After the upheaval of the pandemic, the Australia Institute is delighted to announce Politics in the Pub is back and at a brand new venue: Verity Lane Market!

Please join us in conversation with Bri Lee, award-winning author of Eggshell Skull, to discuss her new book Who Gets to be Smart.

Bri Lee's Who Gets to be Smart is a forensic and hard-hitting exploration of knowledge, power and privilege.

In 2018 Bri Lee's brilliant young friend Damian was named a Rhodes Scholar, an apex of academic achievement. When she goes to visit him and takes a tour of Oxford and Rhodes House, she begins questioning her belief in a system she has previously revered, as she learns the truth behind what Virginia Woolf described almost a century earlier as the 'stream of gold and silver' that flows through elite institutions and dictates decisions about who deserves to be educated there. The question that forms in her mind drives the following two years of conversations and investigations: who gets to be smart?

Interrogating the adage, 'knowledge is power', and calling institutional prejudice to account, Bri once again dives into her own privilege and presumptions to bring us the stark and confronting results. Far from offering any 'equality of opportunity', Australia's education system exacerbates social stratification. The questions Bri asks of politics and society have their answers laid bare in the response to the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, COVID-19, and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020

Bri Lee will be in conversation with Ebony Bennett, deputy director of the Australia Institute. Copies of the book will be available to purchase on the night.

Getting to Verity Lane

Verity Lane Market has entrances at 50 Northbourne Avenue and an entrance in Verity Lane.

Accessibility:

Verity Lane has wheelchair and disability access to level one where the event will be held.