Archive: Arena Quarterly #4

A Five-kilometre Economy

Arena Quarterly no. 4

Phil Cleary, Chris McConville

Dec 2020

In Australia, communities had searched for answers to the perceived impact of globalisation long before the advent of COVID-19.

Citizens, Arise!

Arena Quarterly no. 4

Bill Garner

Dec 2020

The first and last defence of democracy is in the street where we live.

Re-Worlding—with a Pluriversal New Deal

Arena Quarterly no. 4

Ariel Salleh

Dec 2020

The Eurocentric fantasy of mastering nature has always been a problematic ontology.

The China Divide: Industry, technology and military relations are all tied up in strategies now unfolding

Arena Quarterly no. 4

Clinton Fernandes

Dec 2020

The United States is determined to stop China narrowing the gap in technological prowess. The new ‘digital iron curtain’ dividing the world into US and Chinese technological zones runs through Australia…

Housing for Thriving in a Post-COVID World

Arena Quarterly no. 4

Louise Crabtree, Joanne McNeill, Sidsel Grimstad, Neil Perry, Emma Power, Wendy Stone

Dec 2020

Australia’s housing system is dominated by an owning–renting tenure duopoly, but there are many other ways to configure housing access…

Arena no. 4 is available now!

Arena Quarterly no. 4

Dec 2020

In our end-of-year issue, writers consider a world after COVID-19. Dare we look to a world remade—a world beyond a ‘new normal’? De-commodified housing models and grassroots ideas for communities and local councils are grounds for hope. Australia’s relationship with China, and the injustices wrought at Juukan Gorge, call for caution. A Pluriversal New Deal […]

Dream Pastoral Inversions: Re-approaching pastoral fraughtness through questions of Australian rurality

Arena Quarterly no. 4

John Kinsella

Dec 2020

In Australia, rural causation of climate damage, land toxicity, extinction through clearing (flora and fauna) and mass fire events that extinguish ancient forests are counteracted or even entirely denied because of the ‘necessity’ of food production and even a colonial-generational relationship to landholdings.

Antennas Aflame: Cybernetics, Conspiracies and 5G

Arena Quarterly no. 4

Timothy Erik Ström

Dec 2020

Much of mainstream liberal commentary on the 5G conspiracy consists of snide dismissals that blame credulous individuals for inaccurate beliefs. Yet, given how widespread the 5G conspiracies have become, it is not enough to dismiss them...

Juukan Gorge Destruction: Extractivism and the Australian Settler-colonial Imagination

Arena Quarterly no. 4

Dan Tout

Dec 2020

...the settler-colonial logic of elimination—of displacement for the purpose of replacement—has come to align in ever more destructive ways with the economic logic of neoliberal capitalism…

Reimagining Regional Relationships

Arena Quarterly no. 4

Lauren Rickards, Melinda Hinkson

Dec 2020

…wheat exists in the world not only as a plant, a seed or even a material such as flour, but as ‘futures’ and other fictions traded on the Chicago Stock Exchange…

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.

Standing up Straighter against COVID-19?

Arena Quarterly no. 4

Pamela Maddock, Warwick Anderson

Dec 2020

The Morrison government plans to amend the Defence Act to make it easier to deploy the ADF domestically at times of national emergency.