Geographies of activism and acquiescence

Presenting author: Amelia Hine (Queensland University of Technology)

Other author: Robyn Mayes (Queensland University of Technology)

The black-throated finch is an endangered species whose highest quality remaining habitat directly overlaps with the site of the controversial Adani Carmichael coal mine in Northern Queensland. The finch's image has been widely utilised by anti-Adani protest groups as a powerful, affective symbol for the destructive impact of greenfield coal mining on the pre-existing ecological environment. Many of these images evoke the finch as a species on the edge of extinction through its depiction as an already dead bird. Recent work within spectral geographies examines how extinct species haunt our consciousness and their sites of extinction, and on-the-brink species incite care through conservation practices that are haunted by future absence, working toward a sense of human entanglement with multispecies worlds across time.

This paper draws on the recent thinking from Eva Giraud to ask what comes after entanglement, highlighting how exclusionary actions can result in different materialisations of nonhuman identities that may in turn change their capacity for survival. Drawing on extensive empirical data and visual representations of the finch we ask whether the finch's activation within this activist movement has enacted these exclusionary practices to construct a fixed finch on-the-brink ontology that problematises its agency, rendering it reductively synonymous with its habitat. 

Presenting aurthor: Sara Fuller (Macquarie University)

Other author: Amy Barrow (Macquarie University)

Scholarship on activism in the Asian context often draws attention to the practices and spaces enabled by diverse authoritarian governance regimes. While this work provides welcome insights, particularly as research exploring political activism tends to privilege histories and experiences within primarily Western contexts, it nonetheless represents only a partial reading of how activism is conceptualised and mobilised in such contexts. In this paper, we seek to provide an alternative perspective on activism in Asia. Rather than a focus on governance regimes, we instead consider the emergence and implications of hybrid forms of activism in the region and explore the diverse ways they relate to everyday authoritarian practices.

Drawing on illustrative case studies from Hong Kong and Singapore, we consider the interplay between 'quiet' and 'loud' forms of activism in theory and practice. By offering new understandings of the concepts, spaces and practices of activism in Asia, the paper offers insights not only regarding how activism emerges and is contested in the region but also the ways in which dominant understandings of activism might be challenged. 

Presenting author: Febe De Geest (University of Melbourne)

Scholars have examined how youth shape the city due to their social and political actions. These studies, however, mainly focus on the activities of young men, downplaying the role of young women. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork, I have analyzed how young married women in an informal migrant settlement reflect on their everyday social and political actions concerning their position at home.

This paper will unpack how these young women challenge forms of violence and power inequality that they experience in their neighborhoods and households, including eviction and domestic violence. I will discuss how their capacity to be active across social and political domains depends on their ability to strategically choose between activism and compliance. For example, at certain moments, young women in Dehradun challenge state violence by participating in public protests against eviction. At other moments they intentionally acquiesce by visibly enduring violence by their husbands or older members of the community. While women build a more viable future by constantly balancing between public resistance and visible and invisible acts of compliance, they also reproduce patriarchal expectations.

By discussing young women's everyday political and social actions in an informal settlement, I explore the dialectical relationship between acquiescence and activism.

Presenting author: David Reynolds (Monash University)

Plastic materials flow around the globe in huge volumes. Their presence and effects in built and natural environments have provoked responses from scientists and environmental campaigners, as well as people who intentionally avoid using plastics in their everyday lives. Avoiding plastic is a political activity, a form of household-level, mundane, and mostly isolated activism working to re-form human-plastic relations. In interviews with people who avoid plastics in Australia, I found strong feelings about undertaking this mundane activism. These feelings frequently clash with material and social systems and structures that promote heavy flows of plastic. Negotiating one's place as an activist operating within powerfully resilient structures can produce feelings including frustration, guilt, and hopelessness.

Activists are not without agency in managing these feelings and can articulate positions of resistance while recognising continuing structural drivers of plastic flows, and can acknowledge negative affect while making room for self-care and continued activism. Characterising the politics associated with avoiding-plastic activism suggests features shared with different kinds of politics - identity, consumer, environmental - but the 'politics of plastic' appears distinct from each of these, an enacted politics built on mundane activism that combines and straddles recognised forms of politics.

Presenting author: Paula Satizabal (University of Melbourne)

Other author: María de Lourdes Melo-Zurita (UNSW)

Western and masculine understandings of territory largely dominate how the State perceives and engages with space and people. Yet, territories are political and lived spaces, collectively enacted via past and present everyday practices and human-nonhuman interactions. Indigenous and Feminists movements in Latin America are calling for plural understandings of territories, bodies, and Earth, as inseparable and co-constituted - territorio-cuerpo-tierra.

We built on this relationality to analyse the earthquakes of the 19th of September in 1985 and 2017 in Mexico, as the trembling earth intensified and exposed the violence women (cis and transgender) experience on a daily basis. We draw on in-depth interviews with activists from the Feminist Brigade, human rights groups, Architecture Brigade, and the Electrical Workers Brigade, focusing on the experiences of precariously employed and migrant women. Metaphorically and physically, 'bodies-holding-bodies', highlight the multiple ways in which some women held and continue to hold the bodies of other women to defend them from State and male violence, creating and enacting territories of resistance. Here, 'sororidad', emerges as a form of collective action and care, the daily practice of coming together to resist gendered violence and fight for the survival and expansion of more liveable and safer women territories.

Presenting author: Peta Wolifson (University of Sydney)

As Sydney's lockout laws were removed, the city's (night)lights were turned off amid efforts to help combat the impact of COVID-19. In this paper I employ a comparison between the public debates around the lockouts and the lockdown - each centred on balancing issues of public health and economy - to explore the concept of affected acquiescence. This comparison draws on my previous work based on media analyses and interviews with pro-nightlife activists.

Re-examining that material alongside media relating to the more recent lockdown I investigate the idea of acquiescence (including that amid activism) as coerced - by government, policymakers, and others - and interrogate the affective relationships between these two groups and their approaches. In doing so I grapple with the strategies and tactics that make activism more or less susceptible to acquiescence, drawing out lessons to divert the acquiescence affect. This opportune comparison helps to make sense of apparent contradictions within and between the two public debates. Finally, I seek to contribute to ongoing efforts to re-centre culture - that which is largely sidelined - in nightlife debates, by looking into what affected acquiescence means for the future of the cultural economy at night. 

Presenting author: Louise Dorignon (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

This paper charts the applications of de Certeau's framework (1984) of tactics and strategies within human geography scholarship. Its starting point is that this framework has been used diversely and disparately in geographical thought, while not been systematically reviewed. There has been extensive debate over the interpretation of this framework given that class structures and power relations have undergone significant changes since its inception. Interrogating the potentiality of this binary (Buchanan, 2000) in its contemporary relation to forms of power, the paper revisits the original framing and suggests a new ethos to engage with tactical and strategic actions.

The paper first engages with the connections between strategies and space - and between tactics and time - and sets out to discuss the application and operationality of the concepts across multiple geographical fields. Acknowledging the potential perils of taking a categorisation approach to human actions, the paper then discusses the benefits of distinguishing between tactics and strategies and illuminate its links with activism and acquiescence. At a time when the pandemic has brought forward the contested paradigm of 'tactical urbanism' (Berglund, 2018; Webb, 2018) as a coping mechanism, the paper calls for geographers to move beyond a reading of the framework as affirmative and self-determined to recognise tactics and strategies' intersections with relational thinking, everyday power and politics.

Presenting author: Jathan Sadowski (Monash University)

Where is utopia? In a strict definitional sense: nowhere. Coined in the early 16th century, utopia is a pun based on the Greek word for place, topos, and two English prefixes: ou for "not" and eu for "good." Yet, few imaginary places have had such great ideological and material effects on the world. The search for utopia-and the desire to map, settle, and colonise this place - is a prime directive for the leaders, investors, and entrepreneurs of the technological future. At the same time, its inversion of dystopia-coined in the Victorian era during the industrial revolution-has become a common descriptor for the way society, both now and near, is experienced by many. "Utopian" and "dystopian" should not be understood as competing alternatives, but rather as coexisting realities. Which place we occupy is determined by our position in, and perspective of, extant material conditions.

I argue that a relational understanding of utopia and dystopia shows how these good/bad/nowhere places are very real-contrary to their definitions-but are not defined by immutable parameters. Instead, their boundaries can and should be redrawn.

Presenting author: Sangeetha Chandrashekeran (University of Melbourne)

The Musks, Gates and Bezos' of this world claim to possess the leadership and innovation to solve socio-environmental crises through technocratic governance, efficiency improvements, and 'smart' solutions. This paper examines the new geographies of acquiescence underpinning techno-futurism with a focus on Australia's new Consumer Data Right which creates a right of access (not ownership) to data about one's everyday life, and creates technical and regulatory practices (accreditation and interoperability) that enable data transfer to third parties. Through highly technical regulatory processes everyday activities are captured, linked, and analysed with a view to driving new innovations and accumulation opportunities. By contrast, 'data sovereignty' involves actions by civil society or economic cooperatives to hold data in common as opposed to private ownership.

This includes progressive policies and digital platforms that enhance participatory democracy and initiatives to destroy data rather than analyse for purposes of creating market value. By examining practices of technology acquiescence and activism in tandem we are able to more fully understand the simultaneous processes of disembedding and re-embedding tech capitalism in the fundamental relations of production and the scale of the challenges involved in struggles against techno-capitalist futurism. 

Presenting author: Amy Lawton (WESTIR Ltd)

Other author: Professor Nicky Morrison (Western Sydney University)

Unprecedented growth in Australia's metropolitan regions has led to rapid urban expansion into the peri-urban fringes, with agricultural land converted to alternative land uses, and particularly housing.  The purpose of this paper is to focus on Greater Western Sydney (GWS), one of the fastest growing peri-urban regions in Australia. By 2031, its population is expected to increase to 3.3 million in 2031, with the region becoming home to over half of Sydney's population. Whilst this urban transformation has attracted ongoing public attention, there appears a lack of political will and commitment to address the implications of rapid urban growth on the demise of the peri-urban agricultural sector.  Yet like many cities, internationally, Sydney has been hit by a rapid succession of shocks and stresses, drought, bushfires, storms, floods and now the global pandemic, calling into question pro-growth trajectories that put economic imperatives and development needs above natural resource depletion, and local food security concerns.

Juxtaposing longitudinal housing, agriculture and land value datasets, alongside interviews with NSW and local government representatives, the paper charts state-local tensions in managing population growth and housing pressures, on the one hand, whilst protecting (as far as possible) existing peri-urban agriculture lands under threat. The paper concludes that the size, value and extent of loss of the peri-urban agricultural sector in GWS has been historically under-valued, and will remain so, relative to competing housing priorities and private market interests, unless political priorities change.  

Presenting author: Craig Jeffrey (University of Melbourne)

Other author: Associate Professor Jane Dyson (University of Melbourne)

Building on long-term fieldwork on youth political action in rural north India, we focus on women's challenges to patriarchal ideas in particular around education and employment. We argue that young women are effectively challenging aspects of structural power through developing a type of 'prefigurative politics' - a "be the change you want to see" approach - that simultaneously involves elements of provisional acquiescence.

While this prefigurative politics is fairly effective, however, it also produces affective states that resonate with Nathalie Osbourne's ideas of 'political depression.' Young people refer to these affective states as the latent costs of their everyday politics. We argue that these strains manifest especially in young people's concerns around social exposure and the visible nature of their activism.