Rory Medcalf: Grand Stakes: Australia's future between China and India

What is it about those rare and fleeting moments of musical beauty that fully captivate a listener’s attention? Does a composer calculate such junctures or are they happy accidents? How could a composer shape and guide the listener’s experience to create these events? Does detailed analysis of the notes tell us all we need to know to explain them? From Beethoven’s Sonata in E Major, Opus 109 to Leonard Cohen’s song, Hallelujah, as in many other works before and since, there are precise moments where a listener may experience a superb glimpse of ‘musical truth’. Understanding how and why they happen calls for an awareness of the psychoacoustic and social contexts for the musical experience and has unavoidable aesthetic implications for the way a composer thinks about music.

The globalization of social (economic, cultural, environmental) relations has generated a new need for people who have little or nothing in common with others to create community with each other without giving up their differences. The traditional understanding of community was that people want to be together because they feel that they share something, if only the same portion of the world. So what does it mean that people now want or need to be in communities without having anything in common, no shared territories or identities or even values? How can a bond between people be established when there is nothing that unites them? How can radical difference make for communal forms of life? Recent continental philosophy has struggled with these kinds of paradoxes. In this lecture I shall discuss one contribution to these questions found in the work of the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito. This work brings to light two dimensions of community that have so far not been taken into proper account: First, the idea that community reflects an economical relation where an infinite debt ties the members to each other through continuous gift-giving. Second, the idea that community is inscribed in the horizon of life and reaches beyond the human to all forms of life. In contrast to the communist, communitarian and communicative understandings of community, this presentation argues for what could be called a biopolitical conception of community.

In a world maimed by war, climate change, economic dysfunction and political failures, the flows of migration are as intense as they have ever been. Child migrants are central actors in this movement of people across borders and continents. As those in receiving countries such as Australia know well, however, the child migrant is not always kindly greeted on arrival.

As recently as November 2012, the current Minister for Immigration commented that 'It doesn't matter whether you're a child, it doesn't matter whether you're an unaccompanied minor, it doesn't matter whether you have a health condition, if you're fit enough to get on a boat, you're fit enough to end up in offshore processing'. Is this the only way to think about journeys, arrivals and settlement?

The lecture looks at how the child migrant has figured in world cinema since 1939, and argues that the child retains a special power in describing, performing and critiquing the great movements and translations that make the world global.

There is a long-standing prejudice that early romantic philosophy developed in the footsteps of Fichtean foundationalism, and that it was uncritical of the totalitarian seizure of power of subjectivity over Being or Difference allegedly characteristic of J.G. Fichte’s thought. Drawing on the recently developed research method of ‘Constellation Research’, this lecture shows that in fact Early Romanticism was skeptical about foundationalist pretensions, respectful of subjectivity without promoting it into a ‘highest point of philosophy’, ironical with regard to ultimate knowledge claims, ontologically realistic, and in general more modern than so far thought.

Why should incorporated bodies count as legal persons? And what rights and responsibilities should they have? Should they enjoy rights that may trump the rights of individuals? Should they be able to compete with individuals for political influence? Should they be held responsible for the wrongdoing of their members or agents? And do such questions call for similar answers with corporate persons as different as companies, unions, churches, parties and states? The philosophy of incorporation, shaped by Roman jurists, a Papal bull and the South Sea Bubble, may help to shed some light on these issues.

What is sex education? Who should teach it? What are the most effective strategies? When and where should it be taught? These are just some of the questions to be examined in this lecture. After three decades research and international experience, much has been learned about how to best to teach about sex, sexuality and relationships. Despite this, there remains controversy and few countries have implemented the kinds of programs that are known to be effective. The conflict between science and strongly held beliefs makes reasoned and rational discussion difficult. So, what should we do next?

Big is back across a wide range of historical fields. More historians are stretching space, to create international, transnational and global histories. Others are expanding time, to pursue Big History, Deep History and the history of the Anthropocene. What explains this broadening of horizons? And what does it mean for the future of history? This lecture will make a case for history as a discipline of social and political transformation amid crises of global governance, rising inequality and anthropogenic climate change.

When animals become audible in the city, it is often annoying, sometimes unnerving, but also now and again a kind of annunciation.  Animals are an anomaly in the urban soundscape, which seems to be populated and made intelligible to itself exclusively by sounds of human origin. And yet cities have never become free of animals, which are all the time finding ways of recolonising urban space, and insinuating themselves into the syntax of its sounds. I will use this talk to listen out for and amplify the animal signatures in different urban soundscapes. Perhaps the sonic infiltrations of animals are not so much a haunting as a harbinger of a new, more convivial world-city.

Mahatma Gandhi’s legacy of nonviolent resistance, social justice, and respect for the environment is only increasing in its relevance given our current global challenges. His granddaughter Ela Gandhi has continued this legacy. Her lecture will discuss the importance of strategic interventions in education to promote positive action on nonviolence at various levels of academia by building networks of educators with a similar level of vision and commitment.

Aside from its musical genius, Wagner’s Ring cycle remains one of the most staggering achievements of the 19th-century stage, and has continued to stimulate innovative dramaturgy amidst the present Wagner revival. This lecture will focus on two interrelated topics: the relationship between the figure of Wotan and political fields of force; and the role of Siegfried as a way into Wagnerian theatrical psychology—the composer/dramatist’s specific ‘system’ of thinking psychological motivation.