Sydney Ideas

‘Health hacks’ telling us how to stay young in mind and body are everywhere these days, but are they true? Can we trust their advice? In this health forum, our expert panel will highlight helpful insights that are changing people’s lives for the better, and teach us all how to best look after our minds and bodies as we age.

Paul Farrell (Buzzfeed Australia), Benedetta Brevini (Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media), Julie Posetti (journalist and academic) and Gabor Szathmari (CryptoAustralia co-founder) discuss the extent of data collection revealed by Edward Snowden’s 2013 intelligence leaks and the sharp acceleration of new national security and data retention legislation in Australia. A Sydney Ideas event on 22 August 2017 http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2017/journalism_resistance_metadata_forum.shtml

'Gatekeeping' continues to be a rousing and provocative word with regard to Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations. Gatekeeping pertains to the various forms of apartheid in Australia, some of which still apply, if in a veiled and insidious way. But the term is also relevant to Aboriginal communities themselves, in which differing degrees of 'whiteness' and 'blackness' are consigned different values of entitlement and belonging. It is a taxonomy that tends to elide the deeper and more urgent issues that Indigenous cultures, in Australia and elsewhere, currently face. In the spirit of launching the journal co-founded by Professor Jakelin Troy and Dr Adam Geczy (who are the editors, with Lorena Sekwan Fontaine), of ab-Original (Penn State University Press), 'gatekeeping' is used as a relevant and ironic term for a journal whose key mission is to examine global indigenous cultures and their diverse transnational and pan-racial contexts. Joining Prof Jakelin Troy and Dr Adam Geczy in this discussion are Blak Douglas (aka Adam Hill), an artist, musician and social activist and Dr Mick Adams, Senior Research Fellow Australian Indigenous Health, at Edith Cowan University, WA. This forum was held as part of the Sydney Ideas program on 14 September, 2017: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2017/gatekeeping_ab-0riginal_launch_forum.shtml

Professor Ayhan Aktar from Istanbul Bilgi University discusses the turning points in the Turkish process of rewriting the history of the Gallipoli Campaign since the 1930s.

For many years now, anthropologists and urban scholars alike have identified ‘gentrification’ as a process of class conflict in which poorer people get pushed to the margins of urban life in the name of ‘urban renewal'. Using examples from Thailand, China, Greece, and Italy, Professor Michael Herzfeld argues that these short-sighted policies are creating an increasingly disenfranchised and resentful under-class.

Join visiting philosophers Jonathan Tallant (University of Nottingham, UK) and Elay Shech (Auburn University, USA) in a conversation with Associate Professor Kristie Miller from the University of Sydney, as they discuss what implications contemporary physics has for our understanding of time, and how philosophers are engaging with cutting-edge physical theories in their attempts to understand time. A Sydney Ideas and the Centre for Time event held on 10 August 2017 as part of Sydney Science Festival for National Science Week: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2017/sydney_science_festival_2017_the_physics_and_philosophy_of_time.shtml

Science used to be 'natural philosophy'; but Francis Bacon and the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries saw a parting of ways. Many scientists now consider philosophy to be largely irrelevant; while many philosophers consider science – particularly theoretical physics – to have lost its grip on reality. Exactly where, they ask, are all those ‘parallel universes’? It’s time for scientists and philosophers to get together and have a long chat…Tibor Molnar explores some of the issues they need to chat about. A Sydney Ideas and Department of Philosophy event held on 17 August 2017 as part of Sydney Science Festival for National Science Week: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2017/sydney_science_festival_2017_tibor_molnar.shtml

Women’s political activism has one century of history in North Africa, a history that intersects other social movements, and that has been documented and narrated by two generations of feminist scholars. Yet, the representation of North African women in mainstream Western public discourse tends to neglect this history, and continues to be grounded on Orientalist stereotypes. This panel challenges hegemonic narratives, framing North African women’s political activism in the context of the 2010 and 2011 uprisings ad their aftermaths. The historical and contemporary political experience of women in Tunisia, Algeria Egypt and Morocco shows, on one side, the necessity to go beyond generalisation such as ‘Arab women’, ‘Muslim women’ and ‘North African women’, and to shed light on the differences alongside continuities emerging in different contexts. Speakers: - Dr Fadma Ait Mous, Ain Chock Faculty of Letters and the Humanities University Hassan II of Casablanca - Professor Stephi Hemelryk Donald, Comparative Film, University of NSW - Dr Lucia Sorbera, Department of Arabic Language and Cultures , the University of Sydney Held as part of the Sydney Ideas program on 1 September 2017: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2017/feminism_north_africa_forum.shtml

Sydney Ideas co-presented with the Institute of Open Adoption Studies, School of Education and Social Work Join us for a panel discussion to explore the complex issue of contact in the context of open adoption. Adoption is one of the pathways for those children and requires individuals with capacity, sensitivity, and commitment to raise children through open adoption. Part of this openness is realised through adoption related conversation and exchange of information between adoptees, their adoptive parents and their birth families, to enable a child to understand their biological/familial history and the circumstances of their adoption. International research demonstrates that access to knowledge about their history and the circumstances of their adoption is important for children's ability to form a healthy and positive identity – including their identity as an adopted person. Supporting contact that is in the best interest of children is a pressing consideration for contemporary adoption practices in NSW. Chaired by Associate Professor Amy Conley Wright, Director of the Institute of Open Adoption Studies at the University of Sydney SPEAKERS: - Professor Elsbeth Neil, Professor of Social Work, University of East Anglia - Helmut Uhlmann - Lynne Moggach, Executive Specialist Adoption, Barnardos Australia - Philippa Welman, Director Child Safety & Permanency, Department of Family & Community Services Held as part of Sydney Ideas on 31 August 2017: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2017/ESW_deans_lecture_series.shtml

When does evidence obscure the truth? Join us for a forum on the avoidable causes of wrongful conviction. Wrongful convictions can and do happen – it's a sad fact of the Australian legal system. This panel looks at how evidence in legal proceedings can inadvertently support false conclusions if handled by non-experts (as is usually the case). Panel members are associate lecturer in psychology Celine van Golde, barrister and senior lecturer in law Miiko Kumar, both of the ‘Not Guilty’ project at the University of Sydney, and professional linguist Helen Fraser, of Forensic Phonetics Australia. They present real-life cases in which errors, by eyewitnesses, police, prosecutors, and other experts led to people spent years in jail following unfair trials. With reference to their ongoing research on human perception and memory they then ask: what can we do to prevent future miscarriages of justice? Held as part of the Sydney Ideas' Post Truth Initiative Series on 29 August, 2017: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2017/post_truth_initiative_series_2017.shtml