By Brendan Keogh. This article is part of a series on human rights and video games. Videogames are art. Anyone who says otherwise either doesn’t know what videogames are or they don’t know what art is. Videogames are creative works produced by creative people trying to express something. It’s that simple. Just like all forms of […]
By Benjamin Riley. This article is part of a series on human rights and video games. Like any artistic medium, video games have the capacity to engage us with the concerns of marginalised and persecuted people in the world. Of course, literature, visual art and theatre have been doing this for a long time. While […]
Armed violence kills more than half a million people each year, small arms being responsible for a great proportion of these deaths. As Stephanie Koorey recently noted in Inside Story, while small arms and other conventional weapons do not cause wars, they do contribute to the “outbreak, intensity and duration of conflict”. As a consequence, […]
Video games are a massive part of Australian and international popular culture. In 2012, the industry recorded more than $1 billion in sales in Australia. According to a 2011 study of gamers between 18 and 40 years of age, around 2 years of a person’s life can be spent on gaming. Discussion of the impact […]
By André Dao As we head to the September election, we can be sure that the political rhetoric surrounding asylum seekers will only get worse. Just yesterday, the Liberal Party posted an ad on social media that casually linked boat arrivals with street crime in Western Sydney – despite the fact that of 12,100 asylum seekers released […]
By Sienna Merope Australia’s current mandatory detention policy not only breaches our legal and ethical obligations, it is also a colossal waste of money. Mandatory detention of what the Federal Government likes to call “Irregular Maritime Arrivals” was first introduced in 1989. Under the policy, all asylum seekers who arrive by boat are put in […]
By Blue Mahy Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. – C.S. Lewis I believe what C.S. Lewis meant is that literature has a symbiotic relationship with the “real” world. Literature takes from the real world but within literature is also the power to reshape it. This is not to say that […]
Muslim women don’t have to choose between their religious identity and their Australian identity, they are in a position to embrace both.
By Amna K-Hassan This article is part of our March theme, Sport and Human Rights. It’s also part of a series of articles looking specifically at the role of women in sport. “Football doesn’t build character, it reveals it.” This was the inscription on the medallion given to every player at the end of our […]
Having focused on the plight of asylum seekers to begin 2013, in February (overflowing into March) Right Now focused on the theme of religion and human rights. To start with, it’s worth noting the connection between the two themes beginning 2013: most people seeking asylum in Australia are fleeing countries in which they are persecuted […]
By Lily King. This piece is part of our March 2013 focus on Sport and Human Rights. Richmond 15:3 from Lily King on Vimeo. I filmed this story last year as part of my Journalism course at RMIT University. We were given the assignment of making a two-minute news report on the broad subject of Asylum […]
By Sienna Merope. This piece is part of our March 2013 focus on Sport and Human Rights. A few weeks ago, the damning Bluestone Review of “culture and leadership in Australian Olympic swimming” was released. The report blamed a “toxic” culture for the Australian swim team’s generally underwhelming performance at the 2012 London Olympics, citing a […]