Sydney Ideas

The Grandmother Hypothesis aims to explain why increased longevity evolved in humans, while female fertility still ends at the same age it does in our closest evolutionary cousins, the great apes. Beginning with ethnographic surprises that drew us to pay attention to grandmothering in the first place, Kristen Hawkes will show how, in addition to human life history, grandmothering can help explain...

US author and activist, Linda Tirado explains the rise of Trump and suggests what can and should be done about it. Across the Western world, we’re seeing a resurgence in plain populism. The blame for this is laid at the feet of the poor. Common wisdom holds that Trump voters are usually rural, white, and lower working class. But is this objective reality, or merely the narrative we’re used to and...

A Storyology 2016 event co-presented with the Walkley Foundation Investigative and public-service journalism shine a light on the world’s dark corners. In today’s globally connected world, leaked documents and data can be shared and analysed by reporters and citizen journalists anywhere. Major investigations into finance and corruption like the Panama Papers highlight the growing chasm between the...

Part of the 2016 Festival of Urbanism. A conversation on the divergence of Sydney and Melbourne’s cultural policy between the University of Melbourne’s Dr Kate Shaw and the University of Sydney’s Dr Oliver Watts. SPEAKERS: Dr Kate Shaw is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow in Urban Geography and Planning at the University of Melbourne. Her current research focuses on urban renewal...

Under capitalism, how does the state organise space in our everyday lives through the streets we walk, the monuments we visit, and the places where we meet? A talk by Univeristy of Sydney Professor Adam Morton, Department of Political Economy.

The vocation of public service remains a cornerstone of Australian democracy. Yet its traditional virtues are under pressure. Too often exciting innovations have remained at the periphery, failing to deliver on their promise. New approaches to the designing, commissioning and funding of government services have yet to transform the centre of public administration. Bureaucratic structures, regulato...

The 2016 Australian Book Review Laureate’s Fellow Michael Aiken in conversation with David Malouf, the ABR Laureate. The forum includes Michael Aiken reading from his verse Fellowship project, ‘Satan Repentant’, a violent epic leaping from the cosmological to the infinitesimal, and a story of contrition. Sydney Ideas event infomation http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2016/ABR_laureate_201...

At 35 years of age Dr Marjorie Aunos had made a name for herself nationally and internationally as a leading practitioner-researcher and advocate for parents with intellectual disabilities. In her own words, “life was good”; she was doing what she loved especially her new role as a mother to her 18 month old son. On the 5th of January 2012, on her way to work, Marjorie’s life took a sharp turn. He...

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...

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 Virgi...

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 cont...

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...

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 m...

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 lectur...

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 spea...

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, Gri...

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 manifes...

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 ri...

Why was Zika virus declared an international public health emergency by the World Health Organization? What are the implications for people living in Australia? What other infectious diseases pose a risk here, and how would we respond if there was an outbreak? Listen to a wide ranging discussion about the facts behind Zika and other mosquito-borne illnesses, the role of the media and government in...

Data is the currency of the digital age and has transformed all areas of physical life and social sciences. In all disciplines there has been an unparalleled growth in the quantity and variety of data made available by the pervasive nature of the internet and enabled by almost free digital storage. Moving beyond the expectations of ‘big data’ the focus is now on development of sophisticated and nu...

This talk was a key note address for the 2016 Photography. Ontology symposium that took place at the University of Sydney in June 2016. Professor Smith considers Frederick Douglass’s propositions about the social power of photography. Looking back at Douglass’s lecture “Pictures and Progress” through the lens of contemporary artist Rashid Johnson’s homage to the nineteenth-century orator, the talk...

Scientists have long thought that the adult brain is unchangeable, but new evidence is emerging to challenge this belief by revealing that the brain is capable of lifelong change and adaptation. This adaptability - or neuroplasticity as it is commonly known - shows the mature brain can reorganise or ‘rewire’ itself in response to experience, disease or injury. University of Sydney researchers are...

Constructed, neglected, rebuilt and expanded over the course of nearly a century, the Qing imperial park of Bishu shanzhuang played a central, but constantly changing, role in the history of the Manchu dynasty for nearly two centuries. Scholars of the site have focused on its final form at the end of the 18th century, taking a single vision of its design and use as descriptive of its entire histor...

Panel discussion with audience Q&A on the topic of Wiser Healthcare We all want to be able to get good healthcare when we need it. But what would it mean to provide and consume healthcare wisely? This panel discussion with Dr Iona Heath considers a radical idea: that sometimes wiser healthcare means less healthcare. Or at least, less healthcare for people who don’t need it, so we can give more hea...

Music’s power to form, sustain and present social identities is especially relevant in today’s changing and increasingly networked world. A panel of Indigenous researchers and performers from Australia and overseas discuss: how songs can support language revitalization; how music can help us to understand our history and our communities; and how Indigenous youth today are using Rap music to share...