Adelaide Festival of Ideas
Coordinates: 34°55′08″S 138°36′00″E / 34.91898°S 138.599986°E The Adelaide Festival of Ideas (AFOI) fosters the public promulgation, discussion and critique of culturally and socially relevant ideas from South Australia, Australia, and around the world. It has been held every two years from 1999 until 2013, over a period of three or four days. From 1999-2010 it ran in July, and since 2011 it has run in October. From 2016, the AFOI will be an annual event.
The AFOI offers contemporary civil society the highest possible level of intellectual debate across conventional boundaries and demarcations of disciplines, agendas and cultural norms with the aim of challenging the fragmentation of public knowledge. It is not held captive to any particular ideological, political or commercial agenda.
The program is built around an extensive array of speaker presentations, interviews and panel discussions that are mostly free to the public. The high-level discussion and public debate offered by AFOI intends to be as engaging and entertaining as it is provocative and challenging. To maximise engagement, public access to activities held within the AFOI is free of charge wherever feasible, with the aim of attracting and engaging a diverse cross-section of the community as active citizens rather than paying customers. The AFOI recognises the considerable additional benefit gained from real-time, shared-space discussions of new ideas in a moderated context with a live audience.
Founded by Greg Mackie, the AFOI first ran in 1999, and then every two years after that until 2013. From 1999-2009 the AFOI was produced under the auspices of the Adelaide Festival Corporation. The 2011 AFOI was auspiced by the South Australian Department of the Premier and Cabinet - Cultural Development Group, and the 2013 AFOI was produced under the auspices of The Adelaide Film Festival Corporation, all with significant baseline funding from Arts SA. However, after this funding ceased late in 2014, the AFOI was relaunched as a non-profit incorporated association in 2015 in order to present the AFOI in 2016 and annually thereafter.
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