Papers in this project collection arise from international networking on interdisciplinary research into commensality [...].

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Australian Government has been ambiguous in the way it has communicated the aid budget. On some occasions, it has sought to downplay increases in aid spending, while at other times it has sought to downplay cuts to aid spending. We draw on interviews with federal parliamentarians and key informants to understand these dynamics, in the context of obtaining their views on changes to Australia's post-COVID-19 aid policy. We find evidence that a new political consensus is forming around Australian aid. While this 'cautious consensus' countenances aid spending increases, motivated in part by humanitarian concerns but especially by anxiety about increasing Chinese influence in the region, these priorities are tempered by considerable concern about public backlash at a time of significant economic challenges for Australian citizens. Based on this evidence, we define the contours of an emerging 'cautious consensus' by showing how it will differ from the earlier 'golden consensus' era of Australian aid.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people navigate the social and political order of the Australian settler state in ways that seek to increase their personal freedoms and political autonomy. For some groups this means seeking a firmer place within the social, political and economic life of Australia, and for others it means navigating away, towards a more distant relationship based in the resurgence of Indigenous nationhood. This navigation is composed of multifaceted and multidirectional relations between Indigenous Australians, settler Australians, and the settler state. As a discipline, political science must move beyond the study of settler institutions and begin to engage more comprehensively in research that considers the dynamics and structures of Indigenous-settler relations as a matter of priority.

Indigenous family life has been a key target of family and child policies in Australia since colonisation. In this paper, we identify four main policy eras that have shaped the national and state policy frameworks that have impacted Indigenous families: the protectionism, assimilation, self‐determination and neoliberalism eras. Our analysis of these national and state policy frameworks reveals an enduring and negative conceptualisation of Indigenous family life. This conceptualisation continues to position Indigenous families as deficient and dysfunctional compared with a white, Anglo‐Australian family ideal. This contributes to the reproduction of paternalistic policy settings and the racialised hierarchies within them that entrench Indigenous disempowerment and reproduce Indigenous disadvantage. Further, it maintains a deficit paradigm that continues to obfuscate the positive aspects of Indigenous family life that are protective of Indigenous well‐being.

Kajsa Lundberg reviews From Social Harm to Zemiology: A Critical Introduction

In January 2017, several homeless people gathered outside Flinders Street Station in Melbourne, Australia. The gathering gained significant media attention and led to an immediate political response, with the city council proposing changes to ban rough sleeping in the city. Drawing on insights from visual criminology and moral geography, I scrutinise how visual regimes and aesthetic judgements helped motivate this punitive response. To do so, I combine ten in-depth interviews with homelessness service providers and a critical discourse analysis of how Melbourne’s two daily newspapers reported on the camp. I identify how the newspapers represent homeless people as violating the idealised aesthetics of the city, a violation which comes to discursively justify their criminalisation. Moreover, the way a person looks and their belongings, if stored in public space, direct their reception and whether or not they become subjected to police interventions. Finally, representations of homelessness matter and alternative representations of homeless people could shift the emphasis away from criminalisation, in favour of policy responses to homelessness attuned to structures of social and economic inequalities.

The destructive bushfires in Australia 2019–2020 resonate with similar trends around the world as bushfire seasons are becoming longer and more pervasive. Yet, criminological analyses of bushfires are limited and tend to focus on the individual criminal subject and the act of arson, the crime of intentional fire starting. Encouragingly, green criminology, the criminological perspective dealing with environmental crimes and harms, is expanding the categories of offenders and victims of harm by, for example, highlighting non-human victims and harms perpetrated by the capitalist system. Nonetheless, even this perspective is inadequate to deal with the complex and ultimately mobile events of fire and their far-reaching consequences. This article brings green criminology in flux by drawing from the ‘new mobilities paradigm’, emphasising motion, temporality and the mobility of contemporary life. The new mobilities paradigm, or the ‘mobility turn’, has a lot to offer green criminology as is demonstrated here by way of scrutinising the mobility of fire. A mobile green criminology will help trace fire beyond static categories of offenders and victims and open up for more flexible and mobile categories of environmental harms as constructed, complex and unstable processes. Finally, a mobile analysis allows for a more complex and meaningful reading of criminological space, demonstrated by the relationship between social, aesthetic and cultural values of land, politics, power and fire-related behaviours, such as fire suppression or Aboriginal peoples’ cultural burning practices. It is argued here that in order to understand the complex nature of fire, green criminology must attune to the intersections between fire, space, mobility and meaning.