HM Sydney 2016 Conference Wrap

11th Dec 2016

Historical Materialism Sydney 2016

Date: 25-26 November 

Location: University of Sydney

HM Sydney 2016

Dear HM supporter,

We are writing with a brief report on this year’s HM Sydney conference — Populism, Capitalism…and the Alternative? — which was held on Friday 25 & Saturday 26 November. 

It was widely felt that this was our best conference yet, and certainly our biggest, with over 160 people attending. We had 56 presenters, delivering a total of 62 papers.

We are proud to say that the average standard of the papers and discussion was easily the highest we have seen. It’s very exciting to see a bigger pool of Marxist researchers emerging in Australia.

Esther Leslie was an excellent keynote speaker and delivered another short paper and launched her new book. Verity Burgmann delivered an inspiring closing keynote on workers’ struggles in the 21st century.

We want to express our heartfelt thanks to Esther and Verity, and to all the presenters.

We will be putting some of the sessions up on Soundcloud (first upload here), and it will also eventually appear at We Are Many, which also has audio from other HM conferences around the world.

We also want to thank our official sponsors, The University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences & School of Social and Political Sciences, and of course Historical Materialism journal.

Finally, the time of year we held the conference was well received, and we will seek to hold next year’s event at the same venue at the equivalent time of year.

If you would like to be involved in organising or promoting next year’s conference please get in touch with Tad Tietze directly via tadtietze@gmail.com.

Sincerely,

Gareth Bryant

Joe Collins

Rory Dufficy

Bill Dunn

Cat Moir

Claire Parfitt

Tad Tietze

 

The HM Sydney organising team