In Arena no. 2, writers explore COVID-19 and some of its multifarious societal implications, plus university protests in India, Australia's role in intrigues at home and abroad, and the co-optation of the caring professions in 'Countering Violent Extremism'.
Arena Quarterly issue 2 available now
Latest from Arena Quarterly

A High-Tech Pandemic?

Arena Quarterly no. 2

John Hinkson

Jul 2020

Amplified by the powers of high technologies, capitalist expansion has moved to a new level, recalibrating the borders between humans and the natural world and producing effects across species.

Unacknowledged Legislators

Arena Quarterly no. 2

Robert DiNapoli

Jul 2020

All the received wisdoms and shibboleths of contemporary politics and economics, which have (among much else) lifted Donald Trump to his present bad eminence and left parliaments in many lands beset by extreme right-wing parties and ideologues, need reviewing in a fresh light.

American Dream

Arena Quarterly no. 2

Alison Caddick

Jul 2020

Not just precarity but destitution threatens under conditions of COVID, and especially in the United States it threatens people of colour.
Latest from Arena Online

Lebanon’s Predicament

Arena Online

Amin Saikal

13 Aug 2020

Lebanon is in the grip of long-term instability that threatens its viability as a functioning state. This instability can only be addressed if its internal political system is fundamentally reformed and decoupled from outside powers’ interference in pursuit of conflicting regional geopolitical interests.

Cruel Irony or Structural Cruelty? How Good People are Destroying Our Universities

Arena Online

Paul James

13 Aug 2020

Here, the cruel irony (of destroying people’s working lives in order to balance the budget) shifts into a further phase: what might be called ‘structural cruelty’.

Trump as political calculator, narcissism as design for living

Arena Online

Mark Furlong

13 Aug 2020

For Trump, it is better to bring the whole country down than to experience the private horror show that would be his lot if he were to be publicly rejected in the forthcoming election.

School’s Off-Campus, But It Shouldn’t Be Out Completely

Arena Online

Sarah Bailey

13 Aug 2020

Maybe what we have to hold onto is the idea of education as a good in its own right, not a dreary task to be got out of the way before we start the fun stuff, or a series of obstacles to be navigated en route to job-readiness.

Quietly Sacrificing the North? US Marines’ COVID-19 Exemption

Arena Online

Patricia Cahill

4 Aug 2020

Rather than taking a ‘fingers-crossed, let’s-hope-there’s-no-human-error’ gamble on quarantine measures, it would be far safer to prevent US marines from coming to Australia from COVID-19 hot spots.

The Anti-Aesthetic of Cancel Culture

Arena Online

Guy Rundle

4 Aug 2020

The implicit politics of the present—in which the deep left aim of creating a society of universal self-flourishing is rendered as a society of universal ‘safety’, in an expanded sense—trends towards a ban on representation, since any representation of suffering or wrong can be taken as exploitation or aggression.
The Alan Roberts Prize