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Life02


The liveliness of landscapes: practices and processes of attention and sustainability 
Convenors:
William Skinner (University of Adelaide)
Alison Dundon (University of Adelaide)
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Format:
Panel
Stream:
Life on Earth
Location:
WPE Moriac
Sessions:
Wednesday 23 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne

Short Abstract:

This panel engages with concepts of 'liveliness' in landscape. What makes a landscape alive? Does 'aliveness' emerge from landscape itself, or does it spring from intimate relationships between places, people, and the more-than-human, based on a care and attentiveness that must be maintained?

Long Abstract:

In recent decades, anthropological focus has emphasised landscapes as repositories of lived experience, meaning and belonging. Far from being simply a collection of interlinked and imbricated places, landscapes draw attention to the mutuality of places, people, and the more-than-human. The liveliness of landscape is evident in multitudinous ways: through teeming multispecies animal, vegetal, fungal, microbial worlds and, beyond, into the material, spiritual and ephemeral. It has become customary in the age of the Anthropocene to emphasise various ways in which landscapes are changing and dying: the result of destructive processes associated with late capitalism, which appears to threaten the very vitality of the earth itself. While this remains an ongoing concern and important analytical theme, this panel seeks to emphasise the continuing 'liveliness' of landscapes.

We ask, what makes a 'lively' landscape? Does 'aliveness' emerge from landscape itself, and/or does it spring from intimate relationships between places, people, and the more-than-human, based on an attention and care that must be maintained? Might we, by dwelling in and living with landscapes, enliven them through our own (or other's) attentiveness? As such, this panel seeks papers that engage with, and interrogate, living landscapes and liveliness in all its forms, including: landscapes of lived realities and imaginaries; landscapes of power and governance; violence; equity and inequity; belonging and exclusion; care, attentiveness and intimacy; slow and fast landscapes; landscapes of technology and infrastructure; production and consumption; generation and degradation; fraught and fragile landscapes; and processes associated with decolonising landscapes.

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Wednesday 23 November, 2022, -