Arena Publications in Fitzroy, Victoria | Arts and entertainment

Arena Publications

Locality: Fitzroy, Victoria

Phone: +61 3 9416 0232

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25.01.2022 "Strengthening this solidarity, and ensuring the active participation of these other sections of working people, is crucial for sustaining the struggle. This requires finding ways to overcome caste, class and gender barriers, and forging a united resistance against all anti-people actions of the government." Vikas Rawal on agriculture, neoliberalism, solidarity and the ongoing Indian farmers protests

24.01.2022 "In the upper reaches of the masonry that is the British judiciary there are, I understand, still those who believe in real law and real justice... It now rests on their determined shoulders whether that history lives on or dies." John Pilger reports on developments in the Julian Assange trial.

24.01.2022 "With the creation of AUKUShowever much it might be spinthe notion that the coming struggle will be an epochal conflict, cold, warm or scalding, with China has now been formalised." Guy Rundle on formalising a nuclear submarine deal in turbulent times.

23.01.2022 "This was no mere failure of bureaucracy or military knowledge on the part of the United States... we have so changed that we can no longer understand cultures that have not experienced this transformation of how we live and think." John Hinkson on US withdrawal from Afghanistan & the fragile state building strategies of the West.

23.01.2022 "The invasion of Afghanistan was a fraud. In the wake of 9/11, the Taliban sought to distant themselves from Osama bin Laden. They were, in many respects, an American client with which the administration of Bill Clinton had done a series of secret deals to allow the building of a $3 billion natural gas pipeline by a US oil company consortium." John Pilger on the events that led to Afghanistan crisis.

23.01.2022 "For Aboriginal people, formal recognition and, in particular, native title cannot be consigned to the margins or made invisible in the pursuit of truth and justice." Bhiamie Williamson on treaty and truth-telling.

23.01.2022 " COVID is shining a painfully dazzling light on the inequities and imbalances in our society. The shared cost of neoliberalism’s brutal dismantling of workers’ rights. The ludicrousness of imagining that the free market could be trusted to take care of the most vulnerable members of our society." Carla Pascoe Leahy reflects on the ups and downs of lockdown.

23.01.2022 Arena Quarterly issue 5 is now available for purchase! Head to our website to order a single copy or subscription. To celebrate, here is Alison Caddick's editorial touching on news media, neoliberalism, US politics, and what you can look forward to in the latest issue!

23.01.2022 "The code will only strengthen journalism’s dependence on advertising, which critically undermines its ability to serve the public good. Indeed, it further embeds journalism into circuits of cybernetic capitalism and the tech titans’ systems of surveillance and commodification." Timothy Erik Ström on the News Media Bargaining Code, or the turf war between corporate media and tech giants.

22.01.2022 "A rental property can never be a castle for the renter because there is always the looming prospect of having to hand it back to the landlord." Tim Robertson on the housing crisis and The Castle.

22.01.2022 "Theologywho would have thought that our theology of nature might be the cause of the end of Western modernity as we know it?" Paul Tyson on climate politics, theology and Scott Morrison.

22.01.2022 "If enough of us genuinely want the democratic university, it will happen. But you have got to be thinking about it, talking about it, dreaming about it and exciting others about it." Jean-Paul Gagnon lays out a democratic alternative to the increasingly corporatised business model governing Australian universities.

20.01.2022 "The contemporary punitive turn in Australian social security features disinvestment from actual payments made to individuals...as well as investment in punitive mutual-obligation programs such as ParentsNext." Elise Klein on welfare policy and care work.

19.01.2022 Multidisciplinary artist UB has created this beautifully illustrated, tongue in cheek comic about migration, be sure to check it out!

19.01.2022 "Mafalda’s precociousness, and her interactions with friends and her often bemused parents, became the quintessential formula for encapsulating and sensing the mood of a society plagued by the painful consequences of a weak democracy that had fallen under the control of the armed forces." Kiran Mohandas Menon and Eduardo B. Toledo on the legacy of the late Argentinian cartoonist Quino.

18.01.2022 "Whereas The Politics of Suffering, both essay and book, found a white audience willing to embrace his conservative view of Aboriginal people, Sutton’s promotion of Aboriginal permanence in this book has likely missed the contemporary zeitgeist." Richard Davis reviews 'Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate' by Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe

17.01.2022 "There is nothing new about the Australian Right being narrow, philistine, politics led, and driven by mere corporate goals. Nor is it new for Labor and other centre-left institutions to offer less than full-bore resistance to such. But the full force of this onslaught suggested that something fundamental had shifted beneath the surface of conventional politics." Guy Rundle's essay on the state of politics in Australia, from issue 3 of Arena Quarterly, is now online for your viewing pleasure.

17.01.2022 Just over a month until submissions for the Alan Roberts essay competition close! Win $1000 and publication for the best essay exploring science/technology, nuclear energy/warefare/disarmament, ecology/humanity, or new social forms/politics for the future!

16.01.2022 "The implicit politics of the presentin which the deep left aim of creating a society of universal self-flourishing is rendered as a society of universal ‘safety’, in an expanded sensetrends towards a ban on representation, since any representation of suffering or wrong can be taken as exploitation or aggression."

15.01.2022 "Like so much to do with COVID-19, the shift to schooling at home has underscored and intensified inequities of every type." Sarah Bailey meditates on the difficulties of home-based learning and the value of education.

15.01.2022 "Insecure work allows for the tacit threat of unemployment, damaging union density and weakening the bargaining position of workers. It thus affords employers greater control over wage-setting processes, including the use of non-union agreements to suppress wage growth and various forms of underpayment." Orlando Forbes and Andrew Jones on casualisation and underpayment in the English-language intensive courses for overseas students (ELICOS) sectors.

15.01.2022 "The proposal was put forward with the misleading motivation of creating a more ‘job-ready’ and ‘essential’ cohort of university graduates. Behind this, however, lies a more insidious goal, one that cannot be measured solely in economic terms: to attack those courses that threaten the LNP’s governing ideologies." Lachlan Howells and Rebecca Persic on neoliberal governmentality and the erosion of Australians’ political agency and imagination.

15.01.2022 "A major part of d’Abrera’s role is to reassure her audience that claims about Australian bigotry are woke-ish lies, a deception carried out by humanities and social science departments in the universities." A L Jones on Bella D'Abrera, and her role as Director of IPA's 'Foundations of Western Civilisation Program'.

14.01.2022 The spring 2021 issue of Arena Quarterly has arrived! Pandemonium 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.

13.01.2022 "Trump’s ‘deal of the century’ is designed not to solve the Palestine question and achieve a just and lasting peace in the Middle East but to legitimise Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, territorial expansion and violations of international law." Former Palestinian ambassador Ali Kazak on the US/Israel/UAE agreement and the corrupt regimes supporting it.

13.01.2022 "What does a citizen look like in the eyes of the state when she is constructed from multiple databases and how does she respond to the resultant kaleidoscopic rendition of her?" David Lloyd Brown on the Australian government adopting models of surveillance based on commercial marketing technologies.

12.01.2022 "Here, the cruel irony (of destroying people’s working lives in order to balance the budget) shifts into a further phase: what might be called ‘structural cruelty’."

12.01.2022 "Behind in the polls, his tactic is to drum up strife and disunity. Detached from principle, he sees it as a win if distemper and disturbance can be escalated." Mark Furlong on Trump and the dark triad of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism.

11.01.2022 "In nearly all cases where states require associations of traditional connection to be publicly performed in order to be recognised, the persons called upon and authorised to perform them have had their associations fractured by colonial dispossession." Melinda Hinkson on the removal of Djab Wurrrung trees and the disturbing practices of settler colonial governance.

10.01.2022 "The new moral panic about ‘the China threat’, and the comparative indifference in Australia about significantly more intrusive forms of foreign interference by the US and the UK, for example, is orientalist and often racist: China is not a member of the Western club, so it is suspect." Scott Burchill, Senior Lecturer in International Relations on Australia's diplomatic relations with China.

09.01.2022 "Certainly the modelling of potential suicides uses some of the actual experience of unemployment and suicide to underscore its figures, but it completely omits the sociological and historical understanding of a community’s reaction to a major social event such as a war or pandemic." Grazyna Zajdow on modelling, media misrepresentation and moral panic.

08.01.2022 Congratulations to the Alan Roberts Prize winner this year, Chloe Ward, with this essay exploring communication and climate action.

08.01.2022 "The most fundamental conditions of life only rarely become visible as such, and the results of their becoming so is often a moment of grave disquiet. But these are also rare times of opportunity." Fiona Jenkins on the long-discounted chains of dependency in caring for humans and environment.

08.01.2022 "Universities have come to see each other as ‘competitors’ in a sense that they never previously did. But more important has been a rationalisation of competition that has shifted it from what might once have been seen as an art to a science." Mark Gibson on the parallels between Australian sports and universities, and the value lost in this new form of competition.

07.01.2022 "In government, neither side of politics has ordered an inquiry into the Iraq War, and the most obvious question is not asked in the NSC’s safe spaces: do Australia’s expeditionary military campaigns raise or lower the threat to domestic security? If you fear the answer, better not ask the question." Clinton Fernandes on intelligence agencies and transparency.

07.01.2022 "Conflict is occurring at present not only in parliaments and on the streets, but in the courts and in workplaces, as well as among friends and family... To vaccinate or not; to insist others do, or not; to cleave to freedom, whatever that means, or not; to fight the state, be suspicious of science, or fearful of medical intervention, or not..." From Alison Caddick's editorial for the latest issue of Arena Quarterly.

06.01.2022 "The mainstream media’s conflation of links with content to support the code is very problematic. It entirely avoids the fatal philosophical problem at the heart of the code..." Justin Clarke explores the LNP's News Media Bargaining Code and the bureaucratisation of links that could threaten the open internet as we know it.

04.01.2022 "As political debate rages around Australia about how to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the Australian government has quietly approved the arrival of 1200 US marines into Darwin." Patricia Cahill on the risk to Indigenous communities, the silence of the media and geopolitics taking precedence over the safety of Territorians.

04.01.2022 "It is possible for this small minority to be protected without obtaining a vaccine, but their health is dependent upon the goodwill of those around them. The problem arises when an excessive number of individuals decide that they can ‘free ride’ by rejecting immunisation." Kathleen and Christopher Day on herd immunity, the anti-vaccination sentiment, and the neoliberal values inhibiting collective efforts to stamp out coronavirus.

04.01.2022 "It’s the classical liberal Rightwho are putting up the most concerted resistance to lockdowns, albeit usually in a childish and petulant fashion. Yet the lockdown may be a product of the very assumptions classical liberals draw on for their one-dimensional idea of ‘freedom’." Guy Rundle on increasing state powers, and the pandemic pushing the political divide to its very limits.

03.01.2022 A space has opened up to take part in Arena's 2020 writing residencies! Aimed at emerging writers and activists thinking critically about the world, residents will be provided with a $500 stipend, assistance developing their ideas and editing, with the view to publish in Arena Online or Quarterly. Applications close 20th September: https://arena.org.au/arena-residency-program/

03.01.2022 "The threat of a whole-life-without-parole term and a permanent disappearance into the grey half-world of prison seems to add a cosmic lustre. The acceptance of a guilty plea, the absence of court theatrics, dispels any suggestion of adolescent rebelliousness turned lethal."

02.01.2022 "The political adage goes that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’. Sadly, it is a truism when we consider the state of our forests." Cam Walker reflects on environmental activism and the state of logging in Australia.

01.01.2022 "The Lebanese people want a revolutionary overthrow of the system and its replacement by a publicly mandated, not elite-endorsed, system of governance that could deliver them national unity and prosperity." Prof Amin Saikal puts the Beirut explosion in context.