FREE | 5-7pm | Thursday 12th of November | Dr Mary Mahoney AO Amphitheatre, UQ St Lucia

‘The openness of relational logic extends beyond Oceania,’ so with this we are tide-taken, wind-swept, called upon by history, our ancestors, and answerable to kin, all while our lives are metered by clocks not of our making.[1] We are constituted through relations both destructive and nourishing, structured by colonialism, capitalism, Country, kinship. The very openness of relational ordering calls for critical attention. This is increasingly impressed upon us by the cumulative harm – the devastation of the environmental and cultural realm – endemic to dominant structures of social reproduction, especially as they reach their absolute limits. Such conditions ‘call for the rejuvenation and exercise of relational Aboriginal diplomacy with the coloniser and the wider world’.[2]

– Tristen Harwood

Over decades Dr Aunty Mary Graham has theorised and put forward a relational-ethical order adequate to this task. The relational logic developed in her political philosophy offers both a ground for imaginative possibility and everyday practices that recognise distinctiveness and autonomy as well as nourishing collective life-systems.

Reflective Motives presents Relational Ordering, an in-conversation keynote between Graham and Tristen Harwood, which considers what Graham’s political philosophy asks of us, the possibilities it opens, and forms of collective life it might yet enable.

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This is an inclusive, outdoors event at the Dr Mary Mahoney AO Amphitheatre, with live streaming available for those unable to attend in person. Please register to attend. If you are attending online, we will be in touch closer to the talk with instructions for accessing the livestream. Bring a picnic dinner. While the content of this conversation will be philosophical, art historical and political, children and families are welcome.

[1] Mary Graham and Morgan Brigg, “All Perspectives,” in Politics: Philosophical Ordering by Country (Melbourne: Thames & Hudson Australia, 2026), 164.

[2] Graham and Brigg, “The Centrality of Relating,” 124.

Image credit (left to right): Dr Aunty Mary Graham, Courtesy of the speaker. Tristen Harwood, Courtesy of the speaker.

Contact the host of Relational Ordering: Reflective Motives Keynote Conversation with Aunty Mary Graham and Tristen Harwood

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