School of Geography - Research Publications

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    Political ecology in, and of, the Australian bushfires
    Batterbury, S (Undisciplined Environments, 2020-02-11)
    2019 was Australia’s hottest and driest year since records began (Bureau of Meteorology, 2020). From November 2019 and into January 2020 we have experienced fires of a new magnitude. There have already been almost 40 lives lost, 6,000 properties burned to the ground, and an area larger than England and Wales has burned across four states. The continent needs a combination of better preparedness, heeding Indigenous tradition and knowledge, pushing those in power to heed the gravity of the emergency, pulling back on fossil fuel exploitation and the hemorrhaging of poorly taxed corporate profits that results from it, and blaming the real culprits. For engaged political ecologists, we have work to do on all of these. We need Federal level recognition and full participation in strong international and national climate actions, assistance to affected communities and households from all three levels of government, listening to and acting with Australian youth who have had enough of climate inaction, and – for some I hope – heeding a degrowth agenda that will really challenge free market corporate greed, and perhaps hasten a sustainability transition. Teaching, and better engagement, could be our own small contribution to a better climate and bushfire political ecology for Australia.
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    Abierto pero injusto: el papel de la justicia social en las publicaciones de acceso abierto
    Batterbury, S (Scielo, 2020-10-13)
    Stage one of the Open Access (OA) movement promoted the democratization of scholarly knowledge, making work available so that anybody could read it. However, publication in highly ranked journals is becoming very costly, feeding the same vendor capitalists that OA was designed to sidestep. In this Q&A, Simon Batterbury argues that when prestige is valued over publication ethics, a paradoxical situation emerges where conversations about social justice take place in unjust journals. Academic freedom and integrity are at risk unless Open Access becomes not simply about the democratization of knowledge, but the ethics of its publication too.
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    Labour of Love: An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences [reprint]
    Pia, AE ; Batterbury, S ; Joniak-Lüthi, A ; LaFlamme, M ; Wielander, G ; Zerilli, FM ; Nolas, M ; Schubert, J ; Loubere, N ; Franceschini, I ; Walsh, C ; Mora, A ; Varvantakis, C (Società Italiana di Antropologia Culturale, 2020-07-21)
    We are a group of scholar-publishers based in the humanities and social sciences who are questioning the fairness and scientific tenability of a system of scholarly communication dominated by large commercial publishers. With this Manifesto we wish to repoliticise Open Access to challenge existing rapacious practices in academic publishing—namely, often invisible and unremunerated labour, toxic hierarchies of academic prestige, and a bureaucratic ethos that stifles experimentation—and to bear witness to the indifference they are predicated upon. We mobilise an extended notion of research output, which encompasses the work of building and maintaining the systems, processes, and relations of production that make scholarship possible. We believe that the humanities and social sciences are too often disengaged from the public and material afterlives of their scholarship. We worry that our fields are sleepwalking into a new phase of control and capitalisation, to include continued corporate extraction of value and transparency requirements designed by managers, entrepreneurs, and politicians. We fervently believe that OA can be a powerful tool to advance the ends of civil society and social movements. But opening up the products of our scholarship without questioning how this is done, who stands to profit from it, what model of scholarship is being normalised, and who stands to be silenced by this process may come at a particularly high cost for scholars in the humanities and social sciences.
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    Labour of Love: An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences
    Pia, AE ; Batterbury, S ; Joniak-Lüthi, A ; LaFlamme, M ; Wielander, G ; Zerilli, FM ; Nolas, M ; Schubert, J ; Loubere, N ; Franceschini, I ; Walsh, C ; Mora, A ; Varvantakis, C (PubPub, 2020-07-14)
    We are a group of scholar-publishers based in the humanities and social sciences who are questioning the fairness and scientific tenability of a system of scholarly communication dominated by large commercial publishers. With this Manifesto we wish to repoliticise Open Access to challenge existing rapacious practices in academic publishing—namely, often invisible and unremunerated labour, toxic hierarchies of academic prestige, and a bureaucratic ethos that stifles experimentation—and to bear witness to the indifference they are predicated upon. We mobilise an extended notion of research output, which encompasses the work of building and maintaining the systems, processes, and relations of production that make scholarship possible. We believe that the humanities and social sciences are too often disengaged from the public and material afterlives of their scholarship. We worry that our fields are sleepwalking into a new phase of control and capitalisation, to include continued corporate extraction of value and transparency requirements designed by managers, entrepreneurs, and politicians. We fervently believe that OA can be a powerful tool to advance the ends of civil society and social movements. But opening up the products of our scholarship without questioning how this is done, who stands to profit from it, what model of scholarship is being normalised, and who stands to be silenced by this process may come at a particularly high cost for scholars in the humanities and social sciences.
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    The geopolitical ecology of New Caledonia: territorial re-ordering, mining, and Indigenous economic development
    Batterbury, SPJ ; Kowasch, M ; Bouard, S (UNIV ARIZONA LIBRARIES, 2020-01-01)
    In the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia, conflict and difference between Indigenous Kanak people and European settlers has existed at least since the 1850s. We interrogate the geopolitical ecology of these islands, which is deeply wedded to natural resource extraction, is instrumentalized in political debate, power struggles, conflict, and the mining sector. Territoriality, including changes to political borders and access to land, has promoted the interests of the key actors in shaping the future of the islands. Violence in the 1980s was followed by the Matignon Accords (1988) and three provinces were established (North, South, Loyalty Islands). The South Province is governed by a party loyal to France, and the others are in the hands of the Indigenous Kanak independence movement seeking full decolonization and independence. The strengthened regional autonomy that emerged from the creation of provinces has permitted the Kanak-dominated ones to control certain political competencies as well as to guide economic development much more strongly than in other settler states, notably through a large nickel mining project in the North Province. Provincialization has not diminished ethnic divisions as French interests hoped, as signaled by voting in the close-run but unsuccessful 2018 referendum on independence from France. We explore the ironies of these efforts at territorial re-ordering, which are layered on significant spatial and racial disparities. Re-bordering has enabled resurgence of Kanak power in ways unanticipated by the architects of the Accords, but without a guarantee of eventual success.
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    Incremental, transitional and transformational adaptation to climate change in resource extraction regions
    Loginova, J ; Batterbury, SPJ (Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2019)
    Mining regions are affected by climate change. Supplies of energy and water are required, and operations become hazardous during adverse weather events. Adapting to climate change takes three forms: incrementally improving the resilience of mining operations; transitioning to more inclusive governance through institutional and policy innovations; and more profound transformations that shift the balance of power, including profit-sharing, localized control or cessation of mining entirely. Clarifying adaptation pathways helps to identify priorities and inform policies for a fairer and more sustainable future for mining and the regions where it takes place.
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    The imperative of repair: Fixing bikes - for free
    Batterbury, S ; Dant, T ; Martínez, F ; Laviolette, P (Berghahn Books, 2019-09-01)
    This chapter discusses how we can interrupt the cycle of consumption and disposal to reuse a relatively simple and ubiquitous item – the bicycle. We compare two projects that are non-commercial, community-based and involve volunteers who recycle, redistribute and assist with the repair of bicycles. The first is a project that repairs donated bikes and gives them to asylum seekers and refugees who have moved into an urban area. The repair of lives broken by the disruption of seeking refuge in another country is being helped with the life-enhancing mobility of a bicycle. The second is a network of community bike workshops open to anybody, which help owners to keep their bikes on the road by teaching maintenance skills. Being able to repair their bike frees the user from having to pay and wait for a professional service to recover their velomobility. Both types of project operate at the margins of the system of capitalist production and consumption in which bicycles are originally manufactured. Both counter the tendency of advanced industrialised societies towards consuming new replacement goods rather than repairing the broken.
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    Geografías fluidas: territorialización marina y el escalamiento de epistemologías acuáticas locales en la costa Pacífica de Colombia
    Satizábal, P ; Batterbury, S (Universidad Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca, 2019-07-15)
    El Pacífico colombiano ha sido imaginado vacío en términos sociales y lleno de recursos naturales y biodiversidad. Estos imaginarios han permitido la creación de fronteras de control que históricamente han despojado a afrodescendientes e indígenas de sus territorios ancestrales. Este artículo examina la territorialización en los océanos, tomando como referencia el Golfo de Tribugá. Muestra como comunidades afrodescendientes y actores no estatales se ven obligados a usar el lenguaje de recursos, en vez del de arraigo socio-cultural, para negociar los procesos de territorialización marinos. Informadas por sus epistemologías acuáticas, las comunidades costeras reclaman su autoridad sobre el mar a través de la creación de un área marina protegida. Usan instrumentos del estado para asegurar el acceso y control local, subvirtiendo el marco jurídico del mar como bien público de acceso abierto. El área protegida representa un lugar de resistencia que irónicamente somete a las comunidades a tecnologías disciplinarias de conservación.
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    Speaking Power to "Post-Truth": Critical Political Ecology and the New Authoritarianism
    Neimark, B ; Childs, J ; Nightingale, AJ ; Cavanagh, CJ ; Sullivan, S ; Benjaminsen, TA ; Batterbury, S ; Koot, S ; Harcourt, W (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2019-03-04)
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    Affirmative and engaged political ecology: Practical applications and participatory development actions
    Batterbury, S (Pohjois-Suomen Maantieteellinen Seura ry, 2018-01-01)
    Academic critique drives most political ecology scholarship. An engaged and affirmative political ecology, however, is practiced in scholarly, everyday and activist communities. Many academic political ecologists, including some founding figures like Piers Blaikie, take an interest in the '‘relevance'’ of their work and wish to remain '‘engaged'’ with the communities and policy actors that their research identifies as vital for positive social and environmental change. A biographical approach provides clues to what makes '‘affirmative'’ scholarship important and viable. Research engagement, and particularly activism, is desirable but often deemed to be nonconformist by the research culture of Western research universities and organisations. I argue for a more affirmative political ecology, illustrated with examples from research work in an international development project in West Africa. The use of participatory research techniques can reveal injustices, but in this case it was less successful at redressing power imbalances. The more general conclusion is that strong engagement can be effective and satisfying. As environmental problems and injustices worsen, it is essential.