Dream & discontent

When: Thursday 14 November, 9.45 – 11.15am

Donald Horne published The Lucky Country at a time when that era’s version of the culture wars – the cold war confrontation between the West and the Communist world – was beginning to give way to concepts such as the ‘quality of life’ and causes and issues such as decolonisation, environmental protection and civil rights. Horne’s polemic helped set the terms of debate about national identity, but changes in the economy, politics, media, society, and geopolitical orientation since have drastically altered the terrain for such discussion. Are there possibilities for the reconstruction of community beyond our own century’s rising inequality and perpetual culture wars? And what role might the humanities play as a source of inspiration and expertise for a more civil discourse and an expanded sense of political possibility?

Chair: Emeritus Professor Shirley Leitch.

Speakers

Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner AO FAHA FQA

Paper title: Imagined Communities 2.0: Media, information and a diminished political culture.

As a number of studies in recent years have demonstrated, Australia today is very different to the one we can read about in Horne’s The Lucky Country. Increasing inequality, political polarization, cultural division and social fragmentation have undermined the idea of the nation as a cohesive and inclusive imagined community. To function properly as a democracy, the nation depends upon an informed citizenry; open, trusted and accountable systems of governance; and a broad commitment to the centrality of the public good. In this presentation, I focus on just two key elements of the current situation that continue to stand in the way of such a project as we deal with the post-digital formation of the imagined community. First, there is the entrenched toxicity of Australia’s diminished political culture over the last twenty years and, second, the roles played by social media and the mass media in enabling and profiting from that culture, while fuelling its toxicity.

Graeme Turner FAHA is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies  at the University of Queensland. A former President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2004-07), founding Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland (2000-12), a Federation Fellow (2006-11), and convenor of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Cultural Research Network (2006-10), Emeritus Professor Turner is one of the leading figures in the humanities in Australia. His research has covered a wide range of forms and media literature, film, television, radio, new media, journalism, and popular culture. He has published 30 books with national and international academic publishers. His most recent book is a ‘state of the nation’ account of Australia’s political culture, The Shrinking Nation: How we get here and what we can do about it, published by UQP in 2023.

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