2022 Series

PAST 2021 LECTURE SERIES:

Identity, Difference & Belonging
A philosophy lecture series in seven parts.

August 2020 – March 2021

SERIES DESCRIPTION:

Our past decade has featured an intensification of conflicts surrounding identity, belonging, and difference. As such, how we and others forge our identities in line with who and what we belong to has reasserted itself as a central question of our current socio-political situation. Crises of global proportions – climate change, mass migration, economic collapse – have been met with either calls for inclusive international collaboration, or exclusive national interest and security. At the same time, multiculturalism and internationalism have come into conflict with the re-emergence and normalisation of nationalist, protectionist and xenophobic social movements. In the “Western” world in particular, what has been described as “identity politics” has become the central concern of socio-political activism across the political spectrum. The scrutiny and contest of representations of identities of gender, race and sexuality in the media have consequently become a predominant focus of both progressive and conservative voices alike.

These conflicts raise questions both new and old: with our increasingly atomised and fractured communities, to what or who do we belong, if anything? In what ways do notions such as culture, race, gender and sexuality enable and constrain practices of amelioration and emancipation? How do all of us understand, belong to and participate in a history that precedes us, and an uncertain future that lays before us?

In this series of lectures, we hope to open up a space of dialogue in order to engage with ways of thinking about belonging, identity and difference, and throughout we will discuss the possibility of seeing our shared future differently. Each lecture will last roughly 45 minutes to 1 hour and will be followed by questions and conversation.

We invite you to join us for a night of ideas, discussion and drinks as we ask what it means to be human in our contemporary world.

No knowledge of philosophy is required; everyone is welcome.

Free to attend but tickets required. All refreshments and food are available for purchase from Clancy’s Fish Pub, Fremantle.

When? Part One will be on the 17th of August 2020. Lectures will generally fall on the third Monday of each month.

Where? Clancy’s Fish Pub, Fremantle: 51 Cantonment St, Fremantle WA 6160.