One of the most enduring objectives of western scholars is to define the parameters of any debate within their field of expertise. This is then countered by another scholar who wishes to emphasise the boundaries within which their own expertise will shine. In this way, an endless and largely redundant struggle for supremacy in a particular discipline is perpetuated.
Oooh he’s a little blondie like I was, says my niece, who has a little blondie of her own now. He’s not the little blondie running around anymore says his great-great auntie, who recently saw my boy, her 15-year-old nephew, for the first time since he was a toddler.
I got the bit about the Prime Minister feeling under siege, from the weird array of weaponry at his Monday press conference. I understood he was projecting his worst fear – losing face – by posing with gas-masked muppets.
The federal government is in a spot of legal bother. This may seem like the old cliché about the builder with the unfinished home renovation. But for tradies, the explanation is obvious. Work for paying customers is prioritised because it puts food on the table.
There are specific ethics considerations around research with human subjects. These words may – and should – conjure up images of white people measuring the noses and lips of Aboriginal children, and stealing the skulls of their ancestors. Of Henritta Lacks, and the Tuskagee Experiment. Of electric shocks administered to same-sex attracted people.
[This article was first published by Independent Australia on Tuesday 23 May 2017]
[CW: one spoiler]
If good theatre gets us pondering, Nakkiah Lui’s Black is the New White comes crashing into the imagination like a runaway train. It is spectacularly good theatre. Intricately intelligent theatre. So fantastically funny that inhibitions (like being the person with the too-loud laugh) fall away.
Is anyone else disturbed by how the decision of the USA to drop its largest non-nuclear bomb on Afghanistan has disappeared from the news?
A week later (20 April 2017), Malcolm Turnbull said of Donald Trump and the wall-to-wall Republican administration: ‘I trust the judgement of the American government… I trust the judgement, the wisdom, of the president’.
This weekend, the Sydney Moring Herald showcased three conservative ‘young’ white women aged 28, 31 and 37 years.
Yesterday I went to March Australia in Sydney, an event which started in March 2014, a mere six months into the Abbott government, to mobilise against the destructive policies of a newly-elected Coalition government and the dishonest Liberal Party campaign.