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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 Wednesday 1 December, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores some scenes of intimate memorialisation in central Australia, approached as emplacing processes of precarious 'holding-on': entanglements of digital and tangible materials, a daughter’s grief and the affordances of friendship in animations of remembered care, labour and love.
Paper long abstract:
In the wake of the death of a relatively successful senior town camp documentary painter, her surviving daughter, her widow, her grandsons, her brother and some extended family and I worked slowly together to conjure poignant past family events and remembered places in animated and immersive ‘expanded cinema’ media forms. In parallel, the family regularly decorated and dreamed of ‘fixing up’ her grave and her other daughter’s resting place in the same cemetery with ‘proper’ headstones, and of marking their birth places in some way. Enduring states of ‘feeling lonely’ for the deceased, abandoned settlement infrastructures, unfinished enterprises, water scarcity, disappearances, dashed hopes and disappointments sit at the heart of our collaborative experimental memorial work. Unwavering Christian faith and spirit communication led their way in both endeavours.
This paper stages some ethnography of these intimate memorialisations unfolding in the margins of central Australian social history. I approach these materialisations of memory - an animation of avian predation and canine care, a small film about invisible labour, and some brick cairns - as emplaced and emplacing processes of quietly holding-on, of making sanctuary; tactics of survivance amidst the exhausting demands of post-Land Rights displacement and precarious living, consolidating social and economic resources against erasure and the risk of forgetting.
Paper short abstract:
This paper interrogates water as a central element of place-making practices within mining-affected communities. It does so by exploring the experience of water as a qualitative category that is shaped and lived through everyday relations with and within place, impaired by mining.
Paper long abstract:
This paper forwards a discussion of extraction and exclusion into conversation with one about materiality and objects. In exploring the notion of ‘ruin’ – as expressed within and around the small town of Wollar in New South Wales, located at the western edge of the Hunter Valley Coal Chain and surrounded by three open-cut coal mines – I seek to interrogate displacement and mining through the empirical element of water and how everyday encounters with a river shape experiences of place, placement and displacement. This analysis draws inspiration from decolonial scholarship to look at how mining and extraction impact land and water as ontological categories. It positions water as a resource not only of pragmatic value but also of symbolic value in binding people and place together, and as a barometer for the emotional wellbeing of the community. It looks at how experiences and emotions are embodied and ‘placial’, and how scars in the landscape become ‘marks of sorrow and betrayal, of the abuse of power and latent hazards’ (Storm 2014: 1) for those whose imagined futures have been lost in the process of mining.
Paper short abstract:
In the time of accelerating climate change, the Morrison government and Farmers for Climate Action contest the depiction of 'the rural'. Hovering in the space between representations and life on the ground are intensifying structural arrangements that constrain the terms of rural work and life.
Paper long abstract:
In the time of accelerating climate change, lines of contestation are being drawn and redrawn between the Morrison government and Farmers for Climate Action over the depiction of ‘the rural’. Elements of these politics and the images in which they trade have been in play for a century. Others have emerged and intensified more recently. While advancing this polarising debate, in their visions of rural Australia there is one important feature shared by these divergent perspectives. Both render invisible the wider social, economic, and technological transformations that undergird the ‘climate crisis’. They thus sidestep a constellation of issues that food growers feel intensely and must navigate to survive.
Drawing on reportage from mainstream media and interviews with farmers in the irrigation belt of NW Victoria, this paper considers the shape-shifting terms by which the past and future of growing food are imagined and selectively deployed. Hovering in the space between public representations and life on the ground are intensifying structural arrangements that constrain the terms of rural work and life. The late social theorist Bernard Stiegler would have us read these arrangements in terms of the age of disruption—an unprecedented global force of ‘colossal social disintegration’. Thinking with and beyond Stiegler, public contests over the rural and climate change disclose a profound emptying out of place. Displacement occurs not only in the terms of unfolding Anthropocenic catastrophe, but in the affective relations and processes of intergenerational transmission and translation that are fundamental to any shared orientations to a future.