The IILAH Podcast

In this lecture, Helen analyses the notable degree to which early colonial Australian visual culture was dependent upon the skill-set of convicted and transported forgers from Great Britain. As the eighteenth century progressed, forgery crimes were subject to increasingly harsh sentencing, including a gallows death and transportation. This severity reflected broader efforts to enshrine the sovereignty of money at a time when credit systems—exemplified by the widespread use of paper instruments—threatened the perceived intrinsic (or metallurgic) value of coins. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the shared technical skills in mimesis and reproduction, over half the artists who arrived in Australia on The First Fleet were convicted forgers. Beginning with a case study of two scenes of Bristol’s Newgate Prison painted by the convicted forger cum Colonial Architect Francis Greenway, Helen examines the ways in which changes to sentencing for forgery crimes in eighteenth-century Britain delivered a range of artists and artisans—including Thomas Watling, Joseph Lycett, Charles Constantini, Richard Read Senior, Knud Bull, and Thomas Griffiths Wainewright—to the penal colonies in Australia. Here, their convergence is suggestive for a reimagined history of Australian art since colonisation—a narrative that has pivoted ineluctably around the binaries of original and copy, centre and periphery. Dr Helen Hughes is a Lecturer in Art History, Theory and Curatorial Practice at Monash University in the Faculty of Art Design and Architecture. She co-founded and co-edits the Melbourne contemporary art journal Discipline, and is an editor of the peer-reviewed art history journal Electronic Melbourne Art Journal.

What's the relationship between development and human rights? Can human rights challenge economic orthodoxy? How does the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) do its work? In this conversation, Professor Sundhya Pahuja and André Dao speak with Dr Mac Darrow, the Representative of the OHCHR in Washington DC, responsible for the Office's policy engagement with international financial institutions. Dr Darrow was previously chief of OHCHR's Sustainable Development Goals Section, leading the Office's effort to integrate human rights within global and country level development policy frameworks. He is a Senior Fellow in the Melbourne Law Masters program, and has published extensively in the fields of international human rights law, anti-discrimination law, climate change and human rights, and international organisations.

What is the global food system? What are the politics of naming and shaming? What does a UN Special Rapporteur do? In this conversation, Professor Sundhya Pahuja and Dr Luis Eslava speak with Professor Michael Fakhri, the newly appointed UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Professor Fakhri is the author of 'Sugar and the Making of International Trade' (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and the co-editor with Luis Eslava and Vasuki Nesiah of 'Bandung, Global History and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures' (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Join Sundhya Pahuja, Claerwen O'Hara and Valeria Vazquez Guevara in conversation with Jessica Whyte, on a discussion of Jessica's latest book 'The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism'. In this recording, Jessica explores why the neoliberal age has also been the age of human rights. Drawing on detailed archival research, she explores the place of human rights in an attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society. The book helps us to understand why coming to terms with these origins is so crucial. As we emerge from the COVID-19 crisis, now more than ever, we need to be think carefully about the languages and justifications which sustain inequality, and what we can do to challenge them. Jessica Whyte is Scientia Fellow and Associate Professor at the School of Humanities and Languages (Philosophy) and the School of Law at the University of New South Wales, and is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow. She is a political theorist whose work integrates political philosophy, intellectual history and political economy to analyse contemporary forms of sovereignty, human rights, humanitarianism and militarism.