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- Convenors:
-
Randi Irwin
(University of Newcastle, Australia)
Hedda Haugen Askland (University of Newcastle)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Life on Earth
- Location:
- NIKERI KC2.214
- Sessions:
- Friday 25 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
Short Abstract:
This panel turns to the tension between the contemporary moment and anticipated futures in order to examine how it informs planning, preparation, and activism that seeks to embrace or alter the anticipated trajectory of climate change and environmental destruction.
Long Abstract:
Manifestations of climate change, including bushfires, floods, hotter days, and rising sea levels, are markings of our changing world. Such manifestations—the effects of climate change—are not projections into a far-away future but parts of a reality that shape the politics and lived experiences of the present. Lived experiences of climate change and associated environmental destruction inform how communities anticipate the scope of future changes to land, economies, and communities. This panel turns to the tension between the contemporary moment and anticipated futures and examines how various stakeholders seek to embrace or alter the anticipated trajectory of climate change and environmental destruction through environmental planning, preparation, and activism. We are particularly interested papers that explore the ways in which contemporary experiences of climate change and environmental destruction shape community activism that seeks to make a different - less destructive - future possible. What does this activism look like? What futures are envisaged? What are the political possibilities that coincide with the anticipatory nature of climactic despair or hope? How do expectations or experiences of displacement figure into the ways in which community and place are understood in the interstices of the present and future? How do anticipated climate futures shape the concept of livability in the present?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 24 November, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Ethics of conservation and waste are shifting due to new temporal patterns of abundance and scarcity from renewable generation in Australia. Through an engaged futures anthropology I argue for cautious cultivation of this ethic of intermittent abundance for de-carbonising the electricity grid.
Paper long abstract:
The ongoing energy transition in Australia from centralized fossil-fuelled power generation to decentralized renewables like rooftop solar PV, is creating new temporal patterns of energy abundance and scarcity. Whereas previously reducing electricity use had clearer environmental benefits, the intermittent nature of renewable energy, including periods of abundant generation means that energy conservation is not always the most beneficial action for supporting the renewables transition. This paper draws on ethnography with Australian households in relation to distributed energy resources (solar pv, batteries, etc) and energy market innovations to identify an emerging and potentially beneficial ethics of intermittent abundance arising in relation to renewable energy. It places this ethic in contrast to a conservation ethic and continual framings around behaviour change in response to climate change through frameworks of crisis, despair and austerity.
This paper describes both the potential benefits and dangers of this emerging ethic of abundance. With public calls to ‘electrifying everything’, as a solution to climate change, and frameworks which celebrate abundance creating hopeful, playful, and celebratory framings to climate change mitigation, such frameworks can also ignore the continued materiality of renewable energy, including ongoing extractivism and negative environmental impacts of the renewables industry. This paper thus identifies an emerging ethic through ethnography with Australian households, while also working in the vein of an engaged futures anthropology (Pink & Salazar 2017) which enables these insights to inform energy incentives, in particular the design of demand management programs and frameworks for encouraging electricity load shifting, thus ultimately contributing to decarbonisation.
Paper short abstract:
Campus community gardens are becoming increasingly popular, providing students with places to learn about gardening, grow fresh fruit and vegetables to share and make new friends. In this paper I focus on the tensions that arise between activist projects and institutional plans to transition to net zero.
Paper long abstract:
Campus community gardens are becoming increasingly popular. They provide students with places to learn about gardening, grow fresh fruit and vegetables to share and make new friends. At an institutional level, they create opportunities for hands-on teaching and learning as well as cultivating trust between staff and students. Attempting to revitalise these gardens post-lockdown illuminates underlying tensions and inconsistencies between institutional visions of a net zero future and everyday life on campus. Ethnographic and theoretical insights into permaculture projects such as community gardens can contribute to understanding the relationships between global flows and local politics. I will focus on the tensions that arise between activist projects like permaculture and institutional net zero transitions. This paper concentrates on the reflections of three students and one staff member at Monash University in the context of a larger ethnographic study on transitioning to net zero including 55 participants who study and/or work in Clayton VIC. What I am suggesting is that anthropological understandings of what ‘net zero transitions’ means and how it is imagined, can contribute to the design of a more nuanced, inclusive and hopeful future.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on recent efforts to rehabilitate a waterway that flows through Panaji, the capital city of Goa, India. In particular, the paper examines the contestations and collaborations that emerge as diverse constituencies institute urban waterway restoration projects.
Paper long abstract:
Waterway ecologies are central to Panaji, a city in Goa, India located at the intersection of the Mandovi River and the Arabian Sea. Panaji has, in recent years, experienced widespread flooding, causing waterways to overflow and submerging roads in several areas of the city. These occurrences have intensified the focus on the city’s waterways and, in an effort to achieve ecological balance, urban planners, bureaucrats and residents have placed waterways – particularly the Mandovi River and various creeks – at the forefront of urban regeneration initiatives. This paper will focus on recent efforts to rehabilitate a waterway that flows through Panaji and which is seen as critical to the city’s ecological health. In particular, the paper examines the conflicts and collaborations that arise, and the ways in which marginalities are produced or challenged as water based communities initiate and implement waterway restoration projects. By focusing on the multiple framings of waterway restoration and the complexities that emerge, this paper provides a lens through which to understand competing waterbased visions for the city and delivers an insight into how diverse constituencies comprehend and manage their ecological quandary as they (re)imagine the urban future of Panaji.
Paper short abstract:
This work sought to place the program logic of rural dispersal of refugees into sharp relief with refugee experiences; to construct a narrative framework of the confluence of environmental and public health disasters on an background of locally experienced global macro trends.
Paper long abstract:
The Safe Haven Enterprise Visa (SHEV) scheme embodies the push for rural refugee dispersal, linking long-term asylum to working in regional Australia. However, the discourse of resource allocation paired with rural revival is often occurring on a background of communities grappling with various phases of environmental or economic disaster.
Our research sought to counter assumptions in current rural resettlement research, including: rurality as monoculture; the rural Idyll; and positioning refugee groups as a solution rural development.
This work consists of 4 years on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork including semi-structured interviews with rurally based humanitarian entrants and stakeholders; and direct observation of workplace, health and social spaces. The rural settings of 3 country towns provide a nuanced understanding of the impact on rural dispersal policy of humanitarian entrants.
Our study discovered that many people from refugee background in regional communities remained globally connected, were frequently exploited in the labour market and subject to ethnocentric biomedical practices.
The research coincided with multiple environmental and public health disasters, revealing instances where vulnerability to disaster was institutionalised or socially pre determine (structural violence). This research found socioeconomic vulnerabilities intersect with structural failures in under services areas (including health, education and key human services).
While in theory rural dispersal policy serves to enhance rural development, in practice it often translates to compelling vulnerable groups to live in underserviced areas. Compounding this issue, natural disasters and public health crisis contribute to refugee displacement globally and thwart policies of rural refugee settlement locally.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the ways in which hope for a decolonized Western Sahara shapes activist strategies and lived realities in the present. How do Saharawi activist strategies for a decolonized future in Western Sahara define the scope of liveability – or unliveability – in the present?
Paper long abstract:
From the Saharawi refugee camps in Algeria, youth activists navigate the competing expectations of the future that characterize much of the decolonization struggles led by youth. While Saharawi youth in the refugee camps have only known life in a stretch of the Sahara Desert known as the Devil’s Garden, stories of home and the promises of Western Sahara’s cooler coastline define much of the hope for a different future. A future where shoes don’t melt in 43-degree summers and where the availability of clean water meets the UN’s daily minimum. Most housing in the refugee camps was built to be temporary. A mix of mud brick, traditional tents, and some cement houses dot the camps horizon, but weather extremes have resulted in hotter summers and heavier rainfalls that have led to extensive flooding and the destruction of temporary homes that were constructed for the meantime as Saharawis await the UN-led referendum on self-determination. This paper explores the ways in which hope for a decolonized Western Sahara shapes activist strategies and lived realities in the present. In this context, hope shapes - and is shaped by - the Saharawi activism directed at dismantling the extractive industries facilitated by Morocco’s occupation of the territory. As a result, this paper asks how Saharawi activist strategies for a decolonized future in Western Sahara define the scope of liveability – or unliveability – in the present.