It’s clear that children need a safe haven to grow well. It’s less clear that the nuclear family does that job
Every culture works out their own version of family life: paradoxically each version is seen as perfectly ‘natural’ and ‘good’. Tonight we’ll be exploring radical challenges to our ideas about family, probing where the ideal of the nuclear family came from, and wondering what future families might look like. Amid heated debates around population, fertility and parenting, we’ll ask what role the state should play in legitimating families, if any. Indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta, artist and theatre director Samara Hersch, and professor of Anthropology and Sociology, Sonja van Michelen, will provoke, unsettle and liberate some of our deep assumptions about families are for, and what we might hope from them at their best.
Speaker
Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, author, educator, arts critic, and researcher who is a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. Across disciplines in literature, history, Indigenous Knowledges, psychology, environmental studies and technology, his work focuses on applying Indigenous methods of inquiry to resolve complex global issues. He is currently senior lecturer in Indigenous knowledges and the founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University. He is the author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (2019); Right Story, Wrong Story: How to Have Fearless Conversations in Hell (2023); and Snake Talk: How the World’s Ancient Serpent Stories Can Guide Us (2025).
Speaker
Sonja van Wichelen is Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Sydney, where she studies how law, science, and technology shape the politics of life itself. Her work spans adoption, surrogacy, and reproductive technologies, tracing how kinship is being remade in a globalised world. She is the author of Legitimating Life: Adoption in the Age of Globalisation and Biotechnology (2019) and Biolegality: A Critical Introduction (2024). She co-edits the Biolegalities book series, sits on the editorial boards of Science, Technology & Human Values and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and is a committee member for the Annual Review of Anthropology.
Artist
Samara Hersch is an artist and theatre director working between Europe, Australia and Asia. Her practice combines contemporary performance and community engagement and her research explores intimacy as a political act. Samara received the prestigious Caroline Neuber Scholarship in Leipzig in 2023 and is part of the EU Network ACT (Art, Climate, Transition). Her recent projects include: Body of Knowledge (presented at FOURI! Festival, Kyoto Experiment, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art and more), a work that invites teenagers to host conversations with adults regarding questions they have about the body; Sex and Death and the Internet (presented at Adelaide International Arts Festival, Moodestraat, Arts House Melbourne and more), an intimate encounter led by performers in their Seventies and Eighties; and Dybbuk(s) (winner of the Music Theatre Now Award in Rotterdam 2021), a feminist conversation with the dead.
Host
Natasha Mitchell is a multi-award-winning journalist, radio presenter, and podcaster. She is host of the ABC Radio National’s Big Ideas program and podcast, and was founding host and producer of the blockbuster radio show All in the Mind which won the Grand Prize and four Gold World Medals at the New York Radio Festivals. Natasha hosted the ABC’s daily social affairs program Life Matters, and was founding host and producer of Science Friction, awarded Best Science and Medicine podcast at the Australian Podcast Awards. Natasha served as a board member and vice president of the World Federation of Science Journalists and was recipient of the prestigious MIT Knight Fellowship.
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