Sydney Ideas

This forum brings together two esteemed investigative journalists from overseas, Anna Nemtsova from Russia and Madhu Trehan from India, with Australian journalist Tom Dusevic and former NSW Premier Bob Carr. It will be moderated by David Marr, widely regarded as one of the country’s most influential commentators. Co-presented with the Australian Press Council as keynote event in the Press Council’s 40th Anniversary International Conference.

"Not too hot, not too cold" reads the prescription for a world that's just right for life as we know it. Finding evidence of life beyond Earth is one of the primary goals of science agencies around the world. The goal looms closer as a result of discoveries made by NASA's Kepler Mission. Find out more from Dr Natalie Batalha, NASA Ames Research Center and the Mission Scientist for NASA's Kepler Mission, as she describes the latest discoveries and the possibilities for finding inhabited environments in the not-so-distant future. This lecture took place at the University of Sydney as part of the 2016 Professor Walter Stibbs Lecture, an annual lecture by a distinguished astronomer of international standing. A Sydney Ideas co-presentation http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2016/dr_natalie_batalha.shtml

There is now almost universal recognition around the world that 'teaching matters' and that the quality of teaching is crucial in social and economic development. However, there has been remarkably little change in the ways in which teachers' work is constructed and the ways in which teachers are educated for a lifetime of preparing young people for their future worlds. In this talk Ian Menter reflects on debates about the nature of teaching and teacher education in order to challenge much of the dominant thinking, suggesting that such thinking is often driven by ideology and prejudice rather than by careful deliberation or by the use of research evidence. His conclusion is that there are important underlying values that can be traced through the history of teaching which may now be more important than ever, but that the ways in which these values are embodied in the work of contemporary teachers are in need of major reconsideration. This lecture was a part of the University of Sydney's Faculty of Education and Social Work Dean’s Lecture Series which provides an opportunity to hear internationally renowned experts as they contribute to the debates and discussions in education, social work and social policy.

Ugandan human rights lawyer Nicholas Opiyo and Human Rights Watch Senior Africa Researcher Maria Burnett examine Uganda’s failure to make progress on human rights issues, and discuss what can be done to ensure its citizens can freely exercise fundamental human rights. Hosted by Dr Susan Banki, lecturer in human rights at the University of Sydney.

As the United States teeters under the weight of Trumpism while inequalities of race, class, gender, and nativity inspire protests and political organising, it has become increasingly common to harken back to the political divisions of the 1960s. This roundtable panel will explore the usefulness of the ‘1960s’ as a point of comparison for contemporary politics and culture not just in the U.S. but around the world in locales like Brazil and Greece. What has changed in the way we think about the 1960s as scholarship on the decade has passed from those who participated in its upheavals to those who study it as scholarly project? Is the ‘1960s’ a coherent category of historical time and analysis? If so, are the inequalities, oppressions, and counter-revolutions of the contemporary world producing a ‘new 1960s?’. The four panellists, all historians of American social movements who teach outside of the United States, will offer diverse answers to these questions while placing the idea of the 1960s in the contemporary political and cultural context.

Discover how Harvard University Professor Joanna Aizenberg’s research is inspired by biology to design slippery surfaces that mimic those found in nature. Her novel nanostructured materials will have huge impacts in areas as diverse as medicine, construction, shipping industries, aircraft industries, fluid handling and transportation, and optical sensing. Inspired by the slippery surfaces of a pitcher plant, Professor Aizenberg and team have invented new technology to create self-healing, anti-fouling materials, called Slippery, Lubricant-Infused Porous Surfaces, or SLIPS. These novel nanostructured materials outperform state-of-the-art materials in their ability to resist ice and microbes sticking to surfaces, repel various simple and complex liquids, prevent marine fouling, or reduce drag. This lecture took place at the University of Sydney in celebration of the launch of the Australian Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at the University of Sydney, which is discovering and harnessing new science at the nanoscale.

Insight into how local councils are educating communities about climate change, even when they are pressured to avoid using the term. SPEAKERS: Lisette Collins, PhD Candidate, University of Sydney Maria Taylor, journalist and author

Professor Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science In earlier modernity the infrastructures of communication required for an expanding economy and society remained tied to national boundaries and broadly compatible with the values on which democracy was based. In late modernity, globalisation challenged nation-state boundaries, but not yet the values underlying democratic governance. But the era of late late modernity - characterised by the embedding of internet-based connectivity into action at all levels and scales - creates conditions incompatible with freedom, a value generally regarded as essential to the quality of human life, and democratic capabilities in particular. The internet involves the connectability of all points in space-time, which become points in an unlimited information-space. This generates a two-way bargain: if every point in information-space is connectable to every other, then it becomes susceptible to monitoring from every other point. Meanwhile, the resulting ease of information production generates an information excess which makes targeted communication ever more difficult. In response, business and government are constructing a social world based on the permanent monitoring of all actors and the processing of the resulting data. But such generalised surveillance is incompatible with the personal autonomy required for democratic agency. The result is an impending crisis in democratic norms from which we do not yet know how to escape.

Professor Kathy High, Video and New Media in the Department of the Arts, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY Recent research into the human body biomes and fecal microbial transplants (FMT) has led to better understanding of both the important function of bacteria in our bodies and the ecological systems that sustain us. These include microbiota – ecologies within the body. Kathy High an interdisciplinary artist working in the areas of technology, science and art, explores these new developments through metaphors of interspecies love, immunology and bacteria as players. Waste Matters expands ideas around imbalances of internal biomes as a mirror to the imbalances in our larger ecological sphere, where the gut is a ‘hackable space’. 12 April 2016. Sydney Ideas event: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2016/professor_kathy_high.shtml

Professor Yu Keping from Peking University, Beijing elaborates on the meaning of political philosophy and political thought in the Chinese context, traditionally and currently. He highlights the distinction between legitimate authority and legal power, and the ways by which power is transformed into authority. Professor Yu looks specifically at the sources and nature of power and authority, and gives his answer to the question of what kind of power and authority we need in terms of modern democratic governance.