Position Doubtful

Author: Kim Mahood
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781925228946
Category : Aboriginal Australians
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
Imagine the document you have before you is not a book but a map. It is well-used, creased, and folded, so that when you open it, no matter how carefully, something tears and a line that is neither latitude nor longitude opens in the hidden geography of the place you are about to enter. Since the publication of her prize-winning memoir Craft for a Dry Lakein 2000, writer and artist Kim Mahood has been returning to the Tanami desert country in far north-western Australia where, as a child, she lived with her family on a remote cattle station. The land is timeless, but much has changed: the station has been handed back to its traditional owners; the mining companies have arrived; and Indigenous art has flourished. Comedy and tragedy, familiarity and uncertainty, are Mahood's constant companions as she immerses herself in the life of a small community and in groundbreaking mapping projects. What emerges in Position Doubtfulis a revelation of the significance of the land to its people -- and of the burden of history. Mahood is an artist of astonishing versatility. She works with words, with paint, with installations, and with performance art. Her writing about her own work and collaborations, and about the work of the desert artists, is profoundly enlightening, making palpable the link between artist and landscape. This is a beautiful and intense exploration of friendships, landscape, and homecoming. Written with great energy and humour, Position Doubtfuloffers a unique portrait of the complexities of black and white relations in contemporary Australia.

Landscapes of Our Hearts

Author: Matthew Colloff
Publisher: Thames & Hudson Australia
ISBN: 1760761346
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Compelling, multifarious and essential.' - Don Watson 'Drink in its wisdom.' - Andrew Leigh, MP On this ancient continent, waves of people have made their mark on the landscape; in turn, it too has shaped them. If we look afresh at our history through the land we live on, might Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians find a path to a shared future? An epic exploration of our relationship with this country, Landscapes of Our Hearts takes us from the Great Barrier Reef to the Central Desert, the High Country to Canberra's Limestone Plains. It is a book of hope and offers the possibility that a renewed connection to the landscape and to each other could pave the way towards reconciliation. It will change the way you see this land.

Finding the Voice of the River

Author: Gary J. Brierley
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030270688
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
This book addresses societal relationships to river systems, highlighting many unexplored possibilities in how we know and manage our rivers. Brierley contends that although we have good scientific understanding of rivers, with remarkable prospect for profound improvements to river condition, management applications greatly under-deliver. He conceptualizes approaches to river repair in two very different ways: Medean (competitive) and Gaian (cooperative). Rather than ‘managing’ rivers to achieve particular anthropogenic goals (the former option), this book adopts a more-than-human approach to ‘living with living rivers’ (the latter option), applying a river rights framework that conceptualizes rivers as sentient entities. Chapters build on significant experience across many parts of the world, emphasizing the diverse array of river attributes and relationships to be protected and the wide range of problems to be addressed. Although the book has an environmental focus, it is framed as an argument in popular philosophy, contemplating the agency of rivers as place-beings. It will be of great value to academics, students and general readers interested in protecting river systems.

Five Bay Landscapes

Author: Karen Lutsky
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822989115
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
Threatened by issues of environmental health, climate change, population growth, and industrial demands, the coastal zone of the Great Lakes reflects an increasingly dysfunctional relationship between the people of the basin and the resources that support them. Perhaps no place is the physical manifestation of this struggle more evident than in the basin’s shallow bays. While many regional and local responses to these issues focus on methods of control, Five Bay Landscapes argues that responses should begin with critical, experiential, and pluralistic understandings of place. Through a series of five narratives, each located on a bay within the Great Lakes, the authors share their practice of curious site explorations. These explorations, both written and visual, consider the nuances and systems of these shorelines along with the lessons these findings might offer for future design and planning interventions. Using the Great Lakes as a context, Five Bay Landscapes illuminates a dynamic and robust landscape system and establishes a series of methods for understanding, analyzing, and intervening within the changing landscape.

The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature

Author: Douglas A. Vakoch
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100063440X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 587

Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature explores the interplay between the domination of nature and the oppression of women, as well as liberatory alternatives, bringing together essays from leading academics in the field to facilitate cutting-edge critical readings of literature. Covering the main theoretical approaches and key literary genres of the area, this volume includes: • Examination of ecofeminism through the literatures of a diverse sampling of languages, including Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish; native speakers of Tamil, Vietnamese, Turkish, Slovene, and Icelandic. • Analysis of core issues and topics, offering innovative approaches to interpreting literature, including: activism, animal studies, cultural studies, disability, gender essentialism, hegemonic masculinity, intersectionality, material ecocriticism, postcolonialism, posthumanism, postmodernism, race, and sentimental ecology. • Surveys key periods and genres of ecofeminism and literary criticism, including chapters on Gothic, Romantic, and Victorian literatures, children and young adult literature, mystery, and detective fictions, including interconnected genres of climate fiction, science fiction, and fantasy, and distinctive perspectives provided by travel writing, autobiography, and poetry. This collection explores how each of ecofeminism’s core concerns can foster a more emancipatory literary theory and criticism, now and in the future. This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, gender studies, and the environmental humanities.

Shores, Surfaces and Depths

Author: Felicity Picken
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040253466
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
This book examines the oceanic presence in life on Earth, and the ways that we engage with the oceanic worlds for play, pleasure, adventure, and the pursuit of leisure and escape through tourism and travel. The oceanic ‘turn’ across the social sciences and humanities has produced a still proliferating opus of work that seeks to discover and emphasize oceanic presence in life on Earth. This literal and figurative ‘unearthing’ of blue spaces has encouraged scholars to gaze beyond the lands that have supported much of our experience and knowledge towards the gathering up of a more holistic appreciation of blue planetary life. This widening of scholarly attention – from ‘land’ to ‘sea’ – is occurring simultaneously across a range of disciplines and fields, including history, archaeology, anthropology, comparative literature, public policy, cultural studies, and geography. With an explicit focus on 'leisure' and 'tourism', this edited collection follows a growing appreciation that it is our seemingly inconsequential encounters – at play, for pleasure, and on holidays – that are increasingly present and influential in our oceanic relations. This volume will be of value to scholars and students interested in social and cultural history and environmental history and humanities.

Art, EcoJustice, and Education

Author: Raisa Foster
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351743112
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
Emphasizing the importance of contemporary art forms in EcoJustice Education, this book examines the interconnections between social justice and ecological well-being, and the role of art to enact change in destructive systems. Artists, educators, and scholars in diverse disciplines from around the world explore the power of art to disrupt ways of thinking that are taken for granted and dominate modern discourses, including approaches to education. The EcoJustice framework presented in this book identifies three strands—cultural ecological analysis, revitalizing the commons, and enacting imagination—that help students to recognize the value in diverse ways of knowing and being, reflect on their own assumptions, and develop their critical analytic powers in relation to important problems. This distinctive collection offers educators a mix of practical resources and inspiration to expand their pedagogical practices. A Companion Website includes interactive artworks, supplemental resources, and guiding questions for students and instructors.

Talking Sideways

Author: Reg Dodd
Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press
ISBN: 0702262110
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
Reg Dodd grew up at Finniss Springs, on striking desert country bordering South Australia's Lake Eyre. For the Arabunna and for many other Aboriginal people, Finniss Springs has been a homeland and a refuge. It has also been a cattle station, an Aboriginal mission, a battlefield, a place of learning, and a living museum. With his long-time friend and filmmaker Malcolm McKinnon, Dodd reflects on his upbringing in a cross-cultural environment that defied social conventions of the time. They also write candidly about the tensions surrounding power, authority, and Indigenous knowledge that have defined the recent decades of this resource-rich area. Talking Sideways is part history, part memoir, and part cultural road-map. Together, Dodd and McKinnon reveal the unique history of this extraordinary place and share their concerns and their hopes for its future.

Postcolonial Literatures of Climate Change

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004514163
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 428

Book Description
Postcolonial Literatures of Climate Change investigates the evolving nature of postcolonial literatures and criticism in response to the global, regional, and local environmental transformations brought about by anthropogenic climate change.

Imaginative Possession

Author: Belinda Probert
Publisher: Upswell
ISBN: 1743822014
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Book Description
How do we understand a country? At a time when many easy assumptions about how we live and how our society functions are being questioned there is room for contemplation of a country that is ancient, occupied for at least sixty thousand years, and young, a national federation for only twelve decades. Belinda Probert, a migrant from England sets out to question in words and action how well she understands the landscapes she has seen and the people that have shaped them. She takes with her a set of writers who have asked the same questions, or provided interpretations of our sense of belonging, to test their words against her own emerging views. Wondering how a nation of immigrants can fully settle here she decided she needed to buy a property in the ‘country’ so she could observe it more closely, and learn to garden differently. Trees fell on her, ants bit her, bowerbirds stole her crops, but from the exercise she discovers much more about soil, trees, water, animals and protecting herself from fire emergencies. Driving back and forth she learns to see the ancient heritage all around us, and rural industries that have destroyed and created so much. ‘A wonderfully friendly and likeable book. It put me in a good mood for days, and taught me a thousand important things.’ —Helen Garner