Articles by: Alison Caddick

Author Biography:

Alison Caddick is Editor of Arena (third series), was co-editor of Arena Magazine and is an Arena Publications Editor. With a background in the history and philosophy of science, politics and social studies, she writes on techno-science, the body and prospects for social and cultural change.

Our Given Body: Roe v Wade

Arena Quarterly no.11

Alison Caddick

Sep 2022

In the American context, abortion has only increasingly become a ‘master category’, pointing to an ultimate value around ‘life’ but also condensing the meanings and anxieties that are fuelling the radical Right’s larger political struggle—offering ordinary folks a visceral connection to overcoming something ‘rotten’ in the established liberal system.

Quarterly Editorial #10: The Election and the Glue that Binds

Arena Quarterly no.10

Alison Caddick

Jun 2022

But nothing in the Labor Party vision speaks to the meaning of the combined crises that reach across personal life, economy, culture and environment, not to mention international borders. Each is a silo for policy.

Editorial, Arena no. 8: Battening Down the Hatches

Arena Quarterly no. 8

Alison Caddick

Dec 2021

Despite all our problems—all our terrible forebodings—it seems we remain wedded, yet, to a form of life that is, simply, unsustainable, and to a form of human organisation that is ethically bankrupt.

The Palestinian Question: Celebrating the Liberal Media?

Arena Online

Alison Caddick

14 Oct 2021

A certain anti-intellectualism, perhaps especially rife in the Australian context, is arguably one of the major problems of mainstream respectable media.

Editorial, Arena no. 7: The Biopolitics of COVID

Arena Quarterly no. 7

Alison Caddick

Sep 2021

The pandemic very likely is the result of development pressing into once wild places and disturbing achieved balances between nature and human settlement, development that has been fuelling worldwide consumption and a disconnection from nature at an ever-accelerating pace.

Editorial, Arena no. 5: Political Mutations

Arena Quarterly no. 5

Alison Caddick

Mar 2021

Liberalism and neoliberalism, and thus unthinking economic and cultural globalisation, see only a larger, albeit more diverse, pond over which liberal governance can expand.

Editorial, Arena no. 4: Post-Trump Fantasies

Arena Quarterly no. 4

Alison Caddick

Dec 2020

While an America oriented to international climate agreements will make an important contribution, ‘Me? A socialist?’ Biden is not very likely to understand or seek to basically reform the hyper-destructive forces of contemporary capitalism.

Kettling for COVID: Police and protest in Melbourne

Arena Online

Alison Caddick, Grazyna Zajdow

12 Nov 2020

…police forces everywhere have been militarising their equipment, procedures and general outlook. They have been taking on the strategies of special operations forces, influenced by discourses of terrorism, learning new and terrifying tactics…

American Dream

Arena Quarterly no. 2

Alison Caddick

Jul 2020

Not just precarity but destitution threatens under conditions of COVID, and especially in the United States it threatens people of colour.
"

Informit: American dream

Arena Quarterly no. 2

Alison Caddick

Jul 2020

PDF available from Informit

Why don’t American blacks “know they’ve got it good”?

Arena Online

Alison Caddick

9 Jun 2020

Kelly and Sheridan are inclined to have it that the reason for the US protests is in part anguish (over disadvantage) but largely the result of a fashion in political identification: identity politics and the fracturing of the polity/society into incommensurate groupings that refuse to identify with the whole.

Gathering In: When home calls, what are the lessons for social thinking?

Arena Online

Alison Caddick

14 Apr 2020

The Covid-19 crisis has forced a critical question upon us that perhaps, collectively, we have taken for granted: how does our bodily presence, now estranged from almost every other body, shape our social relationships?