Archive: Arena Quarterly

Diderot’s Shout: On AI, signs and apocalypse

The story is a useful reminder in our era, when there is entirely justified widespread disquiet about the effects of the digital world on education, sociality, subjectivity and more.

The Greens, the Left and the World

The Greens must get out of the trap of repressive cultural progressivism. In the meantime, a green community independent movement is needed.

Dwelling On This Place

Housing policy based on simple supply and demand cannot recognise changing ideas of dwelling. A deeper approach is needed.

Living with the Violence of the Past

I am in a tangle of emotions, I am contemplating my own complicity.

Pre-Fascist Space-Time, Forever on the Move

America is presently Making Itself Great Again. Nicolás Maduro is rotting in a Brooklyn prison cell. The Ayatollah is dead... the world has found itself in a very Pynchonian moment.

On Hilarity

Our vexed times could do with a bit more of hilarity, as noble and salubrious a friend as humankind has ever known, and a bit of a hoyden into the bargain.

Deepening Symbolic Recognition

The book negotiates a complex task in addressing two audiences at once: non-Aboriginal Australians seeking to understand urban Aboriginal experience in the context of Treaty, and a younger generation of Aboriginal Melburnians who, as Andrews puts it, ‘are searching’ for their community’s history, and ‘are hungry for it’.

Pauline Conversions? Australian Politics after Farrer

The spectacle of One Nation’s sudden success seems to have stunned many into an almost ritualistic recitative of cod-sociological explanations for right-wing movements.

The Usefulness of Cinema in Times of War

Can film for our present circumstances recreate the conditions of perception so that the ordinary is made strange?

Tertiary Rackets: Deakin.bot v Einstein.ai—the sad finale of this model of higher education?

Has the thru-put model has combined with AI to deliver the final blow to the Australian university? And how did we get here?

On Living in an Accelerating World

Rosa is an intriguing writer who makes you think. He is a critical theorist in the best sense of that tradition.

The Cost of Hesitation

Abortion bans are reshaping medicine, with fatal consequences for women