The Festival of Para-Academia (FOPA) is an experiment in collective equipment for an emerging cultural sphere.

A series of talks, panels, exhibitions + more will occur in Naarm between Nov 21 – 24.

FOPA is a gathering of entities responding creatively to the decay in the Australian university sector.

This event is for anyone who thinks ‘education’ ought to be done better.

EARLY ARVO SESSION | 1pm to 3pm

Critical Research Association Melbourne (CRAM)

“The Writing of Disaster”, Maurice Blanchot: A Reading Group

Justin Clemens, Joe Hughes, Elliot Patsoura, Jessica Marian

“To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to think it.”

CRAM will lead a reading and discussion group focussing on Maurice Blanchot’s “The Writing of Disaster”. Originally published in French in 1980, Blanchot sought to understand the philosophical meaning of the Holocaust as a violent and absolute historical rupture “where all was lost, including guardian thought”. In the face of an increasingly volatile planet, the sixth great extinction, active genocide in Gaza, and the technological expropriation of human symbolic capabilities, we invite participants to reflect on the contemporary significance of Blanchot’s key question: How can we think or write about disaster when by its very nature it defies speech and compels silence, burns books and shatters meaning?

The Critical Research Association Melbourne (CRAM) is an open network for people working across the various disciplines of critical studies today, based at the University of Melbourne. CRAM supports collaboration between researchers in the humanities, economics, architecture and design, law, and the arts, and aims to carve out institutional space to foster the strong collective interest in critical thought in Melbourne.

LATE ARVO SESSION | 4pm to 6pm

Melbourne School of Contemporary Art

Ted Colless and Leon Marvell

OTHER WORLDS: Explorations in Space Opera

“Space opera” is the tag for a subgenre of science fiction that unashamedly chases imaginative adventure and the romance of travel across planets, star systems and galaxies. It can include melodramatic stories of individual exploration as well as the sagas of business families or clans staking colonial claims in outer space, as well as warfare between vast galactic empires. To call these stories “operatic” doesn’t mean they’re sung (although there are instances of this!), but that—whether literary, cinematic or graphic art— they usually deliver spectacle with a good dose of histrionic special effects.

EVENING SESSION | 7pm to late

Barron Field Experience

Adam Bartlett, Justin Clemens, Bryan Cooke

The Barrons shall revel in Laws.

Sit tight, drink fast and listen keenly as those no men of the law courts, the Barron Field Experience, seek to increase the trespass by asking that perennial question: custos, quid noctis? BFE will uncuff the stranger, denude the sovereign and man up without qualities all along the watchtower. Law and order is over, courage and justice is here and now, and if ever such becomes corrupt, but can be put right again, this is the lifelong task every Barron undertakes to the limit of his strength. Being on the side of virtue the BFE will not change under an effect of law; for the Barron’s be true, but every man a liar; as it is written. No…(law), but…(truth) on! Worstward ho!