The Minefield

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The Minefield Podcast

In a world marked by wicked social problems, The Minefield helps you negotiate the ethical dilemmas, contradictory claims and unacknowledged complicities of modern life.

  1. 1 DAY AGO

    “Truths that lie too deep for taint”: Wilfred Owen’s war poetry in our blood-soaked present

    The war poetry of Wilfred Owen refuses the comfort of hollow consolation in response to the mass loss of life — it also urges the sacrifice of the kind of bellicose pride that sees nothing but territorial gain and national self-interest, and is prepared to offer up the lives of the young to these ends.  In a time of heightened violence and bloodshed, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens – along with acclaimed concert pianist and award-winning writer Simon Tedeschi – attempt to recover the rhetorical power and moral significance of two of Owen’s best-known poems, “Strange Meeting” and “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”.

    53 min

  2. 18 SEPT

    Can modern politics avoid propaganda?

    With the US presidential election on the horizon, to say nothing of a number of Australian elections, our airwaves, news sites and social media feeds are filled with political rhetoric. Many of us have come to accept political rhetoric — with its obfuscations, generalisations, exaggerations and outright evasions — as the price of doing business with democratic politics. Is there a meaningful difference anymore between political rhetoric and propaganda? What disciplines and constraints must political rhetoric adopt in order to keep itself free of the propagandistic temptation?

    54 min

  3. 11 SEPT

    Will Australia’s proposed cap on international students do more harm than good?

    Given the dependence of many Australian universities on international student fees, a significant drop in enrolments with no corresponding increase in government funding will likely yield a decline in the quality of teaching and research, a reduction in academic staff, and a precipitous tumble down the world university rankings.  This would do considerable damage to Australia's fourth largest "export". If the forecasts are accurate, why would the federal government embark on legislation that amounts to an act of national self-harm?

    54 min

  4. 4 SEPT

    Festival of Dangerous Ideas: Is Australia breaking?

    One of Australia’s greatest strengths has been the remarkable diversity of its multicultural society. But is this also a potential source of weakness? In this live recording at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens, along with guest Stan Grant, explore the internal and external forces that risk undermining our sense of social unity.

    54 min

  5. 28 AUG

    “Freedom!”: Why can’t US politics agree on the meaning of its most basic principle?

    Even for a nation obsessed with the concept of “freedom” — or perhaps it would be better to say, concepts, not all of them easily reconciled, some of them utterly incommensurable — the prominence it was given during the recent Democratic National Convention was arresting. It was as though the Democratic Party vaulted the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush alike — both of which used “freedom” as a mantra, a talisman, a point of vital differentiation over against communism and terrorism — and return to the muscular wartime rhetoric of Franklin Roosevelt, with his vision of domestic or civic freedom. But are these competing visions of freedom not doomed to remain in an untenable tension without a mediating or underlying conception of freedom’s nature and limits?

    54 min

  6. 21 AUG

    Coleman Hughes, “colourblindness”, and the contentious politics of race

    In democracies with a history of racial injustice, are “colourblindness” and recognition of a “common humanity” — which were at the heart of the moral philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. — desirable as expressions of our commitment to justice as equality?

    53 min

  7. 14 AUG

    “We live in a society!”: Seinfeld’s “Bizarro” comedy of morals

    When the first episode of Seinfeld went to air in 1989, it faced stiff competition from a packed field of American sitcoms. By its finale in 1998, the “show about nothing” had redefined the sitcom genre and conquered comedy. Critical to its success was the unlikely alchemy of the four central characters — their navigation of the interpersonal conflicts and petty irritations of New York City life, and their heedless disregard for conventions of morality. That was the trick: the situations they found themselves in had to be relatable, but the characters themselves could not be sympathetic. They had to be superficial, selfish, inconstant, immature, monstrous — which is to say, “Bizarro” — versions of themselves. As co-creator and executive producer Larry David put it, the guiding philosophy was “no hugging, no learning”. But, as it turns out, there may just be a kind of moral seriousness lurking beneath the mania.

    54 min

  8. 7 AUG

    “I don’t want to join any club that would have me as a member”: How funny is irony meant to be?

    Humour can often be a response to the sense of being ill-at-home in society — perhaps even ill-at-home in the world. But whether it takes the form of fatalism or self-deprecation, all such forms of ironic self-distancing have a sting in the tail.

    53 min
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Hosts & Guests

About

In a world marked by wicked social problems, The Minefield helps you negotiate the ethical dilemmas, contradictory claims and unacknowledged complicities of modern life.

Information

  • Creator
    ABC listen
  • Years Active
    2015 - 2024
  • Episodes
    385
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2024, Australian Broadcasting Corporation. All right reserved.
  • Show Website
    The Minefield

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