Conversations 2021

CONVERSATIONS 2021: CONNECTION AND DISCONNECTION

Webinar 1

Relationality in a complex world

Webinar 2

The regulatory state across terrains of governance

RegNet is a hub where we collaborate between disciplines to understand how governance and regulation are shaped by connections and disconnections across systems and actors. COVID-19 has redefined the meaning of connection and disconnection; the global pandemic has disconnected us in ways we could not imagine but despite that, we keep finding new ways to connect. Conversations 2021 hosted a series of panels aiming to illuminate how connections and disconnections shape outcomes across domains including justice, welfare, and trade.

In three separate panel events, leading experts from across the social sciences considered questions around the role relationships play in regulation and governance, how current understandings of the regulatory welfare state would benefit from stronger interdisciplinary connections, and how strategic competition is reshaping the prospects for global governance.

Webinar 3

Global connections and disconnections: markets, state, earth

40 ANU COLLEGE OF ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

This panel interrogated the role of relationality across a range of domains and theoretical jumping-off points. From restorative justice to peacebuilding to development to glyphosate regulation, RegNet scholars have sought to understand the role relationships and relationality play in the creation of meaning, identity and behaviour. Through an animated conversation, the panel developed emergent and existing theories to better analyse connection and disconnection in today’s complex world.

Speakers Ǿ Chair: Associate Professor Miranda Forsyth

(RegNet, ANU)

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Dr Mary Graham (Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Queensland)PhD scholar Felicity Gray (RegNet, ANU)PhD scholar Mary Ivec (RegNet, ANU)Dr Ibolya (Ibi) Losoncz (RegNet, ANU)

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, many states have enacted large-scale welfare programs that have also expanded their regulatory reach. While the ‘regulatory welfare state’ literature helps to make sense of these transformations, it has yet to address key concerns, such as diminished accountability and transparency in social policymaking, experiences of welfare conditionality, growing reliance on digital surveillance, interlocking inequalities, and the securitisation of mobility. This panel attended to domains of the regulatory state often understood as disconnected: welfare, development, and migration. It shed light on how current understandings of the regulatory welfare state would benefit from building stronger connections with other interdisciplinary fields.

Speakers Ǿ Chair: Professor Kate Henne (RegNet, ANU)ǾǾǾǾ

PhD Scholar Jenna Harb (RegNet, ANU)PhD Scholar Walter Johnson (RegNet, ANU)Professor Veronica Taylor (RegNet, ANU)Dr Anthea Vogl (University of Technology Sydney)

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Growing strategic competition between some of the most powerful states in the world will have significant impacts on the relationships between actors across multiple policy domains. The effect could be to recast how we govern the globe. Some states will remain connected sharing technology, data and finance, others will not. Firms may find new state controls imposed on them, restricting their operations in some domains, and enabling them in others. The panel explored these entanglements and their corollary across actors and institutions in the domains of climate, energy, trade and intellectual property.

Speakers Ǿ Chair: Associate Professor Christian Downie

(RegNet, ANU)

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Emeritus Professor Peter Drahos (RegNet, ANU)Professor Anthea Roberts (RegNet, ANU)Dr Jensen Sass (RegNet, ANU)PhD scholar Alexandre San Martim Portes (RegNet, ANU)Dr Dirk van der Kley (RegNet, ANU)

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REGNET ANNUAL REPORT 2021 41