Australia as a Risk Society: Hope and Fears of the Past, the Present and the Future

29 March - 1 April 2021, University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Italy 

Online Conference

Hosted by the European Association for Studies of Australia (EASA)

Australia may be defined as a society increasingly preoccupied yet also gambling with the future, a worry or denial which is closely connected to the notion of risk as a systematic way of dealing with, inducing and introducing hazards and insecurities. Apocalyptic speculations about future events are often employed in regard to feared scapegoats, such as climate change, migrants and Indigenous peoples, who are blamed for threatening or damaging society.

Denial and scepticism have become the resort of political and social movements, yet fear and anxiety are perhaps the dominant affective modes of expressing one’s attachment to the Australian community or nation.

The public is no longer engaged through rational arguments, but through affect and rhetorical pathetic fallacy, appeals to prejudiced emotions, opinions and convictions, which result in closure. On the other hand, another kind of discourse of the future exists i.e. the future as the effecting of change and creation rather than the effect of change. This is a future that changes the past and allows emergent strategies to unfold in the present. It rests on acts of hope, reinvention and resistance, which at times succeed in crossing and interrupting linguistic, cultural and political boundaries, and create alternative patterns of solidarity and member-shipping. In this light, speculations about the future and media oracles are not incidental but central to ethics, activism and ‘cosmopolitics’ as the potential trigger of solidarity and transformation.

Based on these premises, the conference will focus on the ways in which Australian transnational and local cultural, linguistic and literary productions channel information on risk and the future, in order to suggest and spread awareness on new cosmopolitical models of sustainability and conviviality.

Registration is now open, via the EASA Naples 2021 registration page.

For more details about the conference, vist the EASA Naples 2021 website.

Program and Book of Abstracts

The PDF program and book of abstracts are now available for the Conference.

Professor Mark Kenny (Australian Studies Institute) will be presenting Lucky but lame: Australia's Progressive Retreat on 29 March, as part of Panel 2: Antipodean Populism and the Fabrication of a Risk Society.

COVID-19 Update: 

Due to circumstances connected to COVID-19, the International EASA conference (Naples) has been rescheduled from October 2020 to 29 March - 1 April 2021. The conference will now be taking place online.

A message from EASA:

Australia as a Risk Society: Hope and Fears of the Past, the Present and the Future is now an online conference.

Our aim is to bring together all researchers who are interested in Australian studies from a linguistic, literary and cultural point of view.

We strongly believe that we should do our best to support research in Australian Studies in this difficult period and that the conference will be a great opportunity to connect and share our research although at a distance.

We are absolutely committed to making research from our community accessible so you will be able to view all papers here at the time of the conference, but you will have to register to participate in discussions and social events.

- European Assocation for Studies of Australia (EASA), 2021