Re-worlding: A Post-Pandemic Future

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 and a reimagined, environmentally informed understanding of the land and farming offer expansive ideas for a way forward.

Editorial: Post-Trump Fantasies

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.

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Arena Quarterly issue no. 4, 2020

Contents

TitleAuthorPagePg.
Editorial
Post-Trump Fantasies
Alison Caddick2
Features
Standing up Straighter Against COVID-19?
The militarisation of public life in Australia
Pamela Maddock, Warwick Anderson5
Reimagining Regional Relationships
City and country, food and farming in volatile times
Lauren Rickards and Melinda Hinkson9
A Five-kilometre Economy
Revivifying neighbourhoods, defying globalisation
Phil Cleary and Chris McConville17
Citizens, Arise!
The local is core to meaningful democracy
Bill Garner23
A Pluriversal New Deal
Ecological sustainability, and the infinite beauty of cultural difference
Ariel Salleh28
Housing for Thriving Post-COVID
De-commodified housing solutions for all
Louise Crabtree, Joanne McNeill, Sidsel Grimstad, Neil Perry, Emma Power and Wendy Stone33
Antennas Aflame
Cybernetics, conspiracies and 5G
Timothy Erik Ström43
The China Divide
The new era of strategic competition raises urgent questions for Australia
Clinton Fernandes52
Visual Essay
The Bridge
Michael Weatherill and Matteo Dal Vera68
Arts and Culture
Dream Pastoral Inversions
Re-approaching pastoral fraughtness through questions of Australian rurality
John Kinsella75
Arena Essay
Juukan Gorge Destruction
Extractivism and the Australian settler-colonial imagination
Dan Tout61
Review Essays
Revenge of the Nerds
Richard King84
The New Debt Trap and the Return of Inflation
John Hinkson87
Embodied City
Julie Stephens92
Degrowth
Terry Leahy95
Poetry
The Storm Coast
David Mason72
Under the Mesa
73
Letter to My Right Foot
74

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