The third annual conference of Historical Materialism Australasia takes place this Friday and Saturday, September 5-6, in Sydney. The agenda looks extremely exciting, with a closing plenary on ‘Feminising Emancipation’ and roundtable discussions on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Leo Panitch & Sam Gindin’s The Making of Global Capitalism. My PhD supervisors, Damien Cahill and Bill Dunn, are also launching their recent books.
We are lucky to have Panitch as this year’s keynote speaker. In addition to the rountable on his & Gindin’s 2013 Deutscher Prize winning book (co-sponsored by Jacobin Magazine), he will be speaking on ‘Rethinking Marxism a century after World War One’.
I will be speaking on the roundtable with Panitch, alongside others who contributed to the Jacobin book club discussion last year (Mike Beggs, Mike Rafferty, Martijn Konings and Dick Bryan).
I am also looking forward to a number of interesting papers on Australian and labour history, in particular Phil Griffiths’ paper on racism and ruling class strategy and Sarah Gregson’s paper on the role of the RSL in the 1934 Kalgoorlie race riots (and in relation to race more broadly). Union organiser Marc Newman has also put together an interesting paper on the current state of Australian unions.
You can register online slightly cheaper than at the door, and download the timetable from the conference website.
From protests to politicians’ pressers, we’re in our hi-vis era
This week I published an article with my UTS colleagues Bettina Frankham (Media Arts and Production) and Jesse Adams Stein, (School of Design) in The Conversation Australia + NZ. In the piece we look at the socio-political context of hi-vis clothing in Australia, and...
