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.