[FOPA 2025] Day 1

** Please note the ticket price includes booking fee and GST

Some notes on this years program...

The so-called crisis in education is over, we are simply moving on... and so we asked those participating to respond to a nominal orientation this year: 

“Institutional Drift, Value at the Threshold.”

How the program has taken shape is a credit to those involved in the para-academic sphere.

We will have subtle and nuanced connections between the various sessions. There are however, a number of stand-out thematics across the program:

• Onto-politics, sovereignty, occupation and liberation

• Technics, datasets, AI and imagination

• Education, the university and para-academia

• Economics and value

• Literature, poetry and criticism

Day 1: Friday, 12 December Presentations

9:00–10:00

EXISTENTIALIST SOCIETY: The Shifting Shadow of Objectivity
Presented by Remco van Santen

The presentation questions education’s long-standing pursuit of pure objectivity, the “view from nowhere” that values detached knowledge over lived experience. Drawing from physics, law, medicine, and anthropology, it shows how observation shapes outcomes, meaning arises from shared practice, and rigid procedures can obscure context. The double-slit experiment, Wittgenstein’s language games, and the Erin Patterson trial all expose objectivity’s limits when divorced from the human subject.

Rigour need not mean detachment; understanding deepens when objective measures integrate first-person experience, when numbers meet narratives and principles meet relationships. For education, this means moving beyond standardised metrics to recognise learning as relational and contextual. The aim is not to abandon objectivity but to humanise it, to rediscover that knowledge flourishes where the view from nowhere meets the view from within.

Biography

Remco van Santen, a retired chemical engineer with degrees in science, economics, and business, explores how Ancient Greek objectivity still shapes—and limits—modern understanding.

10:15–11:15

MELBOURNE SCHOOL of LITERATURE: When Poetry is Healthy

The MSL committee will present a panel on poetry introduced and moderated by Eva Birch and Lucy Van.

Melinda Bufton will present on her poetry practice and research into Gurlesque poetics, and what this can mean for unlocking the ambiguities of feminist histories whilst keeping space open for emergent work. The politics unfold, the poetry collects; a speculation into how we might read and feel these accretions and collage-like tendencies threaded through contemporary feminist poetries. George Mouratidis will present on the theory and practice of Beat poetics, counter-cultural production, scrambling the careerist equation of “success”, and engaging and building community organically and intersectionally sans box-ticking brand maintenance and creation of yet another exclusive bubble/”scene” of sniffy hipness. In short: open head, open heart, open eye, open ear, breath, body, kinesis, transmission, compassion, generosity, spontaneity. Sam Moginie will present a short talk on small-press objects from Melbourne’s poetry scene.

Biographies

Melinda Bufton is the author of poetry collections Girlery and Superette. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including anthologies. She was the winner of the 2019 Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award, resulting in the publication of her third collection, Moxie.

George Mouratidis is a poet, researcher and Fellow in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. He also co-founded the CALD literary magazine Kalliope X in 2020.

Sam Moginie is a poet and works at SOd and Melbourne School of Literature.

Eva Birch is a psychoanalyst in private practice, poet, and writer. She completed a PhD on the work of Luce Irigaray at The University of Melbourne and has published her work in Best of Australian Poems, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Un. Magazine, and Rabbit Poetry journal, among others. Her debut poetry collection Pearl was published by Rabbit Poetry in March 2025. Her debut EP is forthcoming with se Dessaisir.

Lucy Van writes poetry and criticism. Her poetry collection, The Open (Cordite 2021), was listed for the Stella prize. Her forthcoming title is MATERIAL (Permanent Draft, 2025).

11:30–12:30

LANGUAGE at the EDGE: John Forbes as Prose Writer and Critic

Presented by Brendan Casey and David Motamed

This session revisits ‘Language at the Edge’, an unpublished talk by poet John Forbes (1950–1998), whose wit and intelligence came to define a generation of Australian poetry. Drawing on this text, and the forthcoming collection Life’s No Joke: Selected Prose, editors Brendan Casey and David Motamed explore Forbes’s work as a prose writer and critic, his reflections on poetry’s institutional and political entanglements, from the avant-garde ferment of the 1970s to the academic consolidation of the 1990s. When language drifts too close to the institutions, Forbes warns, it starts to mistake safety for meaning. Through a reading and discussion, the session traces Forbes’s humour, his resistance to professionalisation, and his continuing challenge to how we value poetry.

Biographies

Dr. Brendan Casey has a PhD in Australian literature from the University of Melbourne. He is 2025 Redmond Barry Fellow at the State Library of Victoria. He has taught literature at the University of Melbourne, the Melbourne School of Literature, and the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, and published widely in Meanjin, Cordite, The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel, Memo Review and elsewhere.

David Motamed is a writer from California. He hosts a reading series in Melbourne called Bad Flâneur, previously ran a community radio show called Ratbag Poetics, and in 2023 hosted the Tasmania Poetry Month Showcase with Redroom Poetry. He is finalising his first poetry collection.

12:45–13:45

WRITING & ENJOYMENT

Presented by Eva Birch and David Ferraro

Eva Birch will present a talk on psychoanalytic writing. The seminars of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, presented between 1952 – 1980, inspired a new wave of psychoanalytic writing, termed écriture féminine (women’s writing). In the 1970s, writers such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Catherine Clément experimented with writing from the unconscious in contrast to more controlled theoretical or scientific forms. From contemporary first-person narrative writing to the fetishisation of the case note in mental health settings, what is the legacy of this movement today?

David Ferraro will present on contemporary forms of satisfaction as they relate to psychoanalytic understandings of politics, social bonds and symptoms.

Biographies

Eva Birch is a psychoanalyst in private practice, poet, and writer. She completed a PhD on the work of Luce Irigaray at The University of Melbourne and has published her work in Best of Australian Poems, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Un. Magazine, and Rabbit Poetry journal, among others. Her debut poetry collection Pearl was published by Rabbit Poetry in March 2025. Her debut EP is forthcoming with se Dessaisir.

David Ferraro is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist in Melbourne.

14:00–15:30

WILLIAM BLAKE’S FRIENDS in ETERNITY

Presented by Leon Kalumba and Chris Murray

William Blake has long been a source of inspiration to thinkers and artists. He moved against Christianity as an organised religion to find in Jesus a model for a radically vital life - the rebel archetype on the unique path of unfettered imagination. Blake's illuminated printing was produced in conversation with his friends in eternity, spiritual entities that he engaged with on the threshold of thought. This panel will explore the way that Blake was influential for the 20th Century. Leon Kalumba will outline Blake’s influence on Marshall McLuhan on the theme of constructing the tower of babel. Chris Murray will present on the significance of Blake for the fashion designer Alexander McQueen.

Biographies

Leon Kalumba is a film maker and media theorist interested in ontology, paraontology, and eschatology. He is an editor at Mongrel Matter.

Chris Murray is a romantic scholar at Monash University with an interdisciplinary expertise in the transcultural encounters of the long nineteenth-century.

15:45–16:45

SCHOOL of POLITICAL ECONOMY: Teaching Political Economy Outside the University

Presented by Dr Tim Thornton

In no other discipline do students around the world so regularly rebel against the content of their instruction than in the field of economics. This is due to the overly narrow nature of the economics curriculum which students generally find to be dull, difficult, and most of all, of very limited use to understanding the economy, or the world in general. The remedy for this parlous situation is to introduce intellectual pluralism and interdisciplinarity into the curriculum. As will be explained, this broader and richer approach is best described as ‘political economy’ rather than ‘economics’. Given ongoing resistance to reform within universities, the School of Political Economy (SPE) was established in 2019 to offer the type of economics education that universities should be offering. The presentation looks at SPE’s development thus far and considers the extent to which it might offer a general template for undertaking tertiary education outside the university system.

Biography

Dr Tim Thornton is The Director of the School of Political Economy, Melbourne, Senior Research Fellow at the Economics in Context Initiative at Boston University and Senior Research Fellow at the Global Development Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University.

17:00–18:00

PLATONIC ACADEMY: Why Universities Will Never Teach Platonism

Presented by Bernie Lewin

The modern state-sponsored institution of research and higher education is often labelled “The Academy” and yet the ethos of the modern Academy has drifted so far from the ethos of the original Academy that the latter now appears thoroughly anti-Academic. This lecture will explain Plato’s approach to academic research and why it would be foolish to expect that Platonic philosophy would ever be taught in the universities of our day.

Biography

Bernie Lewin is a founding director of the Platonic Academy of Melbourne. He has published widely in the history of science, including on the Platonic foundations of mathematics. Enthusiastic Mathematics: Reviving Mystical Emanationism in Modern Science is an historical introduction to Platonic science published by the Academy in 2018.

18:15–19:15

WERTKRITIK: Threshold to True Emancipation

Presented by William Bennett and Fabio Bucci

This panel is organised to introduce some key concepts and theories of the Marxian philosophical tradition, Wertkritik (Value-critique). William Bennett will provide an introduction to para-Marxism, a philosophical lineage emerging in opposition to Marxist-Leninism which rejects the transhistorical conception of value and labour. This esoteric reading of Marx forgoes a critique of ideology for an analysis of commodity fetishism as an objective form of domination. The crises of value offer theoretical insight for strategies of exit from the capitalist system of valorisation. Fabio Bucci will offer a more in depth analysis drawing on contemporary Wertkritik thinker Roswilta Scholtz’s concept of dissociation, associated with her critique of value and argument that the fundamental contradiction of socialisation is determined by its gender specificity.

Biographies

William Bennett is a PhD candidate at Monash University developing a philosophy of artistic production, and an artist involved with Breeze, perfume.copy and rrealartt.

Fabio Bucci is an independent scholar in philosophy, history with a background in fine arts and architecture. He is a member of the French Crises & Critique Association and Publishing House.

19:30–20:30

MONGREL MATTER: With Friends

Presented by: Leon Kalumba, Valery Vinogradovs, DX, Bobby

What does <para> in para-academia stand for? By analogy with "paranormal" (e.g. paranormal servitude/writing), we expect something greater than the extraordinary, right? An event verging on the supernatural (in relation to formulaic academia); let us see, let us forget, but in short, Mongrel Matter are not interested in leadership. Mongrel Matter are not sure if it's the Festival of Para-Academia or the Para-Festival of Academia that will kindly host a prime time session in their latest work in demonstrous philosophy… Please join us!

Biography

Mongrel Matter are Not Academics, Not Artists, Not Writers, Not Musicians, Not Filmmakers but we engage with all these things. All of these titles and bios are making our vision blurry and our decisions hurried.