent years is the kind of displacement at work. Where once queerness existed on the fringes of society, under the cover of darkness, now it has been thrust into the sunlight, quite literally, through the use of remote natural settings.
Throat is a collection that crosses boundaries: of gender, genre, culture, history. Throughout the work you catch yourself, half unconscious, half wondering, dazzled and spent and continually recovering. To paraphrase the title of the second part of the collection it is a work that is always approaching, haunt-walking in. You cannot wait to meet it yet feel that it has met you several times already – feisty, haunting, irresistibly tender.
What marks the continued reign of white supremacy is not pointy white hats (lately morphed into red baseball caps) but the persistent normalisation of whiteness in almost all frames of life – all while vigorously denying that this is the case.
Is it possible for some of the most precariously-employed yet essential university workers to have a conversation with management? Do the two groups have common interests, a shared language? What happens when they meet face-to-face – or, as is necessary during a pandemic, over Zoom?
The media commentators who cite Łobaczewski would have us believe that leaders like Trump and Johnson are progressively weeding out the healthy from their cabinets until only pathological cronies remain. But did Trump fall out with Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, John Bolton and Anthony Scaramucci because they were wholesome?
It is one hundred seconds to midnight on the Doomsday Clock and Australia is waking up to a charred and flooded landscape. After our burning summer, how will things be different? As communities recover and rebuild, let there also be this reckoning: it is not just climate action this country needs, it is climate justice.
Michalia Arathimos reviews new work by Bernadine Evaristo, Luke Horton, Abi Daré, Imbi Neeme and Kirsten Krauth.
The costs of what once would have been on-the-job training has been socialised and offloaded to tertiary education institutions, while the benefits of having a ‘job ready’ workforce are privatised. Employers benefit from the training that the taxpayer and the student fund. And they’re still unhappy.
There is hope that some form of justice will be delivered to the Afghan victims of Australian war crimes. But to ensure that such deadly crimes are never committed in our name again, we must examine the role that creeping militarism plays in our society and give priority to civil institutions that strengthen our resilience against the profiteers and architects of war.