Past Events

A workshop on the concepts and theories of power available to art thinkers today. We cannot understand art without also understanding the systems of power that underpin it. Yet what languages are available to describe these systems?

We invite you to join the Institute for Culture and Society, alongside prominent scholars, practitioners, and artists, for a collective three-day event (25–27 October 2023) to address the unprecedented yet interlinked challenges of our times.

The Knowledge/Culture series is a sequence of international conferences hosted by the Institute for Culture and Society in collaboration with our partners. Each conference focuses on a pressing issue or salient theme in the world – for example, social change, economy, globalisation. The dual motifs of knowledge and culture frame each conference.

How is contagion designed? How do labour, migration, habits and data configure contagion? Across a program of four weeks of discussion and debate, this event explored the current conjuncture through these vectors to address issues of rising unemployment, restricted movement, increasing governance of populations through data systems and the compulsory redesign of habits.

ICS is excited to sponsor the upcoming Western Sydney Summit with Pride in Diversity, a key event focused on advancing LGBTQ+ workplace inclusion across Greater Western Sydney. Pride in Diversity is the national peak body focused on LGBTQ+ workplace inclusion, engaging with over 500 organisations who employ over 3.5 million employees around Australia.

Palestinian statehood seemed ever more out of reach in the wake of 1967’s Six Day War, the writer Ghassan Kanafani insisted that ‘the immediate demand – along with the creation of the state of Palestine – is the creation of a people who embody the cause of Palestine.’ Kanafani saw writing as a crucial means of meeting the second demand, with its capacity to shape Palestinian identity and to give significant form to Palestinians’ experiences of dispossession and resistance. In this seminar, Sara Haddad and Hasib Hourani will discuss writing Palestine in 2025

From its colonial foundations to its increasingly neoliberal frameworks, academia has given little space for Pacific scholarship to thrive internationally. Building an academic career for Pacific scholars is therefore fraught with inequities, cultural (un)safety and structural exclusion. Despite this, Pacific scholars continue to carve out pathways through the academy, with many journeys centred on acts of service and knowledge production that serve their communities.