E.L ‘Ted’ Wheelwright Memorial Lecture: Climates of Uncertainty

The annual E.L. ‘Ted’ Wheelwright Memorial Lecture is held to commemorate the pioneering role that Ted Wheelwright played in developing studies in Political Economy in Australia. This year it will take centre stage in the program of the 2026 Social Sciences Week (12-20 September).

Guest Speaker

Geoff Mann is a Distinguished Professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver BC, where he teaches political economy and economic geography. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, and the author of In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution, Disassembly Required: A Field Guide to Actually Existing Capitalism, and Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future (with Joel Wainwright), which won the 2019 Sussex International Theory Prize. Mann is a senior fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking and a Guggenheim Fellow.

Climates of Uncertainty

Numbers have their limits, but by every metric currently in use, global uncertainty has accelerated in the last decade, and the future is more uncertain, for more people, than at any time since measurement began just after World War II. How high will the cost of living rise? How will AI and other technologies impact our jobs? What will life be like in a world 3° hotter? When and where will the US start another war? Where is populist radicalism taking us? No one knows. For a host of reasons—from economic insecurity to climate change, political instability to technological change—there is a sense, shared by many living otherwise very different lives, that we have reached a point where we can neither know what happens next nor trust history as our guide. It is as if the past and the future have become untethered.

The many ways we deal with this experience are shaped by systems of belief, measurement, method and power inherited from the past, sometimes radically reconfigured in the shadow of the shifting unknown. Claims to knowledge, foresight and faith attempt to rein in the unmanageable future, insisting they have the answers, or the key to discovering them—and yet our uncertainties only grow. What can we base our political commitments on when we have cannot expect tomorrow will be like today? What can the ways we wrestle with uncertain futures—like climate models, prediction markets, high-tech promises, or reactionary revanchism—tell us about a world without a “normal”?

Details

Date & time: 5:15-8:00pm, Thursday 17 September
Venue: Lecture Theatre 200, Social Sciences Building, Science Road, University of Sydney