Archive: Arena Quarterly

Much More than a Mirror Man: John Pilger’s life of truth-telling, remembered

Arena Quarterly no.17

Binoy Kampmark

Mar 2024

Pilger’s lengthy career marked the high-water mark for a certain type of journalism that could still at the time make it into various mainstream outlets. This eventually altered.

Mongrel Mobs? The Gang Crackdown in Aotearoa

Arena Quarterly no.17

Alister McKeich (Ali MC)

Mar 2024

Emerging out of postwar state- and church-run institutions, early gangs were a social and cultural response to shocking abuse perpetrated predominantly upon Māori and Pacific Islander children.

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 […]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Identity in Question: The contemporary self as philosophical by-product

Arena Quarterly no.16

Mark Kelly

Dec 2023

The paradox of the discourse of diversity is that it is a universal credo of anti-universalism: it demands we all acknowledge the significance of particular experience, that we can discern in advance based on who is speaking the value of their words.