UNSW Centre for Ideas

Ivan Coyote doesn’t fit neatly into one of two gender boxes, they never have. From an early age in the Canadian Yukon, they can remember discovering a coded but very possible queer future hidden in the music coming out of the AM radio in the kitchen, lurking in their parent’s record collection, and leaking out of the lyrics in their elementary school musical. In conversation with Yves...

When Nila Ibrahimi posted a video of herself online, singing proudly in protest of the ban on girls over 12 singing in public, she hoped the music would inspire young girls to continue their education. It was 2021 and the Taliban’s return to Afghanistan had come down swiftly on women's freedom. The video went viral and the ban was reversed, sending a powerful message across social media &nda...

Women’s bodies are a battleground for beauty capitalism with a constant pressure to reach unachievable beauty standards.  Writer, presenter and entertainer Lucinda Price (aka Froomes) spent 30 years striving to fulfil those standards, which she unpacks in her debut memoir,  All I Ever Wanted Was To Be Hot: Self image, beauty ideals and desirability . Nutritionist and lecturer Rebec...

In 1998, at the beginning of his esteemed career as an international human rights lawyer, Philippe Sands was invited to advise Augusto Pinochet as the Chilean dictator faced arrest in London.  Instead, Philippe chose to act as a barrister for Human Rights Watch, where he uncovered the well-hidden connection between Pinochet and former SS commander Walther Rauff. In his latest book, part memoi...

The STEMMinist Book Club was founded in 2018 and is dedicated to reading and discussing books related to feminism and STEMM (science, technology, engineering, medicine and maths).  The book club has over 5,000 members from 25 countries. As well as discussing great books, the book club provides a virtual discussion forum and support network for women and non-binary people working in these sect...

Programs like ChatGPT have become ubiquitous with AI, promising to kick start the next industrial evolution. But the scale of resources needed to support AI are staggering, with the cost largely being levied on the marginalised. From energy demands eclipsing whole cities, to labour exploitation in the global south, this behaviour bodes poorly for an equitable future. In  Empire of AI , award-...

The Parthenon Marbles. The Benin Bronzes. Grandma's jewellery that she smuggled in her clothes, never to return. What if taking an object is the best way to keep a community's culture alive? Legal experts Sherine Al Shallah and Lucas Lixinski engage with old and new arguments about cultural objects. Bringing together perspectives from decolonisation and refugee practices, Sherine and Lucas dare us...

The Ministry of Time  landed on multiple bestseller lists thanks to its highly original, genre-defying story, which combines elements of time travel, romance and spy thriller.  Described by Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton as “outrageously brilliant”, Kaliane Bradley’s debut challenges the boundaries of literary and genre fiction as the past meets the future when a di...

Since early 2023, MDMA has been authorised for use in Australia to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.   Still, it remains a controversial treatment publicly and among experts. Adam Bayes from the Black Dog Institute and researcher Rebecca Huntley, whose book  Sassafras: A memoir of love, loss and MDMA  Therapy recounts her experience of using MDMA to treat trauma, discuss th...

Black Saturday razed towns, Canada’s Fort McMurray wildfire forced 88,000 people to flee, the LA fires obliterated over 12,000 buildings and Australia’s Black Summer fires scorched 24 million hectares – an area the size of the United Kingdom. Bushfires are no longer seasonal, they’re unrelenting; reshaping landscapes and lives in our rapidly warming world.  In Fire Wea...

As state and federal governments move to criminalise forms of hate speech, it's time to look at what evidence shows about the effect that laws can have on hate speech and its victims, with legal expert Luke McNamara.  This event was presented by the  S ydney Writers' Festival  and supported by UNSW Sydney.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Not two years after making Australian literary history with My Brilliant Career , Miles Franklin fell into obscurity – and when publishers rejected her subsequent novels, she left Australia for Chicago.  Uncover the mysteries of the legend’s life with Kerrie Davies, whose Miles Franklin Undercover focuses on those lost years. It’s a real-life sequel to the classic Australian...

As one of the world’s leading researchers in artificial intelligence, Toby Walsh has been awarded the Humbolt Research Award and elected as a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of AI. In  The Shortest History of AI , Toby outlines the six key ideas for understanding artificial intelligence today.  Hear Toby trace the origins of artificial intelligence in science and cult...

In 2018 Donna Strickland became the first woman in over 50 years to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, and only the third woman in history. Her award-winning work however began decades earlier. While undertaking her PhD Donna developed chirped pulse amplification – a unique way to amplify ultrashort laser pulses. This breakthrough paved not only the way for safer and more precise laser eye surg...

Adam Bayes is leader in the field of mental health, working as a clinical academic psychologist at UNSW Sydney and a senior research fellow at the Black Dog Institute specialising in mood disorders including depressive and bipolar disorders.   In this podcast Adam shares his cutting-edge research and clinical experience such as using ketamine to treat severe and treatment-resistant depre...

Soaring and crashing stock prices, resigning CEOs and out of control labour practices: what is going on with Australian businesses? Award-winning labour relations lawyer and author of Working for the Brand: how corporations are destroying free speech, Josh Bornstein and award-winning senior business writer and investigative journalist Adele Ferguson join host Richard Holden to consider the state o...

Anne Summers’s  Damned Whores and God’s Polic e was first published 50 years ago – a time when sexual harassment, domestic violence and date rape were unnamed and often ignored experiences for women in Australia. It would be another nine years before the introduction of the  Sex Discrimination Act 1984 . Hear Anne as the bestselling and multi-award-winning writer and jo...

Economics Professor at UNSW Sydney Richard Holden (Money in the Twenty First Century)  and Parliamentarian Andrew Leigh  (The Shortest History of Economics) unpack economics as a global force that impacts wars, technological innovation and social change.  In our contemporary world, what are the causes and consequences of economic inequality? And can economics be used as a tool for j...

Miles Franklin is a literary legend now, but her story, and those of women like her, were nearly lost to the passage of time.  Kerrie Davies unwinds the mysteries of Miles Franklin’s lost years in  Miles Franklin Undercover: The little-known years  when she created her own brilliant career, constructing a real-life sequel to  My Brilliant Career  using never-before-p...

The climate crisis is vast, complex and often feels both imminent and frustratingly out of our control. With global systems slow to change and the scale of the challenge immense, it’s easy to wonder if individual action could ever be enough. On World Environment Day,  Climate Warriors  brought together four transformative voices; renewable energy expert and former Biden administrat...

Artificial intelligence’s collision with human creativity is one of the most important stories of our time.  With the accelerating impact of AI, so much of what we understand about being human is being re-written.   Acclaimed writer Jeanette Winterson ( 12 Bytes: How artificial intelligence will change the way we live and love ) sees AI changing our lives in unprecedented ways...

Acclaimed Indonesian author Norman Erikson Pasaribu and award-winning Australian writer Dylin Hardcastle explore the joy, tenderness and triumphs of queer storytelling.   Norman, best known for Happy Stories, Mostly , and their latest book My Dream Job , crafts tender yet sharp narratives about identity, faith and belonging, challenging the expectations of queer life in Indonesia. While...

Beneath the ocean’s surface, fibre-optic cables pulse with the entirety of our human existence – memes and messages, stock trades and state secrets. But when these fragile threads break, so too can the connections that bind us.  Hear award-winning author Colum McCann join The Daily Aus’  Sam Koslowski to explore truth, misinformation and human connection in a world driv...

Richard Holden | Alan Kohler Australia, a land of sweeping plains, has one of the lowest population densities on the planet. So, how did we end up with a housing shortage?  In conversation with economist and author Richard Holden, veteran finance journalist Alan Kohler’s new  Quarterly Essay ,  The Great Divide: Australia’s Housing Crisis and How to Fix It , investigates where things went wrong at...

Machines lead the charge on today’s battlefields, but what does this mean for the people caught in the crossfire?  Learn from journalist Antony Loewenstein, whose Walkley Award-winning investigation,  The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World , uncovered the widespread commercialisation and global deployment of Israeli weaponry tested in Palestinian...