Resource Management and Geography - Theses
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ItemTurbulence, habit and desire: life after two coal mine closures( 2020)This thesis investigates the experiences of workers and their families as they navigate disruptions to everyday life caused by workplace closure and job loss. Situated in the boom-and-bust world of extractive industry, it draws on qualitative fieldwork at two recently closed coal mines in Australia and China to explore the twists and turns of life after loss in restructuring economies. Picking up people’s lives several years after the mine closures, this thesis traces the cascading chain of changes catalysed by the event of closure. It explores how circumstances of life come to press upon bodies in the wake of loss, and how these intensities can come to reshape how people experience the world. It ultimately asks how people might weather the crisis of loss such that they regain a sense of life as an ‘ordinary’ timespace, reorienting from the past to the future. To do this, this thesis approaches loss as a non-relational force of interruption, showing how loss decomposes existing relations and exposes people to an unknown present. Drawing on postphenomenological theories of bodily change, it then tracks the shifts in concerns, anxieties, and orientations that emerge in this timespace of vulnerability and exposure. These processes of change are explored through three empirical chapters on the forces of turbulence, habit and desire. Turbulence shows how loss can bring ordinary life into disorder, leaving people exposed to the intrusions of unfamiliar and often unmanageable conditions. Habit suggests how melancholy durations of life can redraw everyday existence, allowing bodies to pick up different lines of the past to make sense of the present. Finally, desire describes how encounters after loss might begin to mobilise processes of repair, reorienting people from a lost past towards an unfolding future. By examining the relationship between self and other in the constitution of subjectivity, this thesis shows how transformations of the subject can come about through affective intensities that fold otherness into the self. It contributes to understandings of affect, embodiment, and relationality in geography, addressing how the turbulent circumstances of life after loss can speak to tensions in geographers’ understandings of connection and disconnection, presence and absence, relation and non-relation, activity and passivity. By focussing on how people come to live on after loss, this thesis moves beyond the melancholic tendencies of existing literatures on loss to foreground incipient processes of corporeal transformation. Its thrust is thus consolatory: it aims to recognise the gaps and tears that accompany ends, whilst refusing to forgo the vital and affirmative possibilities of life after loss.