Post capitalist work, engagement and new forms of housing are the centrepiece of this issue: how to cooperate with others to get all manner of things up and working for you, your communities, your comrades. This is the promise of the cooperative movement, and practitioners and researchers in this special section provide crucial leads for thinking about and enacting new forms of meaningful action and association. The issue has enlivening pieces on the purposes of…
Minds, brains, machines, code, consciousness, labour, class, work, culture, social transformation, dystopia, utopia, annihilation and renewal are the matters for this issue of Arena Quarterly, in our special section on AI, large language models and technology. The gap in much discussion of AI is a lack of consideration of it as a cultural product, originating both from deep drives towards the transcendent in human culture, and a lack of understanding, a taken-for-granted attitude to what…
Arena’s Summer issue explores the systemic breakdown that creates instability and violence at a local and global scale. Guy Rundle’s editorial reveals new types of crime that arise from a further change in social life, where current left/right positions present inadequate solutions. Mira Adler-Gillies depicts the complex and insidious relationship between Zionism and anti-antisemitism functioning as a ‘totalised simulacrum available for endless use’. Environmental catastrophes loom in Australia’s North and South; Kirsty Howey examines the…
'The Mourning After?' greets Spring with hope for the future, but realism about its prospects. Paul James examines the abundance of talk of abundance, and its vain hopes that endless growth will solve human problems; Michelle Fahy and Alison Broinowski question our defence suppositions—Fahy through documenting the ‘revolving door’ between public service and defence contractors, and Broinowski through seeing a residual commitment to Western imperatives in the otherwise critical work of Emma Shortis and Hugh…
Fascism? With Trump using executive power to take over US civic society, the right surging in Europe, and Israel moving to complete the destruction of Gaza, and the internment of its population, some might question whether the question mark is required. But as the writers in this issue of Arena note, the forces of the present cannot be neatly subsumed to the political movement of the past, mass, era. John Hinkson explores the relationship between…
'Politics After No' is the theme of the special section of Arena, our Autumn 2025 issue. We're starting a discussion on the theory and discussion underlying the politics of Australia, after the 'No' vote in the Voice referendum. Has a distinctive period ended? Is there a need for radical rethinkinking of the theory and practice of indigenous and non-indigenous relations here? We begin with a debate about the 'settler-colonial' approach that has been so influential…
This issue of Arena analyses social and cultural disruptions at home and abroad. We look at the questions posed by migration for settler colonial societies, the future of independent politics in Australia, life in the suburban fringe-worlds at the edge of Australian cities, and how bushfire management threatens the future of our forests. Elsewhere we trace the rise of the right in Germany, the problem of digital authoritarianism in Indonesia, and the politics of international…
This issue of Arena examines how social life has been radically altered by technology and capital, and how attempts to address this by state policy work to exacerbate already-existing processes of alienation, hyper-individualization and the like. While the state withdraws from areas such as health and education, it intervenes in politics and the public sphere repressing speech and behaviour in the name of 'social cohesion.' We take a deeper look at what the social is, how it has changed, and what…
In this issue of Arena, we call people to arms against arms, with a push back against the push to war, an expose on AI drones in Gaza, and the military in our schools. The politics of place in Fiji has returned Rambuka, and the melancholy right is back in Portugal. Our special section digs deeper, at a time when Left theory is in disarray, and insists on a rethinking of the politics of class,…
This issue of Arena, number 17, 'Prometheus Unhinged' takes on the fundamental challenges of technologies such as AI, neural implants, crypto finance, space colonization and the reemergent danger of nuclear weapons, and explores their common basis: a renewed simplistic faith in the power of technology to deliver human perfection, a belief shorn of much of the critical reflection on technology that was common a generation or so ago. Several pieces thus tackle the failure of…
Arena Quarterly no. 16 carries features on the internal political background to the Ukraine war, the reorientation of China’s economic program, the calamitous history of recent US wars, and an editorial on Gaza. Back home, arguments for the virtues of white civilisation and teaching it are countered in a history of Nordic supremacist and Nazi thinking in the humanities at Melbourne University. At the heart of this edition is a special section on the contemporary…
This issue has a focus on the Voice, with pieces by Michael Mansell, Celeste Liddle, Marilyn Lake, Brian Burkett and Alison Caddick. In an extended essay Dan Tout takes on 'the idea of Australia', with evident consequences for thinking through just what the Voice offers, and Andreas Pohl poses the challenging question of how genocide in Australia might be memorialised. Two pieces on the Russia-Ukraine war ask controversial questions about how it might be viewed…
