1315th OGM and Open Lecture

“Challenges for Open Enquiry and Scholarship in a Divided Age”

Professor Alan Davison

Professor and Dean
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
University of Technology Sydney

Date: Wednesday, 6 September 2023, 6.30 – 8.00 pm AEST 
Video presentation: YouTube video
All are welcome

Summary: Are the current settings within the “ecosystem” of academia – career incentives, and the pressures of social media and public discourse – optimal for generating the best research? In this talk, Alan Davison will outline some of the key drivers in our current academic environment and public discourse that are inimical to genuine research innovation and deep inquiry, how some disciplines are seeking to redress this (such as in the US with the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioural Sciences - SOIBS), and what might be done here in Australia.

Professor Alan Davison is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney. His research interests cover music and visual culture, art and aesthetics, celebrity studies, and 19th-century European cultural history. More recently he has actively promoted viewpoint diversity within our academic communities (as the lead for Heterodox Academy in Australia) and has published both scholarly and popular articles on trends in social sciences and humanities research. In late 2021, Alan partnered with well-known media figure Josh Szeps to launch the “Permission to Think” speaker series, which invites prominent scholars to look at the role of intellectuals and institutions during this age of outrage in public debate of complex issues, especially in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) disciplines. To date, guests in the series have included the likes of Jon Haidt and Alice Dreger.