Participants and Abstracts

George Adamson

Reflections on upstream engagement with climate science in the context of a new logic

This paper argues that the 'echo-chamber' phenomenon is increasing polarisation in public views on climate change to the point that it can be considered a new logic in society, which we refer to as the 'logic of group identity'. We discuss the implications of this new logic for public engagement with climate science.

George Adamson is a historical and environmental geographer at King's College London. His research focuses on the contributions of history to the construction of climate risks, through studies of long-term climate variability, adaptations to climatic extremes in the past and a historical interrogation of climate knowledges. His work particularly addresses the cultural history of the Indian monsoon and the El Nino Southern Oscillation phenomenon.

Joni Adamson

What are the citizen humanities?

In this presentation, I will briefly introduce and define the citizen humanities, as it has been discussed in the environmental humanities today, noting some successes and limitations.

Joni Adamson is Professor of Environmental Humanities in the Department of English and Senior Sustainability Scholar at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University where she directs the Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHI). She is a Convener of the North American Observatory of the Humanities for the Environment global network (HfE).

Rimjhim Aggarwal

Avoiding capture of participation within the metrics of outputs in large scale interdisciplinary projects

In this presentation, I will reflect on my experience – as an economist/social scientist – working with other scientists, and lately environmental humanists, on large-scale sustainability projects that aspire to be transformative. I will discuss some of the critical questions this has raised regarding how we: 1) collectively define what transformation is, 2) assess whether or not transformation is taking place, and 3) measure change in more meaningful ways than the constraining metrics of outputs allow.

Rimjhim Aggarwal is an Associate Professor in the School of Sustainability at ASU. Trained as an economist, Dr. Aggarwal has worked on several inter-disciplinary projects on food and water sustainability and its relation with human wellbeing. In current research she is examining the emerging conflicts in the framing of water as a human right as well as an economic, ecological and social good in rapidly urbanizing regions of the Global South. Her other current research projects include developing a knowledge to action framework for the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. Dr. Aggarwal was awarded the ASU President's Award for Sustainability in recognition of her efforts in "use inspired research" and "community outreach."

Hélène Ahlberger Le Deunff

More-than-human participatory water management

Normative modes of engagement in participatory water management as well as agonistic critical assessments of public participation practice approach the inclusion of non-humans’ concerns in collective action as a project of methodological improvement. Building on insights from material participation, this paper takes the participatory process itself as its starting point to propose a multispecies exploration of the hybrid waterworlds where humans and non-humans actively shape water politics.

Hélène A. Le Deunff is in the first year of her PhD in Environmental Humanities and geography at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Hélène’s research interests include multispecies ethnography and participatory approaches. Her doctoral thesis explores the opportunities that the nexus of water, people and animals create for water management to start engaging with the non-humans.

Paul Brown

Experimenting after the bomb: community arts and knowledge building in atomic survivor communities

A recent showcase of immersive projections, paintings, ceramics, bronze work, soft sculptures and photographs offers conclusions and a call to action from atomic survivor communities. This is rebellious knowledge-making through community cultural development, prompting questions about the role of the artist in society and the arts-science interface.

Paul is Creative Producer for Alphaville, a Sydney-based community arts company specializing in projects with environmental and scientific themes. Work includes a multi-arts program linking artists and communities that experienced atomic bomb tests. In academic and research circles, Paul is a geologist, social scientist and policy consultant, teacher of Environmental Studies and an adviser on Environmental Education policy. As an analyst of creative arts practice, his books include Art and Wellbeing and Verbatim: staging memory and community. Paul was foundational Head of the School of Humanities at UNSW and currently holds an adjunct position within the UNSW Environmental Humanities group.

Jason Chilvers

Remaking participation after the ‘participatory turn’

In this presentation I set out a new relational and constructivist approach to studying participation in the making which in turn opens up new paths for remaking environmental participation more experimental, reflexive, anticipatory and responsible ways. This approach is illustrated and applied through examples of ongoing participatory experiments relating to sustainable energy transitions in the UK.

Jason Chilvers is Reader (Associate Professor), and Chair of the Science, Society and Sustainability (3S) Research Group (https://3sresearch.org), in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, UK. His work, situated in the disciplines of science and technology studies (STS), geography and environmental science, focuses on relations between science, innovation and society, including studies of governance, appraisal and public participation relating to science, sustainability, energy and climate change. He is co-author with Matthew Kearnes of the book 'Remaking Participation: Science, Environment and Emergent Publics' (2016, Routledge).

Jennifer Gabrys

Citizen Sensing and Environmental Participation

Citizen sensing practices and technologies, from monitoring air quality to counting organisms for biodiversity surveys, have the potential to generate new forms of environmental participation. Yet in what ways are these monitoring experiments not just a matter of enabling “citizens” to use technology to collect data, but also projects that involve creating new environments, entities, relations and interpretive registers of sensing?

Jennifer Gabrys is Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Principal Investigator on the European Research Council funded project, Citizen Sense. She is the author of Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (University of Michigan Press, 2011), and Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and co-editor of Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic (Routledge, 2013). Her work can be found at citizensense.net and jennifergabrys.net.

Tom Griffiths

Bushfire, public policy and the humanities

The overwhelming majority of bushfire research funding goes to the physical sciences, yet the major challenges of fire management are cultural. Prompted by this familiar paradox, I will reflect on a recent historical research project with a small community that suffered in the 2009 Black Saturday firestorm.

Tom Griffiths AO is a historian whose books and essays have won prizes in history, science, literature, politics and journalism including the Douglas Stewart Prize, the Eureka Science Book Prize, the Ernest Scott Prize and the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History. He is the author of Hunters and Collectors (1996), Forests of Ash: An Environmental History (2001), Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica (2007) and The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their Craft (2016). He is the W K Hancock Professor of History and Director of the Centre for Environmental History at the Australian National University.

Jennifer Mae Hamilton

Blogging, Research, Pedagogy

After spending many years informally blogging my critical thoughts for fun, and generating something akin to a series of public notebooks in the process, I now use this tool as part of my official research and teaching practice. My presentation will reflect on how this activity relates to the participatory environmental humanities

Jennifer Mae Hamilton formally trained in English Literature at UNSW and is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, funded by The Seed Box. Her research explores the relationship between climate change and developed cities from an intersectional environmental humanities perspective. She co-convenes COMPOSTING Feminisms and Environmental Humanities and Hacking the Anthropocene with Astrida Neimanis. Her first book This Contentious Storm: An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear is out in August 2017 with Bloomsbury Academic. Her two active blogs are weatheringthecity.wordpress.com and earlwoodfarm.com.

Matthew Kearnes

Grounding participation

My intention in this paper is to dwell between Haraway’s call for an “earthwide network of connections” and recent appeals to ‘ecologise participation’; to situate and attend to the multiple interrelations between diverse participatory collectives that characterise contemporary eco-political processes. I explore ways in which this move toward more relational and materially situated accounts of participation in-the-making might be usefully and productively grounded by extending these earth-bound metaphors through an encounter with soil, cows and carbon.

Matthew Kearnes is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and member of the of Environmental Humanities Group at the School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales. Matthew's research is situated between the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), human geography and contemporary social theory. He is co-author with Jason Chilvers of the book Remaking Participation: Science, Environment and Emergent Publics (2016, Routledge) and is currently working with Juan Salazar & Céline Granjou on a new volume, tentatively titled Soil Cultures - On Caring for Soils in the Anthropocene (Bloomsbury).

Lindsay Kelley

Tasting History: Sampling the Bug Out Bag

How might taste inflect how we understand history? This talk reflects on how public tastings of biscuits and crackers provoke a reckoning with the nutritional environment of European colonial expansion.

Working in the kitchen, Lindsay Kelley's art practice and scholarship explore how the experience of eating changes when technologies are being eaten. Her first book is Bioart Kitchen: Art, Feminism and Technoscience (London: IB Tauris, 2016). Bioart Kitchen emerges from her work at the University of California Santa Cruz (Ph.D in the History of Consciousness and MFA in Digital Art and New Media). Kelley is a Co-Investigator with the KIAS funded Research­-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory: Arts and the Anthropocene (University of Alberta, Canada).

Tess Lea

Visualising networks, engaging publics: why do it and is it always worth doing?

Ethnographers by method and habit uncover the socio-cultural complexity of different forms of existence, animate and other, and how these worlds might be differentially treated. But how do we best communicate this complexity, and is the effort of engaging always worth it.

Tess is a 'policy anthropologist', ethnographic researcher, and born and bred Darwinite, now located at the University of Sydney. Her fundamental interest is with issues of (dys)function: how it occurs and to what, whom and how it is ascribed. She has worked as a senior bureaucrat in the Northern Territory Departments of Health and Education, and operated as a ministerial advisor. Her work reflects on the respective points of view of Canberra policy formulators, Indigenous organisations, and Indigenous families and asks why the path to realising seemingly shared ambitions (to be healthy, to be housed, to have an income) is so densely obstacled. Books include 'Darwin' and 'Bureaucrats & Bleeding Hearts: Indigenous Health in Northern Australia’.

Greg Leslie

Community engagement on controversial water supply projects: What engineers can learn from sociologists?

Engineers place too much emphasis on the "What and the How" when engaging with the community on water supply projects. Recent experience from controversial water supply projects teaches that engineers have much to learn from sociologists on the "Why and Who benefits" when building community support and building public trust.

Greg Leslie is the director of the UNESCO Centre for Membrane Science and Technology at the University of New South Wales. Prior to joining UNSW, he worked in the public and private sector on water treatment, reuse and desalination projects in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong and the United States. He is an advisor to the Asian Development Bank on desalination projects and has served on the National Health and Medical Research Council Water issues committee, the Independent Advisory Panel for the Orange County Groundwater Replenishment Project and the World Health Organisation Technical Committee on desalination.

Leah Lui-Chivizhe

Searching for the wisdom of Torres Strait turtle-shell masks

Throughout the Torres Strait marine turtles have nourished the bodies and cultural lives of Islanders for thousands of years and Islanders are internationally known for the fine working of turtle-shell into masks which held knowledge thought both spiritually powerful and saturated with person-hood. Drawing on my doctoral research, my presentation will be a reflection on how I immersed myself in the human, non-human and environmental worlds of turtle-shell masks and explored the longevity and complexity of relationships between people, place and marine turtles.

Leah Lui-Chivizhe recently completed a PhD (History) at the University of Sydney on the cultural and ecological significance of turtle and turtle shell to Torres Strait people. From 2001-2012 she taught Indigenous Australian Studies at the University of Sydney and now teaches in Indigenous Studies at Nura Gili, UNSW.

Noortje Marres

What if nothing happens? Street trials as experiments in participation

This talk considers recent street tests involving driverless cars in the UK and assesses the extent to which they qualify as 'experiments in participation'. I pay special attention to the role of interpretation, and argue that an affirmative assessment depends on whether a collective interpretation of the problems and promises of connected and autonomous vehicles is achieved in these trials.

Noortje Marres is Associate Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. She studied Science and Technology Studies at the University of Amsterdam and her main research interest is the transformation of participation in technological societies. She has published two books, Material Participation (Palgrave, 2012/2015) and Digital Sociology (Polity, 2017). More info at www.noortjemarres.net

Iain McCalman (with Cameron Muir)

Localising the Anthropocene

The National Museum of Australia, Sydney Environment Institute (USyd) and the Australian National University are working together to develop a website, travelling exhibition and book about the experience of the Anthropocene. We plan to experiment with different ways of enabling individuals and communities to contribute stories and objects to the website and exhibition.

Iain Duncan McCalman was born in Malawi, did his schooling in Zimbabwe and his university education in Australia. He is currently a Sydney University Research Professor and Co-Director of the Sydney Environment Institute. He is a Fellow of four learned academies and in 2007 was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for services to history and humanities. He has also served as President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His most recent books include Darwin's Armada. Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution (2009) and The Reef — A Passionate History. From Captain Cook to Climate Change (2014). He is currently researching a book on human-animal relations in East and Central Africa during the early twentieth century.

Judy Motion

“I am the river…”

Environmental justice, here, is about reconfigured relationships with nature and recognition of our connections with and emotional attachments to nature - a kinship/partnership model. In this paper I ask, “How can the environment participate in political decision making?” and draw upon two case studies that reflect upon the recent example of granting personhood or living entity status to rivers to think through environmental participation and notions of guardianship and personhood. The aim is to deepen understanding of relational ontologies and the material politics of social transformation. By examining how ontology is being made to perform, it is argued that living entity status prioritizes relational ontological considerations and allows for alternative discursive openings in which the environment becomes a player in political decision making. Granting of living entity status is interpreted as a decolonizing act that has significant implications for democratic societies - power is shared with community and varying forms of environment partnerships, engaged voices, and participatory spaces are created.

Judy Motion is Professor of Communication in the Environmental Humanities group at the University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia. Judy’s most recent research focuses on public discourse and sense making in relation to environmental justice issues. Judy’s research has been published in a range of journals including Public Understanding of Science, Political Communication, Discourse Studies, Media, Culture and Society, Higher Education Research and Development, Management Communication Quarterly, Journal of Business Research, and European Journal of Marketing.

Cameron Muir (with Iain McCalman)

Localising the Anthropocene

The National Museum of Australia, Sydney Environment Institute (USyd) and the Australian National University are working together to develop a website, travelling exhibition and book about the experience of the Anthropocene. We plan to experiment with different ways of enabling individuals and communities to contribute stories and objects to the website and exhibition.

Cameron Muir has written for Griffith Review, The Guardian, Inside Story and The Canberra Times, among others. In 2013-14 he was a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center, Munich. His book The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress (Routledge) was shortlisted in the 2015 NSW Premier’s History Awards. He helped complete Tony McMichael’s posthumous book, Climate Change and the Health of Nations: Famines, Fevers, and the Fate of Populations (OUP 2017).

Richard Major

Limits of public participation in manipulative research: three case studies from ornithology

Public participation in environmental research that involves animal experimentation can reap great benefits but comes with great risks. I outline studies of three bird species to show how public reaction depends on the charisma of a species, and how such studies might benefit from a multidisciplinary approach.

I am a Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Museum and my research program is directed towards understanding the ecology of birds in human-dominated landscapes. The ultimate goal of this program, is to produce recommendations for land management that will lead to enhanced prospects for co-existence between birds and humans. My research involves the analysis of patterns of distribution and abundance, both of species that have benefited from human activities, as well species that are threatened. My current projects include 1) investigating pathways of invasion by the common myna, 2) testing the cost-effectiveness of noisy miner removal for recovering woodland bird communities, 3) studying the ecology of parrots in urban areas, and 4) predicting population trajectories of threatened songbirds.

Jess McLean (with Emily O'Gorman)

Walking and working with Wiradjuri peoples

This presentation will share some insights from a research relationship between Indigenous people in Mudgee, rural New South Wales, and academics from Macquarie University examining water cultures. We are interested in examining shadow waters, applying Plumwood's shadow places notion to hydro-social cycles, and changing the way water values are recognised and/or marginalised in this area.

Jess McLean is a geographer working at Macquarie University who has two main research areas: water cultures and feminist and environmental digital changes. She grew up in Mudgee, rural New South Wales, and is enjoying learning to see that place differently through a research relationship with local Indigenous people.

Timothy Neale

Don't mention 'culture': finding collaboration with hazards practitioners

In this presentation, I will reflect on my experience of research on, and with, practitioners engaged in natural hazards management in Australia. This experience, I suggest, raises critical questions about the ethics and efficacy of collaborative work.

Timothy Neale is currently a Research Fellow in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University and a Visiting Fellow in the Fenner School at the Australian National University. His research utilises STS, Indigenous studies and anthropological approaches in order to critically understand contemporary issues of environmental knowledge and management. You can find out more about his work at www.timdneale.net

Astrida Neimanis

How do you participate with the bottom of the sea?

Life at the bottom of the ocean, microscopic groundwater denizens, fossils of deep time, cyborgs in speculative futures... is it possible to engage participatory research with entities that are mostly inaccessible to us? Rather than solutions to this "problem," I am interested in what these case studies from my own research can teach us about the scalar biases that dominate a discourse of participation.

Astrida Neimanis is a Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her publications include Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017) and Thinking with Water (2013, co-editor). She is also Associate Editor of the journal Environmental Humanities (Duke UP), Key Researcher with the Sydney Environment Institute, co-convenor of the Composting: Feminisms and the Environmental Humanities research group, and a founding member of The Seed Box: A MISTRA-FORMAS Environmental Humanities Collaboratory (a transnational research consortium based at Linkoping University, Sweden).

Jenny Newell

Museums as sites for participatory environmental humanities

Museums are participatory institutions by design. Their collections, exhibitions, research, education and outreach activities are ideal modes of engaging broad audiences in the challenges of environmental change. The focus of this presentation is the collaborative research capacity of museums, particularly with Indigenous knowledge holders, which enables the co-production of new questions and knowledge about current and future ways to engage with a changing world.

Dr Jenny Newell is a curator who works within the environmental humanities. Much of her work is about participatory approaches to Pacific histories and collections as well as through collaborative projects with Pacific comunities on climate change. Manager of the East Pacific Collection at the Australian Museum, she focuses on relationships between coastal people, cultural objects and rapidly-changing ocean environments. Jenny has formerly worked in Pacific curatorial and research roles at the American Museum of Natural History, National Museum of Australia and the British Museum. Her publications include 'Trading Nature: Tahitians, Europeans and Ecological Exchange', 'Pacific Art in Detail' and a volume co-edited with Libby Robin and Kirsten Wehner, 'Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change'. She convenes the Museums and Climate Change Network.

Emily O'Gorman (with Jess McLean)

Walking and working with Wiradjuri peoples

This presentation will share some insights from a research relationship between Indigenous people in Mudgee, rural New South Wales, and academics from Macquarie University examining water cultures. We are interested in examining shadow waters, applying Plumwood's shadow places notion to hydro-social cycles, and changing the way water values are recognised and/or marginalised in this area.

My research is situated at the nexus of environmental history and the broader environmental humanities, and is primarily concerned with contested knowledges within broader cultural framings of authority, expertise, and landscapes. My research has focused on the Murray-Darling Basin, a region rich in environmental contestations. Currently a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University, I hold a PhD in History from ANU and undertook a postdoctoral candidacy at the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research at the University of Wollongong.

Susie Pratt

Elemental Kinships, Sympathetic Ingestion and Civic Humanities

What do our bodies know of toxic environments? What practices do these toxicities enrol us in? What elemental kinships and affections emerge in atmospheres of toxic intimacy? What sympathetic ingestion is occurring and who counts as the sense-makers?

As an artist, techno-scientific muser, educator, and researcher, Susie explores how creative practice can influence social and environmental responsibility, with an emphasis on environmental health, toxic embodiment and circular design. She currently undertakes educational experiments in creative intelligence within the Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation, UTS, as a Scholarly Teaching Fellow. Her creative work has been internationally exhibited in various forms, including digital storytelling, convergent media installations, site-specific sound works, urban design proposals and participatory events.

Libby Robin

Slow Media and Fast Change: The Anthropocene as Metaphor

Environmental humanities have led much of the exploration of the Anthropocene idea through events, performances and museum exhibitions that explore its power as a metaphor. Slow media - the power of the personal visit or exchange - can make new spaces for intergenerational conversations about global change.

Libby Robin, historian of science and museum researcher, is part of the Localizing the Anthropocene project which is developing ways to talk about the Anthropocene for local contexts, in Australia, in Sweden and in Germany. She is co-editor of Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change (Routledge 2017). She is Professor in the Fenner School of Environment and Society at ANU and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities.

Catriona (Cate) Sandilands

Plantasm: Vegetal Participation and Imagination

What does it mean to participate with plants? Although Michael Marder and others have greatly helped us to think with plants toward a more vegetal episteme, this speculative presentation engages more with the question of acting. When I work with plants, both in everyday life and in focused projects of philosophy and criticism, how are they involved in this process as sensuous, active beings rather than just as figures that are "good to think with"? Beginning with the ethical question of who I am to this plant (not what is this plant for me), I tendril toward a practice of vegetal imagination in which intimate acquaintance with specific plants (individual, collective, species) opens up possibilities for stories that include textures of our situated relationships.

Catriona (Cate) Sandilands is a Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University (Toronto) and a 2016 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellow. Her presentation is part of an ongoing project of working with plants in the Environmental Humanities, entitled Plantasmagoria.

David Schlosberg

Participatory Theorising: Reflective Equilibrium and the Political Theory of Environmental Movements

This talk explains the methodology used to examine the ways that environmental movements make and understand their own political theorising. Rather than a focus on understanding social movement strategy, or on inspiring movements, the method attempts to draw out the political, social and ecological theories behind recent environmental organising.

David Schlosberg is Professor of Environmental Politics and co-Director of the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. He works in environmental politics, environmental movements, and political theory – and the intersection of the three with his work on environmental justice. Current applied work includes adaptation/resilience and food security policies with the City of Sydney, and the impacts of climate change as part of the University of Sydney’s Research Hub on Health and Social Impacts of Climate Change for the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage. This presentation comes from a project on ‘sustainable materialism’, or environmental movements and everyday life.

Thom van Dooren

Storying extinction: situating knowledges in Hawaiian conservation

This presentation will offer some preliminary thoughts on the use of Donna Haraway’s work on “situated knowledges” as a methodology for an engaged practice of community storytelling in which diverse knowledges and experiences of extinction are brought into conversation.

Thom van Dooren is Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities and an ARC Future Fellow at the University of New South Wales. His current research and writing focus on some of the many philosophical, ethical, cultural, and political issues that arise in the context of species extinctions and human/wildlife entanglements. These themes are explored in a sustained manner in his second book Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014). He is also founding co-editor of the journal Environmental Humanities.

Kate Wright

Reports from Armidale Aboriginal Community Garden

Armidale Aboriginal Community Garden opened in 2015, and since this time has functioned as a social and environmental activist platform, a site for Aboriginal cultural revival, and an experimental public (environmental) humanities project incorporating multispecies meaning and affect into ethnographic research. This paper focuses on research as an act of worlding, and explores some successes and failures in this projects attempt to decolonise research environments and to cultivate multispecies worlds-in-common.

Kate Wright is an Environmental Humanities scholar and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of New England. Kate researches the important role played by more-¬than-human communities in working toward social and environmental justice, with a particular focus on decolonisation. Her current project is a collaboration with Armidale's Aboriginal community to develop and manage a community garden in Narwan Village, East Armidale, a former Aboriginal reserve. Kate is co-¬editor of the Living Lexicon section of the Environmental Humanities journal, and recently published her first book, Transdisciplinary Journeys in the Anthropocene: More-than-Human Encounters with the Routledge Environmental Humanities Series (2016).