John Keane

John Keane has recently been appointed as Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney. He is also Research Professor at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB) Berlin. In 1989, he founded the Centre for the Study of Democracy in London. Among his many books are The Media and Democracy (1991), the prize-winning Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995), Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions (1998), a study of power in 20th-century Europe, Vaclav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts (1999) and Violence and Democracy (2004). His latest book, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009) is the first comprehensive survey of democratic ideas and institutions for over a century.

Monitory Democracy?

This keynote lecture proposes a fundamental revision of the way we think about democracy in our times. It pinpoints an epochal transformation that is taking place in the contours and dynamics of representative democracy in countries otherwise as different as the United States and India, France and Australia. It calls into question 'end of history' perspectives and maritime metaphors (Huntington's 'third wave' of the sea simile has been the most influential), both of which are seen to be much too bound to the surface of things, too preoccupied with continuities and aggregate data to notice that political tides have begun to run in entirely new directions. The unorthodox claim is that, from roughly the mid-twentieth century, our world has been living through an historic sea change, one that is taking us from the old world of representative democracy towards a form of monitory democracy defined by the multiplication and dispersal of many different power-monitoring and power-contesting mechanisms, both within more local and national fields of government and civil society and beyond, in cross-border settings that were once dominated by empires, states and business organisations. The lecture poses questions about the causes and causers of this new historical form of democracy, its advantages and disadvantages, and why it has fundamental implications for how we think about media and democracy in the coming decades.

John Durham Peters

John Durham Peters is F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor and Department Chair of Communication Studies, and Professor of International Studies, at the University of Iowa. He is the author of two books, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). He is the author of over fifty journal articles and book chapters on the philosophy of communication, intellectual history of communication research, democratic theory and the public sphere, and cultural history of media. He has also published in such diverse fields as sociology, anthropology, music, film studies, cultural studies, religious studies, history, theater, and philosophy. His writing has been translated into many languages including Bulgarian, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, and Ukrainian. He teaches courses at all levels at the University of Iowa from first-year seminars to doctoral seminars. He likes to play ultimate frisbee and basketball and is the grandfather of three!

Robyn Archer

Robyn Archer AO is a singer, writer, director, artistic director and public advocate of the Arts. In all these roles her reach is global.

Having set an international benchmark in the 1980s for English language interpretation of songs by Brecht/Weill/Eisler, she will perform this repertoire this year in Hawai’i, Adelaide, and Port Fairy. Her recent public speeches and keynote addresses have been enthusiastically received  and will be published in June 2010 by The University of Western Australia Press under the title Detritus; in March 2010 she gave the keynote for the 30th anniversary of the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow and will soon speak in Melbourne, Christchurch and Mackay. She most recently devised/directed a theatrical cabaret in Pittsburgh (April 2009) and is currently Creative Director of the Centenary of Canberra, and Artistic Director of The Light in Winter which she created for Federation Square, Melbourne.

Robyn has performed worldwide (including London, Paris, New York, Berlin, Amsterdam, in every corner of Australia, as well as Mexico, Bogota, Thailand, Singapore, and Slovenia) and has been the Artistic Director of the National Festival of Australian Theatre (Canberra), the Adelaide Festival of Arts, the Melbourne International Arts Festival, Ten Days on the Island (which she created for Tasmania), and for two years the European Capital of Culture. She has also been formally mentoring Arts Mildura in recent years, and informally a number of individual artists and younger artistic directors. She was a mentor at the European Festivals Association’s Atelier 2009 in Varna ( Bulgaria) and recently made a film for AUSAID and the ABC about Vanuatu.

Robyn was Chair of the Australia Council’s Community Cultural Development Board, on the Boards of the Victorian College of the Arts and the Adelaide Festival Centre,  and is currently patron of the Arts Law Society, the Australian Script Centre, The Australian Art Orchestra, Brink Productions, the Experimental Arts Foundation ,the International Women’s Development Agency, co-patron  of the Institute for Postcolonial Studies and maintains links with RMIT’s Globalism Institute.

Robyn Archer is an Officer of the Order of Australia, Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), Officer of the Crown  (Belgium) and holds honorary doctorates from the Flinders University of South Australia and the University of Sydney. In 2009 she was awarded the Dame Elisabeth Murdoch ABAF Award for Cultural Leadership.

Full details of her very full career, past and present, can be found at the depArcher lounge www.robynarcher.com.au.