Professor Joseph Camilleri OAM returns to St Michael’s to deliver three exciting lectures offering a new perspective on how we are travelling in the 21st Century.

The presentations will combine interviews with guests and conversation across the generations to help us probe the present and re-imagine the future.

There is no suggestion here that the nightmarish vision of the future Aldous Huxley paints in his Brave New World is upon us. Yet, his reading of the future has a too close- for-comfort feel about it: the conditioning of people to think in certain ways, economic and political dogmas that go virtually unquestioned, the media-shaped narratives of reality, the habit of reducing human beings to consumers, use of language and images that purposely confuse and mislead.

To make sense of current trends in Australia and the West more generally this series focuses on our public institutions, how truthful and trustworthy they are, what we the public think of them, how well equipped we are to handle, individually and collectively, the challenges of life in ‘our brave new world’.

September 11: Life in The Post-Truth World. Are lies, fake news and cover-ups the new normal?