Upcoming events
The Institute of Advanced Studies hosts public lectures and events presented by our visiting scholars and guests.
These events contribute to our goal of sharing research, ideas and encouraging discussion and debate within the community-at-large.
Public Lectures
On Race, Borders, Migration, and Football
A public lecture by Luis Alvarez, Department of History, UC San Diego and UWA Fred Alexander Fellow.
On the heels of the 2026 World Cup in North America, this lecture chronicles the entangled histories of race, borders, migration, and football. Focusing on the rivalry between the United States and Mexico, it reframes familiar and often-calcified debates over race, migration, and borders from the vantage point of the beautiful game. Tracing the rivalry as the product of neoliberal globalization and demographic revolution in the US shows how citizenship and belonging were routinely contested and reimagined. Those who played, cheered, advertised, and broadcasted the games inflamed anti-immigrant sentiment and embraced practices of multi-national belonging, simultaneously blurring and hardening divisions between the two nations. The growth of the rivalry from the early 1990s to Trump’s rise to power reveals how boundaries of the national polity were violently policed and never static. Ultimately, the US-Mexico football rivalry shows us who was included in the nation, who was excluded, and how the line between “us and them” was not always clear, whether they wore another national team’s jersey or not.
The Fred Alexander Fellowship is dedicated to the memory of Professor Fred Alexander (1899-1996), the founding Head of the History Discipline at The University of Western Australia.
12 August 2026, 6pm-7pm, Fox Lecture Hall, Arts, UWA
Postgraduate Masterclasses
The Politics of the Possible
Masterclass with Professor Luis Alvarez, Department of History, UC San Diego and UWA Fred Alexander Fellow.
Tuesday, 11 August 2026 | 10am- 1pm
Institute of Advanced Studies
Popular Culture is everywhere. Music, film, TV, and visual art infuse our daily life with hope and visions of a better world. They also reinforce debilitating economic and social inequities. The production, consumption, and circulation of pop culture reorders race and ethnic identities, invigorates and short circuits social movements, and unearths both utopian and dystopian impulses in broader society. Taking pop culture seriously can uncover histories determined less by racial or territorial logic than interracial and transnational currents, where pop culture matters to social movements and vice versa, and where dreams of a more just future are embedded in the everyday lives of ordinary folk.
This collaborative masterclass explores pop culture as history, not simply the history of pop culture. It considers the liberating possibilities of popular culture and the ways it stifles, co-opts, and distorts identity and politics in the 20th and 21st centuries.
This masterclass encourages attendees to come prepared to share ideas from their ongoing research in 3-5 minutes.
Past lectures
Many of our events are recorded. See our Past lectures page for more information and links to these recordings.