Sydney Ideas

According to recent reports, 1.2 million Australians regularly struggle to put good, healthy food on the table. From low incomes to high living costs, casualised labor markets to government policies, more and more Australians don’t have enough money to eat or to eat well. In policy jargon, problems like these are often referred to as food and nutrition insecurity. This panel focuses on the problem of food insecurity here in Sydney, its causes, consequences, and – ultimately – what can be done to put good food back on the table. Drawing together academic, policy and practitioner perspectives we hope to open up a space to talk about pathways to and opportunities for a more just food system. Professor David Schlosberg (Chair, Co-director, Sydney Environment Institute Elizabeth MillenProgram Manager, Healthy Environments, South Western Sydney Local Health District Health Promotion Service Tegan Picone, Nutrition Programs Manager, SecondBite Luke Craven, Phd Candidate, University of Sydney A Sydney Ideas and Sydney Environment Institute event in the Food@Sydney series http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2016/food@sydney_series_2016.shtml

Tax evasion is as old as taxes. But with the introduction of mass income taxes at the beginning of the twentieth century, the problem took on new dimensions. After 1918, the first tax haven countries appeared initially in continental Europe. After the Second World War, a new generation of havens opened up in the dissolving British Empire in places such as the Bahamas, Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Singapore, and, for Australia, the New Hebrides and other Pacific territories. This talk will looks at the role of governments in setting up countries as tax havens after 1945. Most tax havens were state-sponsored projects, making current calls for shutting down havens and curbing avoidance appear problematic. What, then, can be done against tax havens especially in the face of mounting inequality today? ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Vanessa Ogle is the Julie and Martin Franklin Assistant Professor in the Department of History University of Pennsylvania, Her first book, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870 - 1950, was published in 2015.. She is now writing a book on the history of tax havens, offshore money markets, and free trade zones, 1920s-1980s. Vanessa is the Kathleen Fitzpatrick Visiting Fellow in the Laureate Research Program in International History, at the University of Sydney. More event information http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2016/vanessa_ogle.shtml

The Second World War still has a defining place in how we imagine war today, despite its increasing distance from us. The west has not experienced ‘major war’ since 1945, and so our comprehension of what it means has not had to be redefined. But the war, which we have invented for ourselves, is a caricature: a ‘good’ war fought for ‘necessary’ reasons by a generation of ‘heroes’. The implicit contrast is with the First World War, which is portrayed as none of these things. This construction of the Second World War has created a massive obstacle to our capacity to understand the war of 1914-18 on its own terms. It too has become a caricature of itself: futile, wasteful and needless. Yet many of the concepts with which we frame modern war are derived from the First, not the Second, World War, including ‘grand strategy’, ‘total war’ and even ‘existential conflict’. The First World War changed what we mean by strategy with effects that still resonate. And the conflict has a further claim to our attention in this centenary period. The complexities and ambiguities that surround it can help us understand the place of armed conflict in our own world – its causes, conduct and termination – and often do so much better than the stories which we tell ourselves of the Second World War. SPEAKER: Sir Hew Strachan FRSE, Hon D. Univ (Paisley) was the Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford and is now Professor of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. He is an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and a Life Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His recent books include The First World War: Volume 1: To Arms (2001), The First World War: an illustrated history (2003); related to a multi-part television series and translated into many languages, Clausewitz’s On War: a Biography (2007), and The Direction of War (2013). He is the editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (revised edition, 2014), and a clutch of volumes arising from his Directorship of the Oxford Changing Character of War Programme.

The Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) 2016 Harley Wood Lecture for the ASA 50th anniversary Annual Scientific Meeting Over the last 40 years, scientists have uncovered evidence that if the Universe had been forged with even slightly different properties, life as we know it - and life as we can imagine it - would be impossible. With small tweaks to the way the Universe works, we can erase the periodic table, disintegrate particles and remove all traces of structure in the cosmos. Join us on a journey through how we understand the Universe, from its most basic particles and forces, to planets, stars and galaxies, and back through cosmic history to the birth of the cosmos. ABOUT THE SPEAKER Luke Barnes is a postdoctoral researcher at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy. Having gained his PhD from the University of Cambridge, he has published papers in the field of galaxy formation and on the fine-tuning of the Universe for life. His forthcoming book co-written with Geraint Lewis is A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos. RESPONDENT Professor Mark Colyvan, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. His research includes work on philosophy of mathematics, decision theory, and philosophy of probability. Sydney Ideas event information http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2016/ASA2016_harley_wood.shtml

The human war against the mosquito is once again garnering global public attention. An explosion in the number of cases of Zika virus in the Americas, has resulted in huge media coverage and the World Health Organisation declaring a global health emergency. Spread by the mosquito Aedes aegypti, Zika virus causes a mild fever in most cases, but it has recently been associated with rising rates of microcephaly (abnormal brain development) if a woman is infected during pregnancy. This panel outlines and explore issues relating to both the recent Zika outbreak and relevant broader, contextual features of human-mosquito relations. More info: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2016/defending_the_aussie_mozzie_forum.shtml

For the 2016 Insight lecture Series Professor Yixu Lu, Head of School, School of Languages and Cultures talks about the images of China tantalised the European imagination throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and still do today. The Enlightenment produced an image of China as decadent and stagnant, and this dominated European visions of China throughout the 19th century. This lecture takes a critical survey of the making and breaking of these images and consider the enigma that China remains today. Fore speaker's biography see: tinyurl.com/zn5cqo9

The Middle Ages have never been more current. Particularly since 9/11, the term 'medieval' has been used to describe, for example, climate-change deniers, climate-change scientists, Christians, Muslims, IS, and Al-Qaeda, to name a few. In these contexts, the Middle Ages denotes ignorance, superstition and barbarism. Why this turn to the idea of the Middle Ages to explain our modern times? Our speakers will explore the long history of the 'modern' Middle Ages and its particular relevance for today's global culture.

Our greatest task is to try to imagine the future before it arrives and then to try to shape it. Will the buzzwords ‘innovation’ and ‘agility’ come to mean more than increased efficiency and wealth for the few? The future is almost within reach, but the portents are challenging; rarely has the future seemed so difficult a prospect. Coinciding with the 500th anniversary of Thomas More's Utopia, Griffith Review founding editor Julianne Schultz launches Griffith Review 52: Imagining the Future. Professor Schultz is joined by University of Sydney scientist Professor Thomas Maschmeyer and distinguished writer-journalists and Griffith Review contributors Kathy Marks, Tony Davis and Paul Daley, in a conversation around themes arising from our urgent need to address the world ahead.

This talk explores how the manifesto became a defining genre of the artistic avant-garde and other political movements across the 20th century, from Futurism and Surrealism to radical feminist manifestos by Valerie Solanas and the Riot Grrrls. It coincides with Julian Rosefeldt’s moving image 2014-2015 artwork, ‘Manifesto’,which brings to life the enduring provocation of the historical art manifesto. ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Natalya Lusty is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (2007), Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History (2013), with Helen Groth and the edited collection, Modernism and Masculinity (2014), which was shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association book prize. She has spent the last decade writing and talking about manifestos in numerous academic contexts and public forums and is currently completing a book on feminist manifestos.

The unrivalled corpus of medieval manuscripts unearthed in the northwestern Chinese desert town of Dunhuang in the early twentieth century divulged a trove of secrets about the practice of Chinese Buddhism. Among the thousands of liturgical texts created by local monks for the performance of rituals, almost two hundred separate manuscripts contain liturgies that were spoken aloud during healing rituals. Stephen F Teiser, Professor in Buddhist Studies and Professor of Religion at Princeton University, introduces Dunhuang and its manuscripts, surveys the practice of healing in medieval Chinese Buddhism, explores how illness can be cured through karmic means, discusses the role of confession in curing, and reflects on the process of healing in Chinese Buddhism.