2025 Paul Priday Gender and Cultural Studies Annual Lecture

Humiliation in Australian Culture

Prof. Ghassan Hage | University of Melbourne

Friday, September 12 | 5:30pm doors for a 5:45pm start

Humiliation is a feature of many domains of life and takes specific forms in each of those domains. In this presentation, I want to share some of the preliminary groundwork that I have engaged in, and have felt needed, for the investigation of certain cultures, apparatuses and practices of humiliation that are constitutive of Australia’s social and cultural spaces. These are concerned with how to define the experience of humiliation and the manifold forms that it takes as a socio-affective phenomenon. They are also concerned with the politics of dignity generated by this experience. While it is the case that humiliation is common to colonial, racial, patriarchal, sexual and class forms of domination and abuse, this does not mean that all struggles for dignity are progressive. Indeed, one can say that the experience of humiliation has been historically behind some of the most reactionary forms of politics, both internationally and in Australia.

Please join us for some refreshments in Sounds Cafe after the talk.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Ghassan Hage is a Professorial Fellow in Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne. His most recent books include The Diasporic Condition (2021), The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism (2023) and Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Being (forthcoming 2025)

Image of Nauru detention centre that appeared in the Canberra Times, July 23, 2016