[FOPA 2025] Day 2

** 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 2: Saturday, 13 December Presentations

09.00am MSCP - Gnome
Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning.

In 1934, Samuel Beckett penned a formidable send-up of his short-lived professionalism in the university sector having found endless frustration amongst its ivory borders. Setting its decisional framework to one side, this poetic inflection becomes a trace through which to rethink our own relation to, and difference from, the no longer brick-and-mortar beacon of << and now only a >> symbolic bureaucracy. As the university's erosively unsustainable practices continue to gut and exacerbate capacities of patience, precarity and tolerance, this discussion asks how its place as institution might be rethought today? What desire can be formed through uncommon approaches that turn from it to renewed practices and places of learning? Is thinking still possible... if so, what and how? To answer these questions the discussion focuses on Beckett’s four-line poem 'Gnome', especially for its intersecting themes of institutional resistance and the subtle, unannounced and seemingly irresolvable dialectic between learning and education.

02.45pm George Vassilacopoulos - A Genocide Alphabet (book launch)
This work is informed by a sense that the times call for minimalist thinking about ontological truth: the minimal truth of an absolute criminal being. It holds that those of the West/Europeans are being asked to give a frank account of themselves by those who already know them infinitely more intensely than they may know themselves, namely the sovereign peoples whose lands remain occupied. For the occupiers, to be as (self-)knowing through and in response to this call is to receive the imperative, ‘Think with your being as fully exposed to our being.’ It is fundamentally to face the question, ‘You are the bearers of criminal being. Who are you?’ The book invites the reader to respond to this question by following the colonising movement of modern western proprietary being and exposing the concealment of its criminality.

04.00pm Remi Johnson & Phoebe Gawin - Coastal Trade
This panel explores value at the threshold by looking at trade practices which are outside our current understanding of value. Real estate investment and financialisation are forms of trade which emerged from capitalism and challenge our understanding of value. This session takes a blue humanities approach in its concern with trade practices on the Australian coast. It juxtaposes pre-capitalist modes of trade with contemporary forms of asset wealth. Remi Johnson will present on the sea cucumber (trepang) trade between First Nations Australians and the Makassan people of Indonesia. Phoebe Gawin will talk to the way that beach front real estate assets threatened by rising tides pose serious legal problems.

05.15pm Dr Samir Mahmoud, Mr Turhan Yolcu & Mr Mohammad Naushad - A Universe of Meaning: The Islamic Worldview on Palestine
Quoting the poet June Jordan, Dr Angela Davis states that "Palestine is the moral litmus test of the world." It is the battleground for ideas and weapons, revelation and revolution. In a world where we increasingly know the price of everything and the value of nothing, where does moral virtue fit with truth, metaphysics, religion, justice, and violence? This conversation will aim to restore value and justice in its appropriate place from Islamic metaphysical, epistemic and axiological perspectives. The seminar seeks to explore the philosophical, spiritual and legal grounds articulated by the Islamic intellectual tradition as it relates to Al Aqsa and Palestine. This is particularly through:

• a unique ontology and cosmology,

• an epistemology grounded in affirming revelation, reason, critical inquiry, and investigation, and,

• a value system of beauty, where politics is an extension of ethics.

08.15pm Erin Manning - The Being of Relation (book launch)
You, “tu”, the intimate mode of address at the opening of Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation speaks to the blackness that can’t be enfolded into ontologies of capture. This blackness, the opacity of relation, is a difference without separability. Difference without separability makes commonality tremble. It resists the separation that assures us of the self-same. Launching The Being of Relation in Australia, ManningI proposes to craft an encounter to the intimate impersonal of difference without separability, and to ask how, in approximation of proximity, an errant politics of a being of relation activates a parapedagogy of relation.