This is the first lecture in a series of five, as part of The Wednesday Lectures – Hosted by Raimond Gaita.
WACA will be posting videos of each of the Wikileaks lectures and would like to thank the Melbourne Law School for granting us permission to film the entire series.
Details of the Wikileaks Series of The Wednesday Lectures :
8 June – Guy Rundle ‘From Cold war to Cyberwar: Power, the State and the Wikileaks Effect’Two decades after the Berlin Wall came down, and a decade after 9/11 became the pretext for a relentless attack on citizenship and civil liberties, a series of releases by the Wikileaks website threw the operation of secrecy and state control of information into chaos. From the Icelandic rebellion against financial crisis, to the Arab Spring, both the quantity and quality of information released has changed the relationship between state, citizen and information.
These momentous events allow us to rethink the inherited privileges and assumptions of state and corporate power, and to ask if a new relationship can be created between global citizens, states and international organisations - indeed, it causes us to ask how it could not be.
Guy Rundle is currently the UK correspondent for Crikey and a regular contributor to The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and many other publications. A former editor of Arena Magazine, and a writer of several stage shows for Max Gillies, his most recent book is The SHellackling, on the rise of the US 'Tea Party'.
15 June - Raimond Gaita ‘ Power and Consent’This is the second lecture in a series of five, as part of The Wednesday Lectures – Hosted by Raimond Gaita.
At the heart of democratic ideals is the contrast between legitimate and illegitimate persuasion. To a large extent, the difference is marked by the ways that forms of persuasion respect – or fail to respect – what Simone Weil called our “faculty of free consent.” The lecture will explore what we should make of the distinction and what its implications are for political action when democratic governments become more secretive, more authoritarian and more reliant on spin.
Raimond Gaita is Professorial Fellow in the Melbourne Law School and The Faculty of Arts at University of Melbourne and Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at King’s College London. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His books include: Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, Romulus, My Father, A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love & Truth & Justice, Breach of Trust: Truth, Morality and Politics and, as editor and contributor, Gaza: Morality Law and Politics and Muslims and Multiculturalism.
22 June – Panel Discussion ‘Secrecy, Power and Democracy’This is the third lecture in a series of five, as part of The Wednesday Lectures – Hosted by Raimond Gaita.
Join this panel of experts as they discuss the overall theme of this lecture series.
Raimond Gaita: Raimond Gaita is Professorial Fellow in the Melbourne Law School and The Faculty of Arts at University of Melbourne and Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at King’s College London. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His books include: Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, Romulus, My Father, A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love & Truth & Justice, Breach of Trust: Truth, Morality and Politics and, as editor and contributor, Gaza: Morality Law and Politics and Muslims and Multiculturalism.
Guy Rundle: Guy Rundle is currently the UK correspondent for Crikey and a regular contributor the The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and many other publications. A former editor of Arena Magazine, and a writer of several stage shows for Max Gillies, his most recent book is The Shellacking, on the rise of the US ‘Tea Party’.
Gerry Simpson
: Gerry Simpson is the Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law at Melbourne Law School, and is a Professor of Public International Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Great Powers and Outlaw States (Winner of the American Society of International Law’s Certificate of Merit in 2005) and more recently Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law and Outside International Law.
Robert Manne
: Robert Manne is Professor of Politics at La Trobe University and a member of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences. He is one of Australia’s best-known public intellectuals. His publications include The Petrov Affair, The Shadow of 1917, The Culture of Forgetting, In Denial, and The Howard Years. Whitewash: On the Fabrication of Aboriginal History (editor and contributor), Dear Mr Rudd: Ideas for a Better Australia (editor and contributor), Left, Right Left and Making Trouble. He contributes regularly to The Monthly).
29 June – Kevin Heller ‘Can the U.S. Prosecute WikiLeaks for Espionage? Should It?’ This is the fourth lecture in a series of five, as part of The Wednesday Lectures – Hosted by Raimond Gaita.
Kevin Heller is Senior Lecturer at Melbourne Law School. He is the author of The Nuremberg Military Tribunals, The Origins of International Criminal Law and The Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law (with Markus Dubber). He is also a permanent member of the international-law blog Opinio Juris. He has written for numerous journals of international law and been advisor numerous international criminal trials including those of Saddam Hussein and Radovan Karadzic.
6 July – Helen Pringle ‘Gimme Shelter: The Power of Secrecy and Silence in Democracy’This is the fifth lecture in a series of five, as part of The Wednesday Lectures – Hosted by Raimond Gaita.
This talk offers an appreciation and defence of the power of secrecy and silence in a democracy. It is often assumed that secrecy shelters domination and that silence provides a license for coarse exercises of power by government or business.
Breaking the silence and the triumph of a principle of general transparency are not only the apparent aims of the Wikileaks project, but form a broader injunction to publicise the smallest details of every aspect of our lives. Pringle argues that this is not an emancipatory project: a general breaking of silence shatters the shelter within which our intimate lives are conducted, and in turn guts public life of its standing and dignity.
Helen Pringle is in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales. Her research has been widely recognised by awards from Princeton University, the Fulbright Foundation, the Australian Federation of University Women, and the Universities of Adelaide, Wollongong and NSW. Her main fields of expertise are human rights, ethics in public life, and political theory. Dr Pringle is currently working on a project concerning the place of pornography within considerations of free speech, entitled Practising Pornography. She is also involved in an international research project on ethnography and sexual slavery in early colonial Queensland.
http://wikileaksaustraliancitizensallia ... %E2%80%99/
