Giday, humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and to permission to think.

Uncomfortable Conversations is collaboration with the University of Technology, Sydney, where we have conversations that push the boundaries of academia with guests who know a lot about the role of the university in public life and foster the kinds of conversations,

the universities ought to have. Professor Alan Davison, who's the Dean of Arts and Social Sciences

at the University of Technology, Sydney, is doing a remarkable job trying to make UTS, the place

where independent thinkers can come and can debate and can be free from being pilloried and free from group think and have actual intellectual freedom and intellectual clarity and resurrect the sort of ancient notions of debate that universities are supposed to embody instead of being echo chambers for people who already agree with each other.

And this is kind of the hobby horse of our guest today, Professor Katie Barnett.

She's a law professor, and she's written about activist scholarship and her worries about activism entering the academy and contaminating what she regards as being the fundamental principles, especially of law,

in addition to being of academia, robust debate, a tolerance of other people's opinions, but no

tolerance of nonsense, a willingness to advocate for a position, but to respect the authority

of the court, the legitimacy of the court, the legitimacy of the court,

the legitimacy of the rules of the game and of debate above your particular belief about

what your political position or what your particular argument is.

Katie started out at Melbourne Law School as a lecturer.

She has – I won't go through her long and illustrious history, but – Katie started out at Melbourne Law School as a lecturer.

She has, I won't go through her long and illustrious history, but basically she's a mother.

She's lived in Australia and England.

She's published a lot of academic publications in private law.

And she's been a visiting scholar at one of the Oxford colleges.

She worked in the courts as a researcher and an associate to judges and also as a solicitor. So I hope you enjoy as much as I did this conversation with Dr. Katie Barnett. What is activist scholarship, Katie?

Okay, so when I use the word activist, I have a very particular kind of a meaning for it.

So I went to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and it says that an activist means a person who uses or supports strong actions such as public protests in support of or in opposition to a controversial view.

You should know by now that any debate that begins with, the dictionary definition of the term is X automatically loses the debate, unfortunately.

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