Sisonke Msimang (2022) | Precious White Lives

Sisonke Msimang (2022) | Precious White Lives

Author: Festival of Dangerous Ideas January 9, 2023 Duration: 45:16

Australia is professed to be the most successful multicultural society in the world. However, with our treatment of multicultural communities throughout the pandemic, a selective immigration progress and fraught ongoing Indigenous relations Australia continues to deliver some sharp lessons about race. Why is it that some lives are remembered, commemorated and valued more than others? 
 
Delivered in the wake of the Queen's passing, author and activist Sisonke Msimang explores the preciousness of white life in the precarious face of Black Lives.

Sisonke Msimang is an award-winning writer whose long-form writing on money, power and sex has appeared in the New York TimesForeign Affairs the Washington PostLapham's Quarterly and a range of other publications. She is also a columnist for The Guardian Australia. Currently a fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), she has fellowships at Yale University and the Aspen Institute, where her work has focussed on the form and content of women's stories.  She served as the Executive Director of a human rights organisation that provided grant funding and advocacy support to amplify the voices of activists living and working across Southern Africa. Much of that work involved gender justice in conflict and crisis-affected countries, most notably Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe. 


For more than a decade, the Festival of Dangerous Ideas has curated a space where provocative thinking isn't just welcomed, it's the entire point. This podcast is a direct line to that stage, offering an archive of talks that deliberately unsettle comfortable opinions and interrogate the stubborn problems we often agree to ignore. Each episode captures a live conversation from Australia's original disruptive ideas festival, presenting arguments that can be exhilarating, uncomfortable, and vitally important. You’ll hear from a compelling roster of festival alumni-including leading experts, intellectual troublemakers, and visionary authors-who share perspectives that conventional discourse frequently sidelines. The discussions here aren't theoretical exercises; they grapple with the pressing and difficult issues shaping our society and culture right now. Tuning in means granting yourself access to a decade-long tradition of intellectual courage, where the core assumption is that some truths are only reached by first entertaining a dangerous idea. It’s a chance to listen as boundaries are pushed, not for shock value, but for clarity. The result is a consistently challenging and refreshing audio experience that complicates simple narratives and expands what feels possible to talk about.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Festival of Dangerous Ideas
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