Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Saturday 28 November
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
How are you?
Such a habitual, everyday question remains one of our most difficult to answer honestly and fully. Where do we even begin? Are we ever possessed by just one state or feeling? What moves the tides of our emotional lives?
In a thoughtful discussion to address our very large - and more nuanced - human dilemmas, Raimond Gaita, Jane Caro, Benjamin Law, Kristin Alford and Sammy J interrogate our search for meaning and contentment within our own circumstances (including gender, cultural background, upbringing and socio-economic position). Why happiness rather than contentment? Why does a part of us want to destroy what we love? Are we born happy, spending our lives defending that, or are we born neutral – destined to spend our lives trying to attain happiness?
How is it possible to be incredibly happy and incredibly sad at the same time? Our Brains Trust will attempt to resolve the complicated experiences of satisfaction, kindness and contradiction.
Featuring
Benjamin Law
Benjamin Law is the author of The Family Law (2010), Gaysia (2012), the Quarterly Essay Moral Panic (2017) and editor of Growing Up Queer in Australia (2019). He's also an AWGIE Award-winning screenwriter who created and co-wrote three seasons of the award-winning TV series The Family Law (SBS/Hulu/Comedy Central Asia), wrote the sold-out mainstage play Torch the Place (Melbourne Theatre Company, 2020), and is co-executive producer, co-creator and co-writer on the forthcoming Netflix comedy-drama Wellmania. Every week, Benjamin co-hosts ABC Radio National's weekly national pop culture show Stop Everything! and interviews public figures for Good Weekend magazine (the Age/Sydney Morning Herald). He is a literary scout for Hachette Australia, board member of Story Factory, committee member of the Jesse Cox Audio Fellowship and ambassador for Plan Australia, the Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation, Victorian Pride Centre, Bridge for Asylum Seekers and the Pinnacle Foundation.
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Jane Caro
Jane Caro AM is a Walkley Award-winning Australian columnist, author, novelist, broadcaster, advertising writer, documentary maker, feminist and social commentator. Jane appears frequently on Q&A, The Drum and Sunrise ...
Kristin Alford
Kristin Alford is a futurist and founding director of foresight agency Bridge8 with a PhD in process engineering and a Masters of Management in Strategic Foresight. Her clients include government, corporate and non-for-profits where she builds capability to think and act effectively in response to big social, environmental and technological changes. She was an organiser and facilitator for the Australian Academy of Sciences project imagining Australia in 2050. Other initiatives have included crowdfunding ideas that don't make sense and running a symposium on time with a start time of 4:42am. She is currently writing a book on five ways to see the future.
Raimond Gaita
Raimond Gaita has published widely to academic and non- academic audiences. In 2009, the University of Antwerp awarded Gaita the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa ‘for his exceptional contribution to contemporary moral philosophy and for his singular contribution to the role of the intellectual in today’s academic world’.
His books, which have been widely translated, include: Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, the award-winning Romulus, My Father, which was nominated by the New Statesman as one of the best books of 1999 and was made into a prize winning film starring Eric Bana, Frank Potente and Kodi Smit-McPhee; A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love and Truth and Justice, which was nominated by the Economist as one of best books of 2000; The Philosopher’s Dog, shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Award and the Age Book of the Year, Breach of Trust: Truth, Morality and Politics and, as editor and contributor, Gaza: Morality, Law and Politics; Muslims and Multiculturalism. His latest book is After Romulus.
Gaita is Professorial Fellow in the Melbourne Law School and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne and Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at King’s College London.
Sammy J
Sammy J is an Australian comedian, writer, composer and broadcaster. He's played in Edinburgh, Montreal and London, had a sitcom on Netflix, is one half of the man/puppet comedy duo 'Sammy J & Randy' and currently ...