Issue 3:
VOICES FROM THE GRASSROOTS
As a sneak peak into our latest edition, the Demos Editors bring together voices on grassroots organising and activism at ANU, in the Canberra community, and from beyond.
Diaspora Consciousness: Fluid or Rootless?
It is 2000, the year of the Sydney Olympics, when my parents decide to emigrate to Australia. Their grounds are valid — they are tired of high crime rates, class and racial tensions, insidious stories told by witch doctors. But I am eight, intrepid and anxious; their...
The Three Graces
The Three Graces (2014) 120 cm x 90 cm, oil on canvas. The Three Graces is a work I hold very dear as it was painted in homage to my two of my best friends at a time when I was in dire need of them. The work always serves as a reminder of the importance and power of...
Power Presence and the Public: Women’s Online Social Movements in the Middle East
Hanan, from Egypt holding a sign reading: “I am with the uprising of women in the Arab world because my freedom is not a gift from anyone I was created free and I will take my rights and impose my freedom.” The online remains a yet unchartered, ungendered space. A...
A Picture of Palestine
1. The Dead Sea We float lazily in the thick and warm water, careful not to let our faces dip into the mineral concoction. The thick water restricts you from making sudden movements. You slowly learn patience, as you simply accept a lazy attitude. I had to learn...
Progression
Bricks of antiquity flaking mortar and dust of Adam’s bones wherein words encrust modern day ballads, cheap songs echo in search of a god to enslave and here it stays as times new roman and pooling ink. (a forgotten murder) Who have built thus these iron bars? William...
Where are the Women? In Search of a New Queer History
In the summer of 2011 I was consumed, as I suspect many fifteen year olds are, with the dual pursuits of Photoshopping images of celebrities to make them look like they were about to make out, and Googling gay youth groups. Though reasonably successful in one arena, I...
Roxley Foley: The Keeper of the Flame
– Gus McCubbing interviews Roxley Foley Due to the work of Gary Foley, the Foley name is synonymous throughout Australia with Indigenous rights activism. However, at a touch over thirty years of age, Roxley Foley, the son of Gary Foley, was the official custodian of...
The Corporatisation of Anti-Capitalism
My interest in environmental conservation was inspired early on by an acquaintance with a pair of old-school activists. I was young and impressionable, and their infectious reverence for the ocean’s natural beauty awakened in me sensibilities I hadn’t appreciated...
Claim the Sky!
The atmosphere is a community asset that belongs to all of us. The problem is that it is currently an open access resource—anyone can emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with no consequences to themselves—but with huge cumulative consequences to the climate and...
The Managerial University: A Failed Experiment?
Recent decades have seen a protracted attack and painstaking demolition of the traditional or ‘old’ university and an associated purging of academics. The rise of managers and ‘managerial’ doctrines were supposed to make universities more efficient and productive,...
Knowledge for Sale
“Knowledge for Sale” is one of a series of posters that address the corporatisation of universities. The posters are the result of a collaborative research project between Dr Ivo Lovric, a recent graduate from the ANU School of Art and Professor Margaret Thornton, ANU...
Political Science
Yes, Let’s! Lets A-politicise all that became somehow political. Until the politics is taken out of politics And the underground of revolution becomes a gathering of silent bodies. We don’t have a will to change the world, We want To control it, To strategise until...
Mining Stories: Slow Violence, Resource Extraction and Writer-Activism in Australia
The red leaf on the left is covered with iron ore dust, the leaf on the right has been cleaned. When plants are covered with dust they can no longer photosythesise, meaning they slowly die, taking with them the culture and societies that depend on them. Photo by Sean...
Grassroots Activism and Democracy: Judith Butler’s Notes on a Sensate Democracy
“To demand justice […] involves every activist in a philosophical problem” – Judith Butler[1] Judith Butler, the American philosopher and gender theorist, has long intimated a democratic theory; or, as she has sometimes called it, a theory of “a sensate...
From the Edge of Our Climate: The Aftermath of Cyclone Winston, Fiji
I find myself walking through familiar scenes, scenes of utter devastation, trees with no leaves, corrugated iron that once were people’s rooves twisted and folded around trees, scattered, wet clothes amongst the remnants of homes. These scenes are somewhat less sad...
How Did We Ever Get Stuck in the *Pinstriped Prison*?
The Pinstriped Prison: How Overachievers Get Trapped in Corporate Jobs They Hate. By Lisa Pryor. Published 2008 by Picador Pan MacMillan Australia Pty Limited, 1 Market Street Sydney, 272pp. In the 1950s and 60s, top students from elite universities aspired to careers...
A Place to Call Home
Avara. First year at Fenner. South Tower. Seventh Floor. Came from near Maitland. Julian. Second year at Fenner. South Tower. Seventh Floor. Came from Yass. Soni. First year at Fenner. South Tower. Seventh Floor. Came from Alice Springs. Dan. First year at Fenner....
Needle Grass
this city does not care for me i am nothing to her cold indifference as if you never left as if i never learned but i have heard out there somewhere someone with a brain just like mine and a voice like English summer calling out my name in the...
It’s Getting Hot in Here: Time for a New Normal
We are already on the way to a new climate normal. Whether that normal is one decided by us or for us is yet to be determined. We’re experiencing longer and hotter summers, and more extreme and frequent natural disasters.[i] Air pollution is killing 7 million...
A Fine Balance
Roots provide the basis for life, yet we often take them for granted. This work provides a composition of the interdependent and harmonious relationship between human and nature. The interplay of nature, education, and other forms of socialisation results in the...
Is Kurdish Rebellion a Left Wing Cause?
There is a paradox in left wing ideology. The left wing often supports underdogs in an effort to ensure equality. Yet the underdog always carries baggage that can be directly opposed to left wing philosophies. As a progressive person, should I support the supressed,...
‘Cultural Appropriation’: Maybe our Discussion is the Problem
A discussion of cultural appropriation often begets one of two extreme reactions. The first is a denial of any possibility of cultural exchange outside the original culture. The second often comes in the form of a cringe-worthy whitesplain of the – to paraphrase –...
College, Collagen, Collision
Photograph by Johannes Dietschi This poem is from Hopscotch, a collection of poems concerned with notions of nostalgia, neighourhoods, family, and larger collections of people; ‘College, Collagen, Collision’ in particular examines how and why people come or are...
The Truth about Westerners: a fictitious email exchange
Friday 01/04/2016 From: Mai Nguyen Subject: Being Asian in the West Dear Dr Kim, I hope you don’t mind me emailing you out of the blue. Last year I took your course on “Contemporary Issues in International Relations” and found it very enriching. Thank you very...
Reinvigorating The Roots of Realism
Those who follow International Relations might have notice the curious rise of the “Thucydides Trap” as the vogue concept among leaders. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has dropped the reference on numerous occasions at international summits abroad.[1] It...
Bearing Witness: Three Digressions Through Art
Modern identity politics is often denigrated; depicted as an irrational mass shouting defiantly about their experiences; a moment of politics that erases the good old fashion posturing of parliamentary debate. While identity politics, like all politics, operates in...
The Destruction of Difference: Paternalistic Australian Policies
In 2015, former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, announced his support of Western Australian Premier Barnett’s plan to close nearly half of the state’s two hundred and seventy-four remote Indigenous communities.[1] This proposal, which spurred much public criticism and...
Collective Responsibility and the Root of All Evil
Within Hannah Arendt’s classic New Yorker essay, ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ (1963) and subsequent book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), an alternative explanation for the origins of the human capacity for evil are explored. Her famous...
Two Poems by Rozhdestvensky in English for the First Time
– Translated by Louis Klee & Milena Selivanov War and Poetry: A Journey Through My Russian Roots – by Milena Selivanov I am writing from St Petersburg, Russia, where I have returned after seven years in Australia. This is my father’s hometown and it’s not my...Past Issues
