Artificial Intelligence, False Information, Trust in Elections and Satisfaction with Democracy in Australia
Lecture/seminar
The proliferation of false information and the rapid diffusion of generative artificial intelligence (AI) pose mounting challenges to democracy. Deepfakes, synthetic news, and AI-powered personalised political advertising are reshaping information ecosystems, raising concerns about how citizens…
The Year the Stars Fell: The Great Leonid Meteor Storm of 1833 and the Problem of Meaning in Antebellum America.
Lecture/seminar
On November 12, 1833, residents of North America witnessed over 100,000 visible meteors falling over the course of four hours. They woke their families and neighbours, creating a shared, continent-wide experience of epistemological crisis—for though the science of astronomy had made…
Tribal Visuality and the Politics of Indigenous Art: 'Mary Sully: Native Modern' Revisited - Allan Martin Lecture
Lecture
In 2024, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art launched a reclamation of the artistic career of Mary Sully, a reclusive, previously unacknowledged Dakota artist active between the late 1920s and mid-1940s. The processes of conservation, curation, and exhibition revealed new dimensions of the work,…
The Departed: Italian Migration and the American Mafia
Seminar
Massimo Anelli, Paolo Pinotti and Zachary Porreca documented the transplantation of the Sicilian Mafia to the United States in the 1920s, when a large-scale repression campaign in Italy targeted Mafia strongholds and forced many Mafiosi to migrate, and study the resulting short- and long-term…
Middle East Update No.3: The Strait of Hormuz, Australian Energy Security & Supply Chain Resilience
Panel discussion
With the Strait of Hormuz now a flashpoint in the US/Israel-Iran conflict, global energy markets face unprecedented disruption. What does this mean for Australia's energy security and the resilience of critical supply chains?This panel brings together leading experts on Gulf energy, Indo-Pacific…
Democratic Commitment and the Partisan Cost of Electoral Accountability
Lecture/seminar
Why do electorates often fail to hold transgressing electoral officials accountable? Two leading explanations point to either a lack of democratic commitment or to the partisan costs of acting on such commitments, but rarely separate these mechanisms. Bermond Scoggins and Marc Jacob develop a…
One year into Trump 2.0
Panel discussion
Join us in this discussion to unpack the wild ride of Trump’s second term and what’s next on the political rollercoaster.One year into Donald Trump’s second presidency, The Australian National University will host a timely panel examining what Trump 2.0 means for American democracy and the…