Archive: Arena Journal Editorial

Editorial – issue 51/52: In Humanity’s Wake

This special issue of Arena Journal addresses the accelerating structural displacement of human participation in contemporary society.

Whither Religion in a World of Compounding Crises?

Introduction to Arena Journal no. 49/50, June 2018. By Stephen Ames, Ian Barns, John Hinkson, Paul James and Gordon Preece

Editorial – Issue 47/48. ‘Confronting a New Leviathan’, by Dan Tout

This issue of Arena Journal, as many before it have been, is concerned with both specific and more general processes of transformation and crisis. While, considered together, the contents of this issue paint a bleak picture about the contemporary situation and future prospects, they also point towards more hopeful, if provisional and conditional futures.

Introduction – Issue 45/46 ‘Cold War to Hot Planet: Fifty Years of Arena’

This issue of Arena Journal emerges from a day-long symposium held at the University of Melbourne in 2013 marking fifty years of publications by the Arena group. The event was composed of diverse presentations, some from among the original editors of the first series of Arena, some by contributors to that first series and others by editors and contributors from more recent times. The day was marked by an unusual vitality as well as recognition…

Introduction – Issue 43/44 ‘Making Modernity: From the Mashriq to the Maghreb’

The recent wave of revolutions across the Arab world has brought to the surface the contradictions in popular understandings of the Middle East and North Africa. The place of the region in the global history of modernity has been unsettled yet again...

Editorial – Issue 41/42 ‘People, Planet and the Anthropocene: Spectators of Our Own Demise?’, by Paul James

Humans now have the capacity to produce synthetic life-forms (since 2010) and to destroy life on this planet as we know it (since 1952). It is only by recognizing this point — that we are now reconstituting the very basis of nature — that adequate acknowledgement of the Anthropocene starts to hit home.

Editorial – Issue 39/40

Geoff Sharp introduces the Issue "The general thrust of the contributions to this issue of Arena Journal is transformation. These articles suggest that the organisation and conduct of social life is now changing in ways that unsettle the basic assumptions that have underpinned the whole epoch of modernity..."

Why Settler Colonialism?

John Hinkson's introduction to Issue 37/38 (2012): Stolen Lands, Broken Cultures: The Settler-Colonial Present

After the Intervention

2008: Issue 29/30. John Hinkson on the dangers of promoting neo-liberalism as the basis of Aboriginal culture.