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- Convenors:
-
Annika Lems
(Australian National University)
Melinda Hinkson (Institute of Postcolonial Studies)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 1 December, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
The panel explores the placemaking practices that are pursued in the face of intensifying processes of displacement, financialization and surveillance. It sheds light on the strategies and resources people deploy as they attempt to make sense of, endure, and overcome the challenges of the present.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores place-making practices in a world marked by acceleration and disruption. The dynamics of the present can press down upon people in ways that feel overwhelming, as if there is no escape. Climate change and the pandemic intensify awareness of the destructive dimensions of global interconnectedness and relatedly, a sense of powerlessness to effect change. Yet in the face of such pressures people do find simple and ingenious ways to secure spaces of respite, create meaningful dis-junctures, as well as coalitions, and in other ways assert some semblance of control over their everyday lives.
We welcome papers that explore the responses, strategies, techniques and resources people deploy as they attempt to make sense of, endure, and overcome the challenges of the present. In particular we ask, what kinds of place-making practices are pursued in the face of intensifying processes of displacement, financialization, and/or surveillance? What are the fine-grained ways in which exclusion and oppression are practiced and experienced? What ethnographic and analytic light can anthropologists shed on the landing places people attempt to carve out for themselves amidst experiences of uncertainty, containment, stress? We are interested in case studies that take up transforming people-place relationships and engage histories of dislocation and human and environmental damage. Holding in view interrelationships across intimate and planetary scales, our aim is to explore the range of place-making practices that emerge from contemporary struggles as well as the conditions of creative destruction in which they are called out and reproduced.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 30 November, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
What does it mean to "shelter in place" when experiencing housing insecurity? I examine how people experiencing homelessness creatively re-appropriate shelter in contexts of great risk, surveillance, and containment. I argue that their experiences represent emergent and predictable displacements.
Paper long abstract:
Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, US state governments enacted what would become known as “shelter in place” orders, demanding that people stay at home except for essential outings. While many panicked about or railed against what was quickly emerging as a “new normal” of containment and surveillance, others—like the people experiencing homelessness who I was working with—accepted the news with little flourish. The response to the pandemic and its life-threatening potential followed the same patterns of exclusion, alienation, and abandonment that they were accustomed to. What did it mean, to them, to “shelter” in places that had always required some level of creative re-appropriation, clandestine movement and occupation, and acceptance of risk and danger? In this paper I take a layered approach to the concept of shelter, asking what it means to create shelter within and from those fundamentally hazardous conditions of life (and death) that have been produced through forces of destruction operating at various scales in the US (as elsewhere): from the general condition of neoliberal precarity; to the normalized alienation of those marked as societal others; to the intimate crises of loss, addiction, and family separation. In discomforting what it means to create shelter through (and in) place, I argue that these represent wholly predictable dis-placements that should be seen not as anomalous to, but as emblematic of, decades (and centuries) of economic rationalism that have worked, at various scales and forms, to alienate people from place.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the placemaking of Indigenous people on Darwin’s peri-urban edges, attending to the dilemmas and ironies that animate relations between owners, visitors, and helpers as each works towards some more just accommodation to an urban politics and political ecology in transit.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic and historical research on Indigenous camps and communities at the edges of Darwin, this paper explores the relations that underpin and enable the place-making practices of Indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory's urban capital. Indigenous people craft kinds of landing place here through relations with one another, with those on whose country they camp, with settler agencies and offices, with non-Indigenous neighbors, and with an increasingly mutable landscape. Foregrounding the dilemmas and ironies that accompany the placemaking of Indigenous people on Darwin’s peri-urban edges, I thus attend to the relations between owners, visitors, and helpers as each works towards some more just accommodation to a landscape and political ecology in motion.
While it may be something of a truism that places are made via such relations, this ethnographic case study underscores and explores a less frequently described paradox: The particular relations that make such camps habitable are also those that mark the limits of such habitability, making negotiation, evasion, and flight all key ingredients to the permanent impermanence of many long grass camps. The paper will examine the radical mutability of both ‘camp’ and ‘ground’ in Darwin’s long grass from the ground of this paradox, underscoring and lending ethnographic specificity to the ways that Indigenous camps afford novel kinds of home, and a valued autonomy and respite for Indigenous residents of Darwin, and the ways that such respite is both supported and undermined by the untethered, if not yet run-away character of changes to the landscape itself.
Paper short abstract:
Through an examination of the proposed onshore shale gas "fracking" industry in the Northern Territory, this paper explores how the techno-manoeuvres of modern environmental governance regimes configure place (by enacting particular climate futures) while simultaneously remaining "placeless".
Paper long abstract:
Despite widespread acceptance that their emissions accelerate climate change and its disastrous ecological effects, new fossil fuel extraction projects continue apace, further entrenching fossil fuel dependence and thereby configuring particular climate futures. In this paper, we examine how this is occurring in the case of a proposed onshore shale gas “fracking” industry in the remote Northern Territory of Australia. We argue that an enunciatory community of scientists, lawyers, activists, and policymakers in the Northern Territory participate in and produce what we call “divisible governance”. Divisible governance – enacted through technical manoeuvres of temporal and jurisdictional risk fragmentation – not only facilitates the piecemeal entrenchment of fossil fuel extraction, but also sustains ignorance on the part of this enunciatory community and the wider public about the impacts of fracking and the manner in which the gas industry is both facilitated and regulated. The hallmark of divisible governance is that its practices are at once decontextualised, or "placeless", and yet they also configure possible futures for the Northern Territory through their acceleration of climate collapse.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how Saharawi government officials have worked to actively construct a Saharawi territory and sovereignty in a way that enables the future state’s property to be used in the meantime via resource contracts that offer opportunities to construct place and economic possibility.
Paper long abstract:
In the absence of clear territorial rights and the formal recognition of sovereignty in Western Sahara, the Saharawi state appears to be a government absent a physical state, and yet prepared for the possibility that it might one day exercise its craft. The state-in-exile governs from the refugee camps, but does not have full access to, or control over, its territory and resources. However, the state-in-exile may have more control over its territory than is immediately recognized. This paper explores how Saharawi government officials have worked to actively construct a Saharawi territory and sovereignty in a way that enables the future state’s property to be used in the meantime. While the conflict over Western Sahara’s future is commonly referred to as a stalemate, this paper explores how Saharawi natural resource contracts have been used as a preparatory tool for the assertion of sovereignty and how they also offer present-day opportunities to create future property. The Saharawi Republic has developed two different ways of utilizing resources and generating property: deferred contracts and currently actionable exploration agreements. The two forms offer present and future economic opportunities and mark out parcels of public and private property – at each instance remaking and asserting particular forms of place. This paper traces the implementation of the two forms of contracts (deferred and currently actionable) in order to consider how their different temporal orientations necessitate new legal and financial regulations, while constructing place and property as new possibilities for the state and its citizens in exile.