6pm - 7:30pm Monday 14 September, 2026. 

Register here for this event.

Exposing the Shark Attack Industrial Complex will examine and challenge the public's relationship with sharks, the beach, and our own identity. The way social, political, and commercial interests combine to portray all sharks in a one-dimensional manner to generate increased income, tourism, hotel rooms, movie tickets, and political cover will be discussed by Associate Professor Chris Pepin-Neff.

Pepin-Neff’s talk comes at a sensitive and emotional time for the local community following a cluster of shark attacks across Australia. This talk is based on the idea that being silent about shark attacks and shark bite prevention has never made anyone safer. This is the time and season to equip the public with more information, including challenging stereotypes about “rogue sharks” and what we believe to be true.

Please come on Tues. 15 September at 6:30pm to this special Social Science Week event and Q&A to discuss and contest the public’s understanding of sharks and the ocean, and bring as many questions as you like! There comes a tipping point where the exploitation of easy narratives about sharks and the ocean harms the public. And that moment has arrived. Again, harder questions make for a safer summer, and I hope you can join us!

Speaker:

Dr. Chris Pepin-Neff is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and one of the world's leading experts on human-shark interactions and shark attacks. 

Details:

Date: Monday 14 September 2026
Time: 6:30-7:30pm (arrive from 6pm)
Venue: Seminar room 650, Social Sciences Building, Science Road, The University of Sydney

5-7pm, Wednesday 16 September, 2026.

Register here to attend.

Our Stories invites community members and anyone interested in storytelling to explore how people represent their experiences and places through film. The evening features a short talk by Dr Habib Moghimi (University of Sydney) and Nick Grinpukel (Social Impact Lab, UTS) on how documentary and creative media can support communities in telling their own stories. The session asks: who tells our stories, who decides what is seen and heard, and what changes when people hold the camera themselves?

The event continues with a screening of Parramatta Redux by Malini Sur (Western Sydney University), a 38-minute documentary exploring the diverse communities connected to the Parramatta River, from First Nations Darug custodians to migrants and long-term residents. Following the screening, a Q&A with the filmmaker, panelists, and audience will explore the film’s approach to representation, storytelling, and the possibilities of documentary practice.

Speakers:

Habib Moghimi

Habib Moghimi is a media sociologist and filmmaker at the University of Sydney, working at the intersection of public sociology and visual media. He convenes TASA’s Media Thematic Group and developed the concept of public sociological film, using documentary and participatory methods to share sociological research with communities beyond academia.

Nick Grinpukel

Nick Grinpukel joins us from the Social Impact Lab at UTS’s Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion. As a facilitator and action research practitioner, his work brings together diverse community and university partners to co-design responses to complex social and environmental challenges. His work focuses on participatory practices that centre lived experience and create meaningful, place-based change.

Malini Sur

Malini Sur is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the School of Social Sciences at Western Sydney University. An award-winning author, documentary filmmaker, and photographer, her work has been supported by the Australian Research Council, the Dutch Research Council, Singapore’s Ministry of Education, Tata Trusts, and Parramatta Council.

Parramatta Redux (38 minutes) tells the evolving story of timeless connections, exploring the enduring impact of colonization and the living, breathing reality of the Parramatta River and its city today. The film uncovers the resilience of those who have called Parramatta home, from its Indigenous custodians to its newest immigrants. As new infrastructures reshape space and migration alters the demographics of Western Sydney, the river and its spirits are more than an enduring witness to the strains between country and displacement, heritage and modernity, and progress and climate. This film is a journey through the past, present, and future of Parramatta, and an invitation to reflect on the ongoing tensions between historical forces and rapid changes.

This documentary film is an outcome of The Collaborative Museum: Embedding Cultural Infrastructure in the City Australian Research Council Linkage Project LP200301481 and generous support from the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University.

Details:

Date: Wednesday 16 September
Time: 5-7pm
Venue: Seminar room 650, Social Sciences Building, Science Road, The University of Sydney

5:15-8:00 pm, Thursday 17 September, 2026.

Register here to attend.

Please join us for the 19th E.L. 'Ted' Wheelwright 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)

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.

Details:

Date: Thursday 17 September
Time: 6-8pm (arrive from 5:15pm)
Venue: lecture Theatre 200, Social Sciences Building, Science Road, The University of Sydney

3:00-4:30 pm, Thursday 10 September, 2026.

This talk focuses upon the ways in which fashion designers materially negotiate location - from social encounters across local, global and online spaces to ancestral connections and atmospheres – into their cultural practice.  Drawing upon an ethnographic study of Fijian fashion designers, I explore the ways in which locality is layered into clothing designs as they move through the phases of the value chain. The first part of the paper attends to the production of traditional and novel aesthetics of locality through fabric and the use of patterns such as local vegetation, geometrical lines and sinuous spirals. I then turn to the distribution and marketing of clothing and fashion, highlighting the ways that designers embed locality through links and connections via social media posts.  Bridging historical work on clothing, Indigenous forms of cultural production and social media branding, I conclude by extending conceptions of materiality, embodiment and place-based identities.

Speaker: 

Heather A. Horst is Professor of Design Anthropology at the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. A sociocultural anthropologist by training, she researches material culture, mobility, and the mediation of social relations, through the study of homes, clothing, and technology. Selected publications include Digital Anthropology (2012/2020); Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practices (2016); The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones: Pacific Perspectives (2018); Location Technologies in International Context (2019); and Decentring Automated Decision-Making (2026). She is also the Executive Producer of three documentary films: "Smartphones and Parenting: Fijian Perspectives" with Robert J. Foster, Romitesh Kant and Eliki Drugunalevu; "Mobail Goroka" on mobile phone infrastructures in Papua New Guinea with Robert J. Foster, Verena Thomas, and Jackie Kauli; and a forthcoming film on fashion and adornment with Letila Mitchell, Juan Francisco Salazar and Rako Pasefika.

Details:

Date: Thursday 10 September
Time: 3-4:30pm 
Venue: Room 441, Social Sciences Building, Science Road, The University of Sydney
Zoom: Join here