Critical Public Conversations

The Australian Centre's hugely popular Critical Public Conversations (CPC) series is the Centre's flagship public event offering.

The Critical Public Conversation (CPC) series aims to enrich the university's social, cultural, and intellectual life and beyond by facilitating conversations that explore the challenges at the heart of relations between Indigenous and settler peoples in a respectful and considerate manner. By making explicit the fraught foundations of this relationship and its centrality to the politics of this continent, the series develops capacity for scholarship that is more ethical and academically rigorous.

Each year the presentations are organised around a central theme. Previous themes include:

  • Introducing Critical Public Conversations - Semester one,2020
  • What does success in Indigenous Higher education look like? - Semester two, 2020
  • Exploring Indigenous Settler Relations - 2021
  • Undoing Australia - 2022

Country, Climate, Colonialism

In 2023, the Australian Centre’s Critical Public Conversations webinar series will focus on the relationship between Country, Climate, Colonialism. The series seeks to interrogate the settler state’s incapacity to manage the ecology of this continent and will highlight the ways in which First Nations care for, and obligations to, Country are inextricably bound to questions of sovereignty. The webinar series will showcase research and activism that explores what it means to care for Country and do environmental work in the context of ongoing colonial occupation.

Upcoming Critical Public Conversations Webinars

Previous Critical Public Conversations

Engage with recordings from previous Critical Public Conversation webinars.