Editorial: Prometheus Unhinged

Arena Quarterly no.17

Guy Rundle

Mar 2024

The announcement that Elon Musk’s Neuralink Corporation has succeeded in implanting a microchip capable of working with a human brain has hit the news just as I write this editorial. By the time you read this, it may have vanished again into the news-ether, or it may be all anyone is talking about. It is […]

Perpetrators: Israel under The Zone of Interest

Arena Online

Marcelo Svirsky

19 Mar 2024

Where were your grandparents during the war? The question sits upon my tongue when I meet a German. Israelis will soon find that a similar gaze will descend upon them.

Damned Rivers: Chronicling the Murray-Darling Basin Region

Arena Online

Scott Robinson

13 Mar 2024

The whole frame of the region as a Basin system may need to dissolve; it has been too caught in the lingering perception that the Murray is a ‘purposeful’ river, a gathering force that can be harnessed for the nation and capital.

Silence and the Social Order

Arena Quarterly no.17

John Hinkson

Mar 2024

It is not merely a matter of not knowing; it is knowing actively being suppressed by multiple mechanisms. In this respect Australia is an example of the role silence can play in making the formation of a certain kind of nation state possible.

Where does Value Lie?

Arena Quarterly no.16

Alison Caddick

Dec 2023

As Marx unfolded the ‘hidden abode’ of the capitalist market to reveal the true nature of capitalist accumulation, so Fraser moves behind that abode to find another.

Palestine and Football: Solidarity, Protest and Resistance

Arena Online

Paul Gardner

22 Feb 2024

This single act of cynical, unfettered power epitomizes the ruthless brutality of the Israeli war machine and its intention to end the dreams of the Palestinian people.

More Light Shining in Oxbridge

Arena Quarterly no.16

Robert DiNapoli

Dec 2023

Eagleton’s brisk summaries of their legacies afford a window into a time of sudden and tumultuous change both in modern Western culture at large and within the cloistered environs of academic literary criticism.

Only Shocking Thing about Price Gouge Is Predictability

Arena Online

J. A. Ryan

22 Feb 2024

As tempting as it might be to blame the C-Suite individuals for bill increases, this type of anger merely obfuscates that such occurrences are a built in feature of our economic system.

Australia and East Timor: the continuing denial

Arena Quarterly no.16

Peter Job

Dec 2023

Throughout the occupation, the Australian government worked as chief propagandist for the Suharto regime in the international arena on the Timor issue.

Time is Ignorance

Arena Quarterly no.16

Valerie Krips

Dec 2023

We are in thickets of folktale and myth even before the characters in Joe’s comics come to life and Joe, following a cuckoo’s call, encounters the deep past as he moves through known topography made as strange as time itself.

From the Archive

Green Pathways to a People’s Future

Arena Quarterly no. 1

Adam Bandt

‘Fire’ may be an appropriate way to think and talk about the climate-change emergency, not just because we are literally dealing with a burning world but also because it does not bring with it the concerns associated with ‘rule by emergency’.

From the Archive

The Tip of the Democracy-Sinking Iceberg

Timothy Erik Ström

There is a curious and seldom-told backstory and parallel story to the high-profile Cambridge Analytica scandal, one that makes the notorious firm seem like the tip of the democracy-sinking iceberg.

Statement Regarding my sacking from the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology

Arena Online

Ghassan Hage

10 Feb 2024

For anyone who knows the German landscape at the moment, there is nothing surprising about this happening to me. Many people other than me have copped a variation on this same treatment. It does not make it less infuriating. 

The Subs and the Next War

Arena Online

Samuel Hume

8 Feb 2024

AUKUS is a poor investment even when judged by the irrational standard of its proponents.

You threw the bums a line, didn’t you?: Bob Dylan’s recurring lesson plan

Arena Online

Mark Furlong

8 Feb 2024

Not interested in encouraging loyalty, or any of the values that can contest the process of individualization, Dylan has been a profiteer.

Smashing, grabbing, falling: Trauma and the core self in youth offending in Mpwartne/Alice Springs

Arena Quarterly no.16

Pamela Nathan

Dec 2023

The truth is that these youth have endured assaults and violations to their internal worlds also. It can be argued that they have lived with a form of ‘soul murder’.

The captivating whiteness of the humanities in Australia

Arena Quarterly no.16

Warwick Anderson

Dec 2023

The parameters of the ‘human’ in the humanities at the University of Melbourne were clearly defined and restricted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Ungrounded Self: Are we witnessing a breakdown in the transmission of culture and subjectivity?

Arena Quarterly no.16

Guy Rundle

Dec 2023

This current process is happening much faster than any other transformation, and so the transformation of subjectivity can be observed in real time.