Sydney Ideas

Chido Govera - Growing Change: female empowerment through farming and social enterprise

02 May 2017

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Human Rights and the Rise of Islamophobia: academic responses in the age of populist anger and fear

28 Apr 2017

Contributed by Lukas

A special presentation by leading human right scholars, Emeritus Professor Gillian Triggs, President of the Australian Human Rights Commission and Pro...

CISS Global Forum: Peace and Security under Uncertainty

27 Apr 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Uncertainty, like insecurity, is as much a subjective state of mind as it is an objective condition of reality, raising new and troubling questions fo...

Trapped in/Pushed Out: border politics in the US and Australia

12 Apr 2017

Contributed by Lukas

From building walls, to stopping boats, to attempts to ‘trade’ refugees between countries, we are witnessing unprecedented efforts by national gov...

Sydney Ideas: LIGO, Gravitational Waves, and the Final Ballet of a Pair of Black Holes

11 Apr 2017

Contributed by Lukas

On September 14, 2015, scientists from the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration observed the collision and fusion of the two blac...

Justin Hastings - A Most Enterprising Country: North Korean in the Global Economy

10 Apr 2017

Contributed by Lukas

North Korea has survived the end of the Cold War, massive famine, numerous regional crises, punishing sanctions, and international stigma. Why is it s...

Forum - Hot in the City: climate and health in urban environments

06 Apr 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Sydneysiders have just sweltered through the hottest summer on record. According to the Bureau of Meteorology, the mean summer temperature in the city...

Professor Robert L Glicksman: The Trump Administration and the Future of US Environmental Law

04 Apr 2017

Contributed by Lukas

What has happened to the bipartisan consensus on the importance of protecting public health and the environment with environmental law in the United S...

Dean's Lecture Series. George Sugai : Addressing the Social and Behavioural Needs of All Students

04 Apr 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Professor George Sugai is a world leader in positive behaviour support (PBS), a behaviour management system used to understand what maintains an indiv...

Duncan Green: How Change Happens

03 Apr 2017

Contributed by Lukas

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 chan...

Preserving the Past: the Dawkins reforms and the University of Sydney

29 Mar 2017

Contributed by Lukas

The Dawkins reforms to higher education in the late 1980s roused passions at many universities across the nation, over fears for the academic enterpri...

Professor Minxin Pei: the origins and dynamics of crony capitalism in China

29 Mar 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Corruption in the post-Tiananmen era exhibits distinct characteristics not found in the 1980s, such as astronomical sums of money looted by officials,...

Making dough with Ryan Holmes, Hootsuite founder and CEO

23 Mar 2017

Contributed by Lukas

A Sydney Ideas conversation co-presented with the Sydney School of Entrepreneurship A serial entrepreneur, Ryan Holmes started his first business in ...

Professor Pavel Pevzner: Life After MOOCs: online science education needs a new revolution

23 Mar 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Pavel Pevzner from the University of California, San Diego, shares the concerns about the quality of early, primitive MOOCs, which have been...

Wadah Khanfar: Speaking Truth to Power in the Middle East and North Africa

16 Mar 2017

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Professor Stuart Kauffman: The Emergence and Evolution of Life Beyond Physics

01 Mar 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Stuart Kauffman is one of the most distinguished scholars of complexity and the author of several acclaimed books, including The Origins of ...

Forum - Reverberations: the Holocaust, human rights, and the museum

28 Feb 2017

Contributed by Lukas

A panel presents fresh perspectives on museums approaches to human rights and the Holocaust, exploring and explicating contemporary international deba...

Professor Richard Peiser: Housing Affordability

23 Feb 2017

Contributed by Lukas

International insights on achieving affordability with quality density. Real estate development expert Professor Richard Peiser at Harvard University...

Forum - Transgender: looking back, moving forward

23 Feb 2017

Contributed by Lukas

How do theatre plays, such as The Trouble with Harry contribute to advancing contemporary transgender issues? A post-performance Q&A co-presented wit...

Forum - Ecological Democracy: looking back, looking forward

20 Feb 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Efforts to reconcile theories and practices of democracy with environmental sustainability have long been central to environmental political thought. ...

Forum - Drones, Lies, and Privacy: trust and accountability in the era of mass surveillance

16 Feb 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Contemporary governments frame surveillance and secrecy as evils necessary to ensure our security. Individual privacy has been trumped by the need for...

The Plastiki Expedition

15 Feb 2017

Contributed by Lukas

In 2010 environmentalist David de Rothschild sailed from San Francisco to Sydney in 'The Plastiki' , a unique 18.3-metre catamaran made from approxima...

Professor Michael Mann - The Madhouse Effect: Climate Change Denial in the Age of Trump

08 Feb 2017

Contributed by Lukas

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 politi...

Paul Mason: Can Robots Kill Capitalism?

06 Feb 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Since the smashing of labour’s collective bargaining power under neoliberalism, how is the transition to a postcapitalist society to be enacted? A...

Professor Genevera Allen: Networks for Big Biomedical Data

31 Jan 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Cancer and neurologial diseases are among the top 5 causes of death in Australia. However, there is some good news in this battle against these as new...

Professor Elizabeth Loftus: The Fiction of Memory

03 Jan 2017

Contributed by Lukas

False memories, like true ones, have consequences for people, affecting later thoughts, intentions, and behaviours. Once planted, the false memories l...

The Arts and Learning Panel Discussion

14 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

The recent review of the national Australian Curriculum has recommended reducing arts learning in our schools. Many in the sector see the recommendati...

Philosophy in the Age of Democracy

14 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

How might philosophical research into apparently non-practical matters be of general relevance to the community? What benefits might tax-payers expect...

Dr Kieron Rooney on Sugar Sweetened Schools

14 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Sugar Sweetened Schools: a supply chain to childhood obesity? With rates of childhood and adult obesity at all time highs, it’s time to reconsider ...

Professor Glenda Sluga on Nationalism, Internationalism and the Legacies of the First World War

14 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

What lessons should we draw from the First World War? Professor Glenda Sluga discusses the war's legacies from the perspective of its end, and the tw...

Professor Lynn Meskell on The Right to World Heritage?

14 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

UNESCO’s 1972 Convention concerning the protection of the world cultural and natural heritage is the only international instrument for safeguarding ...

Creativity: Teaching The Teachers

14 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Find out how leading researchers are making a contribution to our understanding of creativity, while at the same time inspiring the next generation th...

Professor Samuel Moyn on The Political Origins of Global Justice

14 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Why was the invention of the idea of 'global justice' in the 1970s, a sharp break from the theory of the social contract? Leading human rights schol...

Andrew Campbell on Managing Young People's Mental Health Support

14 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Young people aged 12–25 are the highest at-risk group for experiencing mental health problems. They are also the group most likely to look for help ...

Professor Andrew McLachlan on Six Drug Myths you Probably Believe

14 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Have you ever bought a pain reliever that ‘targets’ specific pain? Can pain relievers really target a part of the body? Are ‘natural’ medicine...

Leading Change: Breast Cancer Research and Consumer Advocacy

14 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Sharon Kilbreath and Ms Sally Crossing have a lot of things in common, but perhaps the most striking is their refusal to accept the status q...

Food@Sydney Global Food, Nutrition Security and Climate Change

14 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

How will a changing climate affect global food production and global hunger? What do we know and what needs to be done? In March 2014, the Inter-Gove...

Food@Sydney Smallholder Agriculture and the Future of Global Food and Nutrition Security

14 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

At a global level, the people who produce most of the world’s food – smallholder farmers – are also the people who suffer the most food and nutr...

Food@Sydney Why don't we eat enough fruit and vegetables?

14 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Why Don’t we Eat Enough Fruit and Vegetables? This seminar will address the question of why Australians are eating too few fruits and vegetables. N...

Food@Sydney Tackling Food Waste

14 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Too much of the world’s food goes to waste. Wasted food represents a burden on our scarce environmental resources that we can scarcely afford, and l...

Food@Sydney Professor Julie Guthman on Lives Versus Livelihoods

14 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Lives versus Livelihoods? fumigants, farmworkers, and biopolitics in California’s strawberry industry 23 November, 2015 There’s been great debat...

Food@Sydney Comprehending the Justice In Food Justice

14 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

In recent years, we have seen an explosion in the number of community organisations that orient themselves around the production and distribution of f...

Ben Caldecott on fossil fuels and stranded assets

09 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Stranded Down Under: Are fossil fuels bankrupting our nation both financially and ecologically? Numerous industrialised nations are taking to reduce ...

Tom Szaky on Eliminating the Idea of Waste

09 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Tom Szaky dropped out of Princeton University to found TerraCycle, a company that started by selling an organic fertiliser for plants made from worm p...

Gabriela Ramos on Investing in Gender Equality for Growth

09 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Gabriela Ramos, OECD Chief of Staff and Sherpa to the G20 In the lead up to the OECD G20 Leaders Summit to be held in Brisbane in November in 2014 we...

An Arts Matters Forum - Why Feminism Matters

09 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

An Arts Matters Forum - Why Feminism Matters Compared with 30 years ago women are now better represented in politics but there is still more to be d...

Akala, Artists and Community (Part 2)

09 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

BAFTA and MOBO award-winning UK hip hop artist and writer Akala joins a panel of local hip hop artists, students and activists to talk about the evolu...

Akala, Artists and Community (Part 1)

09 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

BAFTA and MOBO award-winning UK hip hop artist and writer Akala joins a panel of local hip hop artists, students and activists to talk about the evolu...

professor_stephen_gardiner_on_climate_emergency_and_ethics

08 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

If a Climate Emergency is Possible, is Everything Permitted? Professor Stephen Gardiner, Professor of Philosophy and Ben Rabinowitz Endowed Professor...

Professor Peter J. Katzenstein on Why the Clash of Civilizations is Wrong

08 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

One of America’s leading political scientists, Peter Katzenstein, is particularly interested in the relevance of cultural categories for the analysi...

Loretta Napoleoni on the War on Terror and the Credit Crunch

08 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Loretta Napoleoni is an expert on financing of terrorism and advises governments and international organization on counter-terrorism. In her lecture f...

Professor Esther M Sternberg on Emotions, the Brain and the Body

08 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Esther M Sternberg MD and Professor Ian Hickie AM How do the emotions affect our physical and mental health? What is the science that shows...

Professor Michael Oppenheimer on Global Warming

08 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Michael Oppenheimer was the Lead Author on the Third and Fourth Assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). His scient...

Paul Gilding on Economic Growth Version 1.0 is Finished

08 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Paul Gilding argues that we have entered a period of global ecological crisis and economic stagnation that will last for decades. This will lead to an...

Maude Barlow on The Blue Covenant

08 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Maude Barlow is a Canadian activist and author who travels the world telling a simple and compelling truth: we are running out of water. And with that...

Cormac Cullinan on Earth Rights

08 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Environmental laws as presently conceived are incapable of addressing the fundamental challenges of the 21st Century such as climate change and the de...

The Dark Side of the Universe

29 Nov 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Ordinary atoms that make up the visible universe, from the smallest molecules to planets and stars, constitute only 5% of all matter and energy in the...

British Cultural Commentators on Revolutionary Mexico

29 Nov 2016

Contributed by Lukas

The Mexican Revolution (1910–20) gave birth to a radical regime which, during the 1920s and 1930s, innovated in terms of state-building, social refo...

Calcium Regulation and Advances in Treatment

24 Nov 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Rajesh Thakker FRS FMedSci from the University of Oxford delivers a lecture in the 21st Century Medicine series of public lectures.

Stephane Shepherd on Assessing the Needs of Indigenous People in Custody

24 Nov 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people comprise 27% of the prison population but represent only 3 % of the Australian population. Justice health...

Dean's Lecture Series. Comparative Pedagogies and Epistemological Diversity in Education

16 Nov 2016

Contributed by Lukas

The educational landscape today is marked by numerous texts for teachers that identify ‘what works’ in the classroom and ‘best practices’ for ...

The Chaser at USyd 2016 : Sakdiyah Ma’ruf on The Virtues of Self-Censorship

15 Nov 2016

Contributed by Lukas

For our 2016 Chaser lecture we bring you Indonesia’s first female Muslim stand-up comedian and freedom of expression advocate, Sakdiyah Ma’ruf (wi...

Accelerating Gender Equality: Do we need Male Champions of Change?

02 Nov 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Australian of the Year David Morrison AO leads a panel of researchers, students and academics in this topical debate. Some of the questions they explo...

The Three Biggest Challenges Facing the Food System, and How we Fix Them

01 Nov 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Corinna Hawkes, Director of the Centre for Food Policy, City University London The keynote lecture in the Food Governance Conference hosted...

Future States: Visions for the health of our people, communities and planet

28 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

A forum held as part of the University of Sydney Innovation Week 2016. How can today’s research inform tomorrow’s public policy, drive technologi...

Game of Thrones! History, Medievalism and How it Might End

26 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Carolyne Larrington, Professor of Medieval European Literature at the University of Oxford, talks about watching and writing about HBO’s Game of Thr...

Security and Privacy in a Hyper-connected World

20 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

We've created a world where information technology permeates our economies, social interactions, and intimate selves. The combination of mobile, cloud...

Hong Kong and Mainland China: contested realities, future visions

19 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

A public forum with Anson Chan and Martin Lee In 1997 the People’s Republic of China assumed sovereignty over Hong Kong, subject to The 1984 Sino-B...

Professor Herbert Huppert: How to get it right the first time

17 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

How can you obtain the best decision from a group of so-called ‘experts’ about future events such as a natural disaster or a stock market crash? ...

Childhood Infectious Diseases

12 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Which infectious diseases pose the greatest danger to a child during pregnancy, in infancy and adolescence? Most of us are aware of the dangers of wh...

Dr Benjamin Veness on Mindfulness

10 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Is mindfulness all about the individual practice? What is the role of community when it come to the issues of well-being? How could institutions such ...

Can Mindfulness Save the World?

10 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

A panel of the University of Sydney experts and practitioners discuss the possible benefits and risks of mindfulness, and how it has been used in educ...

Primo Levi Reads Dante: The role of literature in our world

10 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Is there a degree of suffering and degradation beyond which a man or a woman ceases to be a human being? A point beyond which our spirit dies and only...

The Rise of the Populists

10 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

What is happening in the US election campaign and where does the support for this ‘populist’ political movement come from? On the day after the s...

Don Watson: American Politics in the Time of Trump

07 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Don Watson and fellow Quarterly Essayist James Brown discuss the strangest election campaign the US has ever seen.

Dying Re-imagined: designing a better way to die

06 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Approaching death is an opportunity for individuals and those who care for them to reduce unnecessary suffering and achieve something more human and h...

Why Violent Revolutions Lead to the Most Durable Dictatorships

05 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

The twentieth century saw the emergence of a number of authoritarian regimes – China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, the USSR – that have both challenge...

Gut Microbiome: a new target for managing human metabolic health

04 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Humans are superorganisms with two genomes that dictate phenotype, the genetically inherited human genome (25,000 genes) and the environmentally acqui...

Fighting Corruption in Indonesia’s Natural Resource Sector

30 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Indonesia has struggled with corruption in its natural resource sector, with unchecked environmental destruction the result . Laode M Syarif, the new...

Punishment as Help and Blaming Emotions

26 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Legal academic Professor Annalise Acorn argues that criminal punishment, devoid of all emotions of blame, is inhuman in relation to the offender and c...

Pluto: the pugnacious planet

23 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Lecture by Professor Fran Bagenal, Co-investigator and Leader of the Plasma Teams for NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and Juno mission to Jupit...

Understanding China Today and Tomorrow

21 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

What happens in China today – from economic to political and cultural events – already has an impact on the rest of the world. As its global influ...

Professor Richard Salomon: Reflections on the study of the oldest Buddhist manuscripts

20 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Richard Salomon from Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington presents an overview of his experiences in...

Dr Barbara De Poli: Doctrinal and Political Roots of the Islamic State

12 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Following its military successes in Iraq and Syria, and especially after the terrorist attacks in Paris and Belgium, the Islamic State (IS), also know...

Insights 2016: Professor Catherine Driscoll on Rural Retirement Culture

08 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Retiring from the city to the country is a popular Australia dream. But what are these retirees’ lives like, and what should we know to help improve...

Festival of Democracy | Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy: Old Visions, New Realities

07 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

For several decades after the Second World War, capitalism regulated by democratic politics proved successful. Rapid growth and equitable distribution...

Five ways your heart can kill you that you did not know

07 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Each year around 55,000 Australians suffer a heart attack, and almost 9,000 will die as a result. We know that obesity, high blood pressure, high cho...

Festival of Democracy | Populism, Race and Democracy

06 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Western democracies have seen a resurgence in far-right populist movements. Alongside disaffection with mainstream political parties, there has been a...

Australian Book Review: Professor Alan Atkinson on 'The Australian National Conscience '

05 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

As a modern idea, national conscience dates back to the anti-slavery campaign of the late eighteenth century. Its origins were Christian, yet they aro...

Festival of Democracy | We Need to Talk about Antarctica

01 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

For more than half a century, the fragile and frozen continent of Antarctica has been protected by ‘post-sovereign’ governing arrangements that ar...

Schattenkinder: Children born of war in the 20th and 21st centuries

01 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Sabine Lee, the University of Birmingham. Starting from a drawing ‘Schattenkinder ‘ by the Dutch painter Knut Weise, whose half-sister ...

The Australian Mosque: locality, gender, and spirituality

31 Aug 2016

Contributed by Lukas

This panel considers the diverse cultural expressions of mosque design, past and present, in areas where Muslim populations are both minorities and ma...

The Holocaust: the known, the unknown, the disputed and the re-examined

30 Aug 2016

Contributed by Lukas

The Holocaust is one of the most researched events of the twentieth century. Yet it continues to spark popular interest and scholarly controversy. In ...

Dr Estelle Lazer on 'Stolen Lives: Returning Identities to Pompeian Victims of the AD 79 Eruption '

25 Aug 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Since they were first revealed in 1863, the casts from Pompeii which preserved the forms of the victims in their moment of death have generated huge i...

East West Street: a personal history of the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity

24 Aug 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Drawing from his new book - part historical detective story, part family history, part legal thriller - Professor Philippe Sands QC, explains the conn...

Professor Mark Dadds - On the Importance of Time-out in the Era of Empathy and Attachment

18 Aug 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Mark Dadds from the Sydney Child Behaviour Research Clinic at the University of Sydney covers some of the current scientific evidence behind...

Politics at the End of the World: a public forum on the future of Antarctica

17 Aug 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Politics at the End of the World: A Public Forum on the Future of Antarctica A panel of experts and those passionate about preserving Antarctica give...

Diabetes, Heart Disease, Obesity: a looming healthcare crisis?

16 Aug 2016

Contributed by Lukas

The most common causes of death in Australia are chronic non-communicable diseases related to lifestyle. Despite great improvements in treatments and ...

Sydney Science Festival: Grandmothers and Human Evolution

15 Aug 2016

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Linda Tirado: The Poverty of Elections

11 Aug 2016

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...