Emily Potter

Ethical Consumption : A Critical Introduction

Community gardens or ‘organized gardening projects’ have of late received renewed impetus as a form of governmental intervention that responds to increasing concerns about (amongst other things) obesity, food security and community cohesiveness. Scholars have likewise responded with keen analytical interest, deploying manifold conceptual lenses including Foucaultian governmentality, which explores how and to what ends such interventions come about. In this chapter, we discuss empirical evidence of organized garden projects in Australia and the Philippines through a ‘realist governmentality’ approach, which examines the actual impacts of interventions on subjects, and potential ‘disjuncture’ between governmental aims and actual outcomes. We argue that these interventions can be read as enacting the disciplinary and normalizing intentions of contemporary modes of governing, in-keeping with the work of governmentality theorists. However, through joint action, exposure to shared vulnerabilities, and shifts in perspectives on the self and others, these interventions exceed their governmental intentions. This occurs not through ‘disjuncture’ per se, but through the proliferation of (potential) sites and connections of cultivating ethical praxis, which overreach the spatial and ontological confines of these projects’ initial intention.

Communicating climate change: public responsiveness and matters of concern

Since climate change captured global attention in the 1990s, the private individual, addressed as a member of a concerned public, has occupied a focal position in the discourse of environmental amelioration. Recently, a range of prominent books, films and television programs — for example, Tim Flannerys The Weather Makers (2005), Al Gores An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and ABC TVs Carbon Cops (2007) — have promoted the role of the individual as the ‘starting point’ for effective environmental action. These texts assume that the provision and comprehension of sufficient information to the public about climate change will change individual habits and practices. This accords with the ‘information-deficit model’ in environmental communication research, a concept that asserts a direct connection between individual awareness and response, and collective action. This paper discusses the limitations of this model, pervasive in both popular and official approaches to climate change. It will interrogate the philosophical assumptions that underlie it, in which nature and culture are polarised and the human is positioned in a certain, and separate, relationship to the non-human world — an inheritance of the very logic that enables the continued exploitation of nature. Applying Bruno Latours notion of a ‘matter of concern’ to climate change, where the gathering of a range of irreducible forces and im/materialities continually produce these phenomena, this paper proposes that, in thinking about climate change as essentially unrepresentable, a different mode of public engagement with the issue is asserted.

Indigenous Place-Making in the City: Dispossessions, Occupations and Implications for Cultural Architecture

This paper considers Indigenous place-making practices in light of an idea for a major Victorian Indigenous Cultural Knowledge and Education Centre in central Melbourne as championed by Traditional Owners in Victoria. With only eight Aboriginal architects in the country, collaboration with non-Indigenous architects will be inevitable. Two case studies from the recent past—the Tent Embassy in Canberra and a street corner in Collingwood—reveal that dominant cultures of place-making continue to marginalise Aboriginal people in urban Australia. This paper will contend that delivering spatial justice will require both an opportunity for Indigenous Victorians to build visibility in the centre of the city and a willingness within the dominant culture to be deterritorialised.

Introduction: making Indigenous place in the Australian city

Abstract This introductory essay situates this special issues concerns in the context of Indigenous cultural centre design in settler-colonial Australia. Given the very small number of Indigenous architects in Australia, architectural facilities for Indigenous communities are routinely designed by non-indigenous architects. The implications of this are significant. Given the often complex social, historical and political ambitions that are invested in the construction of Indigenous cultural centres, and their frequent intention to represent a broad Indigenous constituency, can non-indigenous architectural and spatial practice ever realize these? As a way into this question, the essay surveys postcolonial and architectural scholarship that explores the spatialization of setter-colonial politics and the distinct place-making traditions of Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. The making of place in the Australian city is an ongoing force of conflict, assertion, exclusion and forgetting, but it is also central to the realization of a possible post-colonial state in which no one ‘centre’ can ever stabilize and resolve questions of legitimacy and power. Instead, such a centre might hold these questions in tension and as questions in common, which would mean a new foundation for the making of place.

A new environmental design: Sustainable place making in postcolonial Australia

This paper seeks to expand on environmental design understood in purely instrumentalist terms. It argues that current environmental emergencies in Australia and elsewhere are requiring alternative strategies of response, and proposes the terrain of poetic work as offering new insights in the field of sustainability practice. It draws upon two place-making projects to advance a theory of environmental design that is poetically guided.

Climate change and non-Indigenous belonging in postcolonial Australia

The constitution of climate change as an ‘emergency’ invites an appeal to sovereign power that is troubling in the context of Australias colonial history. Climate change is an unsettling and dispossessing force that, while unprecedented in many ways, can be situated among a series of environmental and social crises that have shaped a discourse of anxious or insecure non-Indigenous belonging in this country. This discourse seeks to render non-Indigenous Australian place as secure and absolute, and understands environmental change as a threat to this goal. This threat appeals to an emergency framing, and in turn to a reassertion, in line with the insights of Agamben, of an exclusive sovereignty that rehearses the foundational dispossessions of colonization. At the same time, climate change is initiating new ways of conceptualizing human relations with place that challenge the value of sovereign status. It enacts realities that refuse a singular emergency and instead generate community from a reorientation of places, times and more-than-human relations. Thought in this way as a creative force that is shaping communities and environments, climate change becomes a source of critical insight for the possibilities of a decolonized future.