The Vice-Chancellor's Democracy Forum (VCDF) is UTS’s premier public lecture series. Each year, the Vice-Chancellor invites significant thinkers across various fields to engage in open dialogue on topics crucial to today's society and its advancement.

UTS is pleased to announce Fintan O'Toole, as the second speaker for our 2024 series. Don't miss one of the world's most influential columnists and writers in his highly anticipated talk, "The Perils of Self-Pity: Democracy and Identity in the Age of Trump."

In this extraordinary "year of elections" , voters in many parts of the world are being asked, not just to choose between parties and candidates, but to decide whether they still believe in the democratic system itself. In this talk, Fintan O'Toole asks why systems and values that had been taken for granted for so long are now in such peril. He argues that a central part of the problem is the distortion of the sense of victimhood. There are profound injustices but the rising far-right movements have little interest in remedying them, Instead, they take the language of resistance to oppression and distort it into a self-pity in which even those who are highly privileged can feel sorry for themselves -- and imagine themselves to be victims of some other group. The result is a politics of tribalism in which defeating the Other is much more important than gaining anything tangible. How, he asks, can we combat this drift into tribalism and restore the sense of common purpose without which democracy becomes hollow?

Attendees will have the chance to hear directly from Fintan, alongside Anna Funder and Roy Green, as they delve into why our long-standing systems and values are facing unprecedented threats.

Don’t miss this chance to dive deep into the pressing issues of our time with one of today’s most influential voices!

Date: Thursday 26 September

Time: 6:00pm - 7:15pm (doors open 5:45pm)

Location: The Great Hall, UTS Building 1, Level 5, 15 Broadway Ultimo NSW 2007

This is an event that you don't want to miss - register now!

Speakers

Fintan O'Toole is an Irish Times columnist and writer known for his books We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 (2022), Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018), and Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger (2009). He contributes to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and more. In 2011, The Observer named him one of “Britain’s top 300 intellectuals.” Fintan is Professor of Irish letters at Princeton University.

Anna Funder is one of Australia’s most acclaimed and awarded writers. Her books Stasiland and All That I Am are prize-winning international bestsellers, translated into many languages. Wifedom, hailed as a ‘masterpiece’, has been chosen as a Notable Book of 2023 by the New York Times and a Book of the Year by The Times, The Economist, the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph (UK) and The Telegraph (UK). Anna is a UTS Luminary and Ambassador.

Roy Green AM is Emeritus Professor and Special Innovation Advisor at UTS, where he was Dean of the UTS Business School. He graduated from the University of Adelaide and has a PhD in Economics from the University of Cambridge. Roy has enjoyed a career in universities, government and industry and has published widely in the areas of innovation and public policy, including projects with the OECD and European Commission. Currently Roy is Chair of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Hub and the Port of Newcastle and a board director for CSIRO and the SmartSat CRC.

We hope to see you at this exciting event.

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