2026 Wilson-Locke Lecture: "It's the end of the world as we know it" ...should we feel fine?

 

 

Please join us for this timely and crucial lecture, featuring a panel discussion and audience participation with Curtin University’s Dean of Global Futures Professor Farida Fozdar. Professor Fozdar has been recognised for her outstanding contribution to sociology and social inclusion research, being elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA). 

 

The lecture will include a panel discussion with Associate Professor Michael Gillan of the University of Western Australia Business School, and Dr Michael Pinches, editor of Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia.

 

The latest Australian values panic sparked by Opposition Leader Angus Taylor assumes a distinctive national identity requiring protection from the ’wrong kind’ of migrants, yet research shows Australian values are among the least unique globally. This is just the latest in Australian political rhetoric promoting exclusionary nationalism. Referencing R.E.M.'s 1987 song cataloguing a litany of global anxieties, this talk asks whether the "end of the world as we know it", a world fragmented by an increasingly shrill and violent defence of arbitrary, exclusionary, national borders, might actually be welcome.

It considers Australian nationalism and cosmopolitan postnational orientations, presenting research on Australians' engagement with such thinking. Quantitative and discursive data reveal both traditional and an emergent ‘multicultural’ nationalism exist, with the nation-state remaining a key foundation for identity and belonging.  Resistance to global cosmopolitan formations and orientations is clearly articulated. Yet given assaults on the international rules-based order and supra-national political structures, the erosion of human rights, and borderless environmental and technological crises, to dismiss post-national futures as impractical, premature, and ultimately utopian is naive. Should we feel fine about the end of the nationalist world…if indeed that is what we are heading towards, and what should the role of anthropologists and sociologists be in heralding these changes?