Welcome to GR Online, a series of short-form articles that take aim at the moving target of contemporary culture as it’s whisked along the guide rails of innovations in digital media, globalisation and late-stage capitalism.
Climbing the opportunity ladder
IN THE LATE summer of 1912–13 a new public high school was established in Parramatta, on the western outskirts...
All things to all people
ON 16 JULY 2020, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the launch of the $2 billion JobTrainer Fund. The media...
Tech future, human rights
IT SEEMS AS if we’re experiencing unending crises, rolling over us at such pace that we can’t catch our...
Facing foundational wrongs
ROMAN QUAEDVLIEG STANDING tall in his smart black suit – medals glistening, insignia flashing – looked every bit the man-in-uniform from...
New world dreams
EREWHON. SOUNDS WELSH – the soft ‘h’. That’s what I thought when I first saw the word on the...
Creation stories
Listen to Editor Ashley Hay in conversation with Sarah Sentilles for Byron Writers Festival. The word utopia makes me nervous, an uneasiness cultivated by too...
Erasure
It was thanks to a series of deliberate decisions made during the nineteenth century that women’s critical labours were designated ‘unproductive’ and simply wiped from view. Key to these erasures was Alfred Marshall, the revered father of neoclassical economics, who advocated strict limits on women’s choices lest they behave selfishly.
Blue wedge
A STRANGE DISQUIET stalks the Australian arts and cultural community. It’s not just the very real effects of COVID-19 –...
Orphaned responsibility
UTOPIAN IDEALS ARE ordinarily more ambitious, and romantic, than the desire to see a constitutional system functioning as it...
Restoring wholeness
AS A POLITICAL (and social) theorist, my thinking has always been anchored in a passionate attachment to the Australian...
Grounded imaginaries
THIS WE KNOW: we live within systems, institutions and structures – economic, social, political, cultural and discursive – that are generating...
Power to the people
Here in Australia, thousands of birdwatchers are collecting and entering data about birds into apps such as Birdata or eBird via smartphones.
