<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/540_whats-on_ideas-festival-feature_ban-300×61.jpg" align=left Just a quick heads up to some sessions at the Brisbane Ideas Festival later this week which might be of interest. I’m speaking on a panel called “The Future of the Magazine”. It’s part of the “Think Do Tank” program targeted towards high school students. You can access the times and places (1.30pm Thursday and again at 1.30pm on Friday) via the links in my speaker’s bio.
Frequent guest poster on cultural policy stuff, Marcus Westbury, is talking about technology, new media and creativity on a panel on Friday night at 6pm.
And another LP guest poster and CPD Director Miriam Lyons will be discussing how technology is mediating the social engagement with democracy with some other think tank folk on Saturday arvo at 4pm.
There is no truth to the rumour that her doppelganger Myriam Lyons has usurped her role in this session!
Barry Saunders, from Gatewatching and Democratic Renewal Coordinator at the CPD, will be facilitating a workshop on using open access tools to interface with government on Saturday at 1pm.
I’m sure there’s lots of other interesting and worthy stuff going on! As usual at the moment, I’m crazily busy, though, so won’t necessarily be around for it – but the whole program can be accessed here.
Ah, so Brisvegas is emulating Adders and our Festival of Ideas? Excellent taste.
It does quite surprising things for a city, and assorted punters turn up in droves from all over the place. We’ve got one this year too (they take it in annual turns with Writers’ Week); the (Adders) guest I’m particularly interested in is Katharine Gelber from UNSW, talking about the place where the category of ‘hate speech’ meets that of ‘free speech’, which has always seemed to me a key issue in blogging.
I notice that there is a session on cooking the planet on Saturday 10am with some likely characters.
We’ve been doing it for a few years, Dr Cat, on and off – though Adders did get there first!
One slight pity is that I was approached to do something similar to what you, Tim D and Gary S-T did in blogging the festival but I just don’t have time amidst all my other commitments.
I’ve always wondered why these things aren’t scheduled for uni breaks (which is only a few weeks away) – a lot of the speakers at this one are acas – though some way up the food chain where they don’t have to worry about teaching. As it is, I’m having to find someone to fill in for me for a class, and I also would have thought that tertiary students would be a great target audience for this sort of event.
Just an idea!
Ps – Katherine Gelber’s bound to be interesting. She organised a bit of a pathbreaking postgrad conference at Sydney Uni in 98 or 99, if I remember rightly – one of the first ones I spoke at. She’s sharp as a tack.
Acas and non-acas, or should I say acas v. non-acas, have been having that fight over Adders Writers’ Week since it started in 1962 or thereabouts. The line the organisers always take is ‘Well it’s not specially for academics, you know!’ Which is shaky ground, because in the first instance academics were exactly who it was for — the very first ever attempt to give the brave souls then teaching Australian writing in universities, against hysterical opposition from their professorial English overlords, a chance to get together and talk about it.
They’d only have to move it a few weeks backwards, from the first week in March to the last or second-last in Feb, but their other argument is that it would be too hot. (Compared to the usual WW average of 42 degrees in the shade, no doubt.)
But I can see their point — the educated general public (of Adders, anyway) feel that it is for them, and therefore come in droves, and because there are general audiences it never gets so intellectually rarefied as to be tedious to all but specialists. And the same is true of the Ideas Fest. Besides, even if these things were held during non-teaching periods, most acas would be away on the conference circuit!
Probably not in midsemester break – we’re all marking! But I guess it’s school holidays then!
I do always feel it’s a pity that I can’t realistically encourage my students to go along to Ideas and Writers Festivals – because they also seem to be at peak assessment deadline periods! I really don’t want to make an argument that everything should conform to the university calendar, but I do think that it would be fabulous if students were given a taste of these sort of events.
Must say I never object to the Writers Festival practice of lots of night time sessions at the Powerhouse with lots of grog – that makes up for all manner of other possible gripes!
At the uni where I teach film production, the students are given a mini-pass and a week off from classes when the Melbourne International Film Festival is on. They, of course, have to write an essay about the films they’ve seen. So, it’s a case of the festival won’t come to the students, so the students go to the festival.
Fine, yep, Adelaide U’s Creative Writing program does the same thing (or used to) during Writers’ Week. One clever soul at one stage was offering a whole unit on the publishing/bookselling industry that used the festival circuit as a focal point.