The Inhuman Condition
Navigating the world is challenging and it’s not always easy to throw out our comfortable understanding of how things work. But with the right guides and in a few short talks, fresh perspectives can be found.
Our current health system isn’t evidence based – for women. Menstruation cycles have kept women out of medicine for decades. Bronwyn Graham unpacks how and why sex hormones need to play a more central role in both our everyday lives and our medical system.
Michael Richardson examines how technology, culture, and power shape knowledge in war, security and surveillance.
Carbon markets hailed as key pillars of our climate response have turned out to be largely greenwash. Megan Evans explores how our hyper fixation on environmental markets could do more harm than good, and what alternatives are possible.
What can we expect from a world of deepfakes where anything you see or hear might be synthetic and the output of AI? Toby Walsh unpacks untruths and the ministry of AI.
Supported By
Megan Evans
Megan Evans is a Senior Lecturer in Public Sector Management within the School of Business at UNSW Canberra. She is an interdisciplinary social scientist whose work aims to inform the design, implementation and evaluation of environmental laws, policies and tools. Her research has contributed significantly to environmental policy in Australia and internationally, including work on forest regeneration carbon offset integrity that triggered the Independent Review of Australian Carbon Credit Units, the development of the Australian government’s biodiversity offset policy under federal environmental laws, and work on the economics of land-based carbon offsets that informed the establishment of the $500 million Land Restoration Fund in Queensland. Megan has engaged extensively with the federal government’s Nature Positive law reform process, and recently completed ARC Fellowship which examined the growth of private sector investment in biodiversity and natural capital. Megan holds undergraduate degrees in mathematics and ecology (UQ), a PhD in environmental policy (ANU), and is a member of the editorial board of the journal Conservation Letters.
Bronwyn Graham
Bronwyn Graham is a professor, clinical psychologist and behavioural neuroscientist at UNSW Sydney. Her research examines how female-unique factors, like fluctuating sex hormones and pregnancy, impact women’s mental health. Bronwyn has held numerous fellowships, including an ARC DECRA, a UK-based MQ Fellowship, an American Australian Association Neurological Fellowship, and she has received continuous funding from the ARC since 2014. Bronwyn’s awards include a Psychological Science ‘rising star’, a NSW Young Tall Poppy, and the Biological Psychiatry Aubrey Lewis Award. Bronwyn regularly appears in the media and she disseminates her findings to health professionals through collaborations with organisations including AnxietyUK and Black Dog Institute.
Michael Richardson
Michael Richardson is a writer, researcher, and teacher living and working on Gadigal and Bidjigal country. He is an Associate Professor in Media and Culture at UNSW Sydney, where he co-directs the Media Futures Hub and the Autonomous Media Lab, and an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making + Society. His research examines technology, power, witnessing, trauma, and affect in contexts of war, security, and surveillance. His latest book is Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Climate, and Data After the End of the World (2024).
Toby Walsh
Toby Walsh is Chief Scientist of UNSW.AI, UNSW Sydney’s AI Institute. He is a strong advocate for limits to ensure AI is used to improve our lives, having spoken at the UN and to heads of state, parliamentary bodies, company boards and many others on this topic. This advocacy has led to him being “banned indefinitely” from Russia. He is a Fellow of the Australia Academy of Science and was named on the international Who’s Who in AI list of influencers. He has written four books on AI for a general audience, the most recent is Faking It! Artificial Intelligence in a Human World.
Photo: TU Berlin, Christian Kielmann
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We acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation - the custodians of the country in which we meet - and acknowledge their Elders, past and present.
While we believe in freedom of speech, the views and opinions expressed by the speakers are not necessarily the views of The Ethics Centre and our partners.