Sydney Ideas

Part of the 21st Century Medicine Lecture Series. Professor Guy Thwaites, an academic infectious diseases physician and clinical microbiologist, whose research interests focus on severe bacterial infections, including meningitis and Staphylococcus aureus bloodstream infection, and tuberculosis, gives lecture on antimicrobial resistance and the misuse of antimicrobials. Presented by Sydney Ideas on...

From 1799 to 1804 Alexander von Humboldt made an extraordinary trip through Spanish America, a trip that resulted in a scientific and an aesthetic vision of the terrestrial globe. Fascinated by the exuberant vegetation and wildlife he encountered in the tropics, he investigated how they varied with the specific physical conditions of different regions. Humboldt carried with him an impressive array...

Early in her life Chido Govera realised the importance of food to community. Mushroom farming enabled her not only to feed her family in Zimbabwe and attain independence, but to create a healthier environment through managing food waste. For many years Chido has shared her unique skills and experiences with women throughout Africa and globally as an educator and mentor. Chido joins Sydney Ideas fo...

A special presentation by leading human right scholars, Emeritus Professor Gillian Triggs, President of the Australian Human Rights Commission and Professor Samina Yasmeen, University of Western Australia, with Professor Shahram Akbarzadeh, Deakin University They discuss the topic of human rights today in the face of rising Islamophobia for the launch of the Australian Association of Islamic and M...

Uncertainty, like insecurity, is as much a subjective state of mind as it is an objective condition of reality, raising new and troubling questions for those trying to assess its global impact. Are uncertainty, volatility and precarity actually on the rise? Do repeated efforts to measure, record and represent uncertainty only amplify the condition? Is uncertainty the result of a single person or s...

From building walls, to stopping boats, to attempts to ‘trade’ refugees between countries, we are witnessing unprecedented efforts by national governments to externalise their borders, absolving rich countries of their international obligations, and often shifting the burden to poorer countries. Our panel will examine the current policies of the United States and Australia and offer observations a...

On September 14, 2015, scientists from the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration observed the collision and fusion of the two black holes by directly measuring their gravitational waves. This detection came 100 years after Einstein developed the general theory of relativity that predicted gravitational waves, and 50 years after scientists began searching for them. This discover...

North Korea has survived the end of the Cold War, massive famine, numerous regional crises, punishing sanctions, and international stigma. Why is it still here? In this talk, Associate Professor Justin Hastings, of the University of Sydney, explores the puzzle of how the most politically isolated state in the world nonetheless sustains itself in large part by international trade and integration in...

Sydneysiders have just sweltered through the hottest summer on record. According to the Bureau of Meteorology, the mean summer temperature in the city was about three degrees above average. As Sydney’s population expands in the next few decades, how can we protect and promote health in this changing climate? What are the options for managing the heat, and how will this influence the choices we mak...

Professor George Sugai is a world leader in positive behaviour support (PBS), a behaviour management system used to understand what maintains an individual's challenging behaviour, and establishing goals for change. For this presentation he outlines how PBS is just one part of prevention-based multi-tiered systems approach that can be used to support the academic and social behavioural goals of sc...

What has happened to the bipartisan consensus on the importance of protecting public health and the environment with environmental law in the United States? P Robert L Glicksman from the George Washington University Law School, updates us on what is happening in the US. SPEAKER: Professor Robert L Glicksman is the J B & Maurice C Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law at the George Washington Univ...

Dr Duncan Green of Oxfam joins Sydney Ideas to share the ideas in his latest book How Change Happens, exploring the topic of social and political change from the perspective of international development. SPEAKER: Dr Duncan Green is Oxfam Great Britain’s Senior Strategic Adviser. He teaches on international development at the London School of Economics, where he is a Professor in Practice. His blog...

Corruption in the post-Tiananmen era exhibits distinct characteristics not found in the 1980s, such as astronomical sums of money looted by officials, their family members, and their cronies in the private sector, large networks of co-conspirators, and the sale of public office. By examining the evolution of Chinese economic and political institutions since the early 1990s, we can trace the emerge...

The Dawkins reforms to higher education in the late 1980s roused passions at many universities across the nation, over fears for the academic enterprise and Australia’s system of free, public university education. What was the impact of the Dawkins reforms, particularly at the University of Sydney? SPEAKERS: - Emeritus Professor Deryck Schreuder, 4th Challis Professor of History at The University...

Professor Pavel Pevzner from the University of California, San Diego, shares the concerns about the quality of early, primitive MOOCs, which have been hyped by many as a cure-all for education. At the same time, he believes that much of the criticism of MOOCs stems from the fact that truly disruptive educational resources have not been developed yet. He proposes to transform MOOCs into a more effi...

A Sydney Ideas conversation co-presented with the Sydney School of Entrepreneurship A serial entrepreneur, Ryan Holmes started his first business in high school, ultimately opening a string of ventures - from a pizza restaurant to a digital media agency – before starting Hootsuite in 2008. As founder and CEO, he has helped grow Hootsuite into the world’s most widely used social relationship platfo...

As Director General of Al Jazeera Media Network from 2008 to 2011, Wadah Khanfar was in a unique position to observe war, uprisings and revolution in one of the most turbulent regions in the world, the Middle East. He is now President of Al Sharq Forum, an independent think-tank dedicated to developing long-term strategies for political development, social justice and economic prosperity of the pe...

Professor Stuart Kauffman is one of the most distinguished scholars of complexity and the author of several acclaimed books, including The Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection in Evolution (1993), At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (1995), and Humanity in a Creative Universe (2016). In this Sydney Ideas talk, he proposes that the ever-chan...

A panel presents fresh perspectives on museums approaches to human rights and the Holocaust, exploring and explicating contemporary international debates. Experts from various disciplinary backgrounds alongside museum practitioners analyse, challenge, and critically assess existing approaches, while considering possible future directions for these increasingly influential institutions. For while h...

How do theatre plays, such as The Trouble with Harry contribute to advancing contemporary transgender issues? A post-performance Q&A co-presented with the Seymour Centre as part of the 2017 Mardi Gras. The playwright Lachlan Philpott is joined by the University of Sydney PhD candidate Rillark Bolton whose research explores the experiences of identity formation and community creation for trans masc...

International insights on achieving affordability with quality density. Real estate development expert Professor Richard Peiser at Harvard University and guests of the Cities Leadership Institute at the University of Sydney, spoke on how to achieve quality, affordable housing drawing on case studies and strategies from the United States. They discussed ways that we can better finance loans for key...

Efforts to reconcile theories and practices of democracy with environmental sustainability have long been central to environmental political thought. Since this first wave of scholarship on ecological democracy, there have been numerous crucial developments that pose a range of challenges. On the environmental side, we have seen the acceleration of climate change, arguments for setting planetary b...

Contemporary governments frame surveillance and secrecy as evils necessary to ensure our security. Individual privacy has been trumped by the need for covert behaviour on the part of states and corporations who collect and store our personal metadata and monitor our activities via new technologies without our knowledge or consent. We ask: how does the gathering and suppression of information subve...

In 2010 environmentalist David de Rothschild sailed from San Francisco to Sydney in 'The Plastiki' , a unique 18.3-metre catamaran made from approximately 12,500 reclaimed plastic soft drink bottles, sails of recycled PET, and masts made from aluminium irrigation piping and consist of 98 per cent post-consumer billet. In his talk for Sydney Ideas, with inventor, educator and adjudicator Sally Domi...

With the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States, it now seems climate change denial has reached into the most powerful political office in the world. In this special Sydney Ideas public lecture, world-renowned climate scientist Professor Michael Mann provides a somewhat light-hearted take on a very serious issue - the threat of human-caused climate change and what to do ab...