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.
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ItemHigh-rise living in the middle-class suburb: a geography of tactics and strategies( 2019)Within new configurations of the ‘Great Australian Dream’, high-rise living in Australian cities has become not only an acceptable housing configuration for the middle classes but also a desirable one. Enquiring deeply into the tactics and strategies that building inhabitants use to live vertically in the city, this thesis explores the ways in which the design, inhabitation, and maintenance of middle-class high-rise developments are negotiated in Melbourne inner-suburbs. It explores dwellers’ agency in the negotiation of design choices and co-production of high-rise spaces, using mixed qualitative methods combining walking tours and semi-directed interviews. Drawing on the new geography of architecture and on a relational approach to housing and home, the research engages with a theory of practice acknowledging tactical and strategic actions in the city. It argues that dwellers reshape the socio-material configurations and spatial relations of apartment living set by designers, developers and housing technologists. Explicitly recognising of the role of social class in high-rise living, the research suggests that apartment developments are highly contested sites where intended lifestyles and aspirations are negotiated by varied institutions and actors, through a distinctive set of temporal and spatial actions. It finds that competing actors all work towards the co-production of high-rise living spaces and cultures. However, the thesis also shows that housing relations in the practice of middle-class apartment living outline an uneven and changing distribution of power between those who develop strategies and those who craft tactics. More broadly, this research opens up a deeper understanding of how this new kind of vertical city reflects and transforms configurations of status, power and identity in the Australian suburb.
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ItemNon-representational geographies of therapeutic art making( 2015-11-12)This thesis is an exploration of the non-representational geographies of therapeutic art making, drawing on practice-led research methods from the creative arts. It is, therefore, interdisciplinary. The work comprises two examinable components—a major project (creative work) and the written dissertation. After a review of three major bodies of literature, the thesis outlines a series of geographical engagements with the practices of visual art making, poetic permaculture, subterranean graffiti, fibre art, and dance therapy. The ‘findings’ are presented in two empirical chapters. The first is a collection of poetry designed to animate fieldwork encounters, and the second describes a body of creative work that was audienced at a PhD art exhibition in 2013. In its entirety, the work attempts to think therapeutic activity at the boundary of the body and extending outward—into the cosmos—rather than inward, in support of a fragile ego. Informed by contemporary feminism, Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm, Whitehead’s process-oriented ontology, and Deleuze’s thinking on sense and ‘the event’, the work reclaims therapeutics as ecological, spatial, and material.
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ItemBackpacking in an unsustainable world: the places and practices of mobile people( 2015)This thesis integrates the geographical concerns of mobility, place and practices with the study of long-term, multi-destination tourists called backpackers. As backpackers are highly mobile but also reside in place for prolonged periods, they can help us to understand what happens to practices amongst people who have a fluctuating and dynamic relationship with place. Practice-based approaches applied in the study of sustainability have generally eschewed an engagement with mobile people, while scholars engaging with practice theory in sustainability-related research have often overlooked the actions of people on holiday. Recognising both the contribution that mobility studies makes to conceptualisations of place, and backpacking as a unique form of mobility, this thesis explores the differences that travel and mobility make to practices of sustainability. Using a pragmatist theoretical perspective and a mixed methods approach, this thesis integrates the research areas of sustainability, everyday practices, mobilities and place with the study of backpackers. The aim is to understand the differences place and mobility make to practices of sustainability. This thesis provides a broad account of the relationship between the everyday practices of mobile people and sustainability. To convey the dynamism of place and mobility and their influence on everyday backpacker practices related to sustainability, the thesis also develops the notions of destination and pace. Destination is a term that describes where mobile people are performing practices. It amplifies the interrelationships between practice, place and mobility. Three types of destination emerged in the backpacking context and each had a distinctive relationship with backpacker practices in the context of sustainability. The notion of pace combines speed and rhythm and it describes how mobility and backpacker practices are implicated in sustainability. Engaging with pace further explicated the interrelationships between practice, place and mobility. The relationship between sustainability, practices and place was shown to be tightly bound via a slow pace but loosened via a fast pace. Practices that I considered sustainable were then enabled or obstructed depending on the fluctuating pace of backpacker travel, with a slow pace associated with more sustainable practices than a fast pace. By attending to destination and to pace I demonstrate how place, mobility and practices are entwined with sustainability. As there is a lack of attention to place and mobility in the literature on social practices, this thesis contributes to this field of research by demonstrating the dynamic relations between practices, place and mobility. In so doing, it furthers debates in the social sciences regarding the use of practice-based approaches to issues of tourism and sustainability.