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…
Arena Quarterly no. 14 features an extensive special section on AUKUS. Clinton Fernandes and Alison Broinowski reveal in their respective articles the true commitment that AUKUS binds us to in the projection of US power against China. They debunk comforting notions that AUKUS protects vital sea lanes and builds, without social cost, local defence industries, showing us the financial and ideological commitments Australia is making to the US war machine. Binoy Kampmark details the responses…
Arena Quarterly No. 13 features a special section on nuclear power and its political resurgence as 'the only way forward' in a climate collapsing world. John Hinkson explores the deep structures of life and culture in the nuclear age, shattering any confidence there might be in the safety of the nuclear way. Dave Sweeney gives an account of the success of the people's anti-nuclear movement to date in Australia. Guy Rundle forewarns on the technocratic directions…
In Arena Quarterly Issue 10, titled ‘Imperium East and West’, we focus on the Russia–Ukraine war. Is it most of all Vladimir Putin’s urge to empire that is implicated in this disaster; is the West engaged in a proxy war, encouraging Ukrainians to fight and die for a US agenda; how much is a more general barbarity emerging, at least in part as a consequence of globalisation and the unravelling of democracy everywhere? There are…
The first issue of 2022 considers the many ways in which our vision can be obscured in these complex and tumultuous times. The climate emergency—its scale so vast that it can’t be contemplated entire—grows ever more urgent. The far Right exploits well-intentioned concerns about vaccines to draw greater numbers into its fold. Meanwhile, here in Australia, a federal election looms.
The spring 2021 issue explores the social and political fragmentation wrought by COVID, and by the realities of contemporary life: neoliberal governance, the techno-sciences, a disconnection from nature, and rampant commercialisation and commodification.
Care is so often undervalued and taken for granted. Yet what would our society be without care – care for our children and frail elderly, care for the environment, care in education? In this issue, Fiona Jenkins, Elise Klein, Gabrielle Meagher and Daniel Ross show the essential value of care, and how it must take a central place in thinking and planning.
