Remembering and reimagining embodied geographies

Presenting author: Corrinne Sullivan (Western Sydney University)

The concept of migration is not typically understood as an Indigenous Australian experience, rather discourses of removal and dispossession have been the focus. Drawing from research with Indigenous Australian sex workers, and secondary sources, I will locate and discuss the ways in which queer Indigenous Australians migrate to the city to create new communities and spaces of belonging. This presentation explores the narratives of Indigenous Australian queer peoples to unpack the motives and personal experiences of 'placemaking' in the city for this group of people. In doing so, I will discuss how notions of identity, community and relationships are understood, shared and (re)produced by those who migrate to the city, and thereby draw attention to the experiences that shape Indigenous Australian queer migration.

Presenting author: Gordon Waitt (University of Wollongong)

Other authors: Ian Buchanan (University of Wollongong), Tess Lea (University of Sydney), Glen Fuller (University of Canberra)

This paper reflections on embodied geographies of pedalling 'down under'. I do so by asking the question: 'Where does it feel right to ride a bike'?  To think about this question, this paper takes up this challenge by drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's notions of assemblage and territory. In this way, advocating for a more just transport future is conceptualised as an embodied process of territorialisation, reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation. Our analysis proceeds by offering three 'portraits' 'from empirical materials gathered from a qualitative cycling project in the car-dominated small city of Wollongong, Australia. We argue that all road users are not equal, regardless of having the same formal status.

Through an appreciation of the rhythmic qualities of spatiality, the paper charts experiences of the process of gendered, sexed, aged and classed inclusion and exclusion from the road through cycling. Implications for a just transport future are discerned from the territories created by the affective intensities of different pedalling rhythms narrated as love and the possibilities of cyclists, to move-together, or not, in proximity with other cyclists, pedestrians and drivers.

Presenting author: Imogen Carr (University of Melbourne)

Other author: School of Geography, University of Melbourne

Feminist and intersectional geographies work to challenge claims of objectivity, call attention to power imbalances, and decentre those with privilege. Yet as Longhurst & Johnston (2014) suggest, this remains a work in progress. In this paper, I show how a narrative approach might contribute to destabilising masculinism within geography. Listening to life-story narratives allows researchers to situate particular lived experiences within a broader context - of past experiences; social and cultural narratives; and norms and expectations. Situating lived experiences in this way exposes the hierarchies and power structures at play.

Reflecting on semi-structured interviews from a case study in a neighbourhood with high levels of economic, social and ethnic diversity, I consider the role perception plays in the encounters three diversely positioned women have across difference. Discussion of how these women perceive, and feel perceived by, others reveal how their identities come to be embodied in relational to others and with reference to their own past experiences. A narrative approach provides an opportunity to unpack the implications of embodied forms of power such as perception and in doing so destabilises more dominant modes of knowledge production. 

Presenting author: Ellen van Holstein  (University of Melbourne)

Other author: Ilan Wiesel (University of Melbourne), Brendan Gleeson (University of Melbourne), Christine Bigby (La Trobe University)

The Covid-19 public health crisis has revealed highly unequal distributions of vulnerability. Vulnerability is an ambiguous and contentious concept. While vulnerability is universal to the human condition for our embodied and therefor precarious being in the world, it is also particular to an individual's social position, privilege and resources. Meanwhile, focus on subjective experiences has created interpretations of vulnerability as abnormality and the label has limited the autonomy of those deemed vulnerable. This paper advances understandings of vulnerability by examining how people with intellectual disability, a group of people who have often been denied autonomy for their perceived vulnerability, experienced and managed Melbourne's periods of pandemic lockdown. We interviewed four self-advocates with intellectual disability seven times between April and October.

This series of interviews demonstrates that the cause of disproportionate bodily and emotional discomforts during lockdown, such as anxieties and lack of exercise, were firmly entangled with ongoing stressors related to discrimination, a complex information landscape and the social organisation of disability support. The paper argues for analyses of vulnerability that recognise the agency of people with disability and their ability to navigate disruption and risk, given the right supports. 

Presenting author: Rachel Colls (Durham University)

This paper provides a series of critical reflections upon two strategies deployed by feminist geographers to place 'the body' within Geography.  Building on Longhurst and Johnston's (2014) identification of 'the body' to cause upheaval and disruption to the masculinism of the discipline, I seek to critically interrogate both the form and affect that such an upheaval has taken. Specifically, I will consider how 'the body' has been made present within the discipline through strategies of (re)valuation and insertion.

In different ways, over the past twenty five years, feminist geographers have sought to revalue 'the body', through a critical engagement with disciplinary conventions of knowledge production, alongside developing new research agendas e.g.  fleshiness and fluidity, and considering more broadly what the body can 'do' to wider  disciplinary concerns e.g. social exclusion and geopolitics. This paper will tease out the assumptions and absences in the theoretical work we use, specifically around 'raced' and trans bodies; question the dangers of merely 'adding bodies in' as a means to build intra-disciplinary presence;   and finally consider what future bodily geographies might look, sound and feel like if we reflect inwards upon our own practices as a strategy for the making of new, coherent and wide reaching geographies of 'the body'.

Presenting author: Lynda Johnston (University of Waikato)

Other author: Robyn Longhurst (University of Waikato)

Emeritus Professor Janice Monk argues for the importance of examining "the careers of women geographers" (Monk 2004, 1) and so in this presentation we turn our attention towards her own impressive career. We also turn our attention towards another woman geographer, the late Professor Dame Evelyn Stokes, who like Monk, over the course of many decades, made a rich contribution to the discipline of human geography.

Both Monk and Stokes have been hugely influential in each of our own scholarly journeys. We adopt an approach that Monk (2004, 2) herself used when examining the careers of women geographers, that is to acknowledge "the existence of multiple histories" and the importance "of recognising differences among women as gender intersects an array of other distinctions, among them race and ethnicity, class, place, and time". Monk and Stokes each have different histories despite both being born 'down-under' (Monk in Australia and Stokes in Aotearoa New Zealand) within a few months of each other (Monk in March 1937 and Stokes in December 1936). Both were ahead of their time, engaging an intersectionality approach, and played a major role in shaping contemporary critical feminist and embodied geography and geographical education that came to follow. 

Presenting author: Jessica Lemire (University of Newcastle)

To know embodiment, is to be in a body as a body. To draw attention to the interplay between feelings, senses and place. While difficult to put into words, dance is powerful; evocative, emotional, relational and more-than-human. My contribution to dance scholarship defines dance as the connecting points - convergences - between and amongst more-than-human bodies. It is the oscillating entanglements through and between bodies, where movement has flow and rhythm. In working with this expanded understanding of dance, I acknowledge that it is not only humans who dance. Navigating our multi-sensuous, placed encounters, dance corporeally articulates our embodiments and emplacements. 

In this paper, I discuss the way that I embody and document more-than-human dance in my research. Here, research is a dance, as dance guides my literature, methods and empirics. Centering the emplaced dancing body in the collection of data, methodologies emerge, demonstrating dance is as methodological as it is theoretical; as conceptual as it is corporeal. 

The sensation of inhabiting a body is difficult to articulate; so rather than simply tell you about embodiment, I would like to, instead, show you through dance.  This paper is an invitation for you to dance with me.

Presenting author: Gabriel Baker (Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington)

In the early 21st centuary the rise in alt-right/white supremacist activity and renewed vigour in defending blood and soil illustrate current political imaginaries which  affirm continuation of white privilege and entitlement in settler coloniser societies. Within these imaginaries are the tenuous, conflicting, and unsensed 'dances' between colonial bodies and place. In such 'dances' colonial bodies have been represented as distinctly masculine and the experiences and inheritances of settler coloniser women have been left under examined. In the context of Aotearoa, as a  pākehā women of settler coloniser ancestry, my PhD research shifts focus away from masculine pākehā settler coloniser subjectivities.

Drawing on Luce Irigaray's theory of the female imaginary and a dance infused embodied methodology I aim to make 'felt' the  unconscious and uneasy imaginaries of white female settler colonisers and thus attend to the  dances - both literal and metaphorical, that pākehā women enact in their relationship to place. In this paper I will mediate upon these dances of freedom and restriction, of settling and becoming unsettled, of remembering and reimagining.