Speakers

APSA President's Address

Helen Sullivan

'How Political Studies can save the world (providing we can get out of our own way)'
Monday 20 September 9.45am - 10.45am AEST 

Professor Helen Sullivan is a public policy scholar whose work explores the nature of state-society relationships, and their interaction with public policy systems. Her latest book (co-edited with Helen Dickinson and Hayley Henderson) is The Palgrave Handbook of the Public Servant, a major reference work published by Palgrave (2021).  Helen is President of the Australian Political Studies Association (2020-21), a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and National Fellow of the Institute of Public Administration Australia. She currently serves as the Dean of the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. 

Keynote Lecture

John Keane

John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and the WZB (Berlin). He is renowned globally for his creative thinking about democracy, and is the author of a number of distinguished books including The Life and Death of Democracy (Simon & Schuster, 2009), When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter (2017) and The New Despotism (Harvard University Press, 2020). He was nominated for the 2021 Balzan Prize and the Holberg Prize for outstanding global contributions to the human sciences. 

'Thoughts on Uncertainty'
Tuesday 21 September 9.15am - 10.45am AEST 

There seems to be growing agreement among scholars and citizens that our planet and its peoples are presently living through an era of great political uncertainty. Global pestilence, species destruction, shrinking US power and the birth of a new Chinese global empire are among the forces said to be responsible for the rising tides of uncertainty. Some observers even speak of a great leap backwards, a regression towards catastrophe, a rebirth of the disquiet and fear that marked the world of the 1920s and 1930s. They are sure that the future will bring only threats, rather than new opportunities to live well. 

This lecture notes the seriousness of things, but it raises doubts about these pessimistic claims about a new age of uncertainty. Historical comparisons are needed. So is greater clarity about the role played by communicative abundance in inflating our collective sense of doom. And a paradox is noted: calamities do more than stir up questions about how best to classify and measure the experience of uncertainty. Definitions of uncertainty also become uncertain. This should be unsurprising, John Keane suggests. Only institutions and everyday experiences unaffected by the flow of time could be defined and lived with any certainty. 

The insight not only has rich implications for the way we think about politics and democracy and its vulnerability to morbid backlashes and yearnings for demagogues. Doubt can generate fresh ideas and positive practical breakthroughs. Disquiet and incertitude are fickle characters, moody challengers of hubris, capricious tormenters of all forms of human arrogance, including the dogmatic conviction that our world is now headed for hell.