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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Just Add Water: Colonisation, Water Governance, And The Australian Inland, Leah M. Gibbs Sep 2013

Just Add Water: Colonisation, Water Governance, And The Australian Inland, Leah M. Gibbs

Leah Maree Gibbs

Water has played a key role in the development of the Australian inland and the nation. For European colonists, the dry and variable landscape challenged ideas about nature imported from northern temperate regions. I argue first, that colonists brought with them ideas for ordering nature and tools for transforming landscapes that led to inappropriate and destructive water management and the silencing of local voices and knowledge systems. Secondly, colonial patterns of ordering and transforming landscapes are ongoing, but new ways of governing water, which challenge colonialism, are emerging. In the first section of the paper I discuss colonial relationships with …


Living Together But Apart: Material Geographies Of Everyday Sustainability In Extended Family Households, Natascha Klocker, Chris Gibson, Erin Borger Jul 2013

Living Together But Apart: Material Geographies Of Everyday Sustainability In Extended Family Households, Natascha Klocker, Chris Gibson, Erin Borger

Natascha Klocker

In the Industrialized West, ageing populations and cultural diversity-combined with rising property prices and extensive years spent in education-have been recognized as diverse factors driving increases in extended family living. At the same time, there is growing awareness that household size is inversely related to per capita resource consumption patterns, and that urgent problems of environmental sustainability are negotiated, on a day-to-day basis (and often unconsciously), at the household level. This paper explores the sustainability implications of everyday decisions to fashion, consume, and share resources around the home, through the lens of extended family households. Through interviews with extended family …


Conducting Sensitive Research In The Present And Past Tense: Recounting The Stories Of Current And Former Child Domestic Workers, Natascha Klocker Jul 2013

Conducting Sensitive Research In The Present And Past Tense: Recounting The Stories Of Current And Former Child Domestic Workers, Natascha Klocker

Natascha Klocker

In recent years, scholarship on children's work has increasingly incorporated the perspectives of working children. Although laudable, this shift toward children's inclusion in research has concentrated on those employed at the time of data collection. Former child workers have largely been overlooked as a source of information. This paper reflects on research conducted with current and former child domestic workers in Tanzania. The child domestic working experiences reported by those two groups diverged markedly: those who had already ceased employment reported far higher rates of dissatisfaction with child domestic work, and far more experiences of exploitation and abuse, than those …


Becoming Differently Modern: Geographic Contributions To A Generative Climate Politics, Lesley M. Head, Christopher R. Gibson Jul 2013

Becoming Differently Modern: Geographic Contributions To A Generative Climate Politics, Lesley M. Head, Christopher R. Gibson

Lesley Head

Anthropogenic climate change is a quintessentially modern problem in its historical origins and discursive framing, but how well does modernist thinking provide us with the tools to solve the problems it created? On one hand even though anthropogenic climate change is argued to be a problem of human origins, solutions to which will require human actions and engagements, modernity separates people from climate change in a number of ways. On the other, while amodern or more-than-human concepts of multiple and relational agency are more consistent with the empirical evidence of humans being deeply embedded in earth surface processes, these approaches …


Decentring 1788: Beyond Biotic Nativeness, Lesley M. Head Jul 2013

Decentring 1788: Beyond Biotic Nativeness, Lesley M. Head

Lesley Head

The usefulness of the concept of biotic nativeness has been challenged in both the social and natural sciences, for different reasons. This paper explores the particular construction of nativeness in Australia in relation to plants, showing that the definition builds on and inscribes more deeply the boundary between humans and the rest of nature seen in the wider literature. In this context two further boundaries are etched: between some humans and others, and before and after European colonisation. Such a use of nativeness as an axiom of environmental management is argued to be problematic, foreclosing a number of future options …


Becoming Differently Modern: Geographic Contributions To A Generative Climate Politics, Lesley M. Head, Christopher R. Gibson Dec 2012

Becoming Differently Modern: Geographic Contributions To A Generative Climate Politics, Lesley M. Head, Christopher R. Gibson

Chris Gibson

Anthropogenic climate change is a quintessentially modern problem in its historical origins and discursive framing, but how well does modernist thinking provide us with the tools to solve the problems it created? On one hand even though anthropogenic climate change is argued to be a problem of human origins, solutions to which will require human actions and engagements, modernity separates people from climate change in a number of ways. On the other, while amodern or more-than-human concepts of multiple and relational agency are more consistent with the empirical evidence of humans being deeply embedded in earth surface processes, these approaches …


Living Together But Apart: Material Geographies Of Everyday Sustainability In Extended Family Households, Natascha Klocker, Chris Gibson, Erin Borger Dec 2012

Living Together But Apart: Material Geographies Of Everyday Sustainability In Extended Family Households, Natascha Klocker, Chris Gibson, Erin Borger

Chris Gibson

In the Industrialized West, ageing populations and cultural diversity-combined with rising property prices and extensive years spent in education-have been recognized as diverse factors driving increases in extended family living. At the same time, there is growing awareness that household size is inversely related to per capita resource consumption patterns, and that urgent problems of environmental sustainability are negotiated, on a day-to-day basis (and often unconsciously), at the household level. This paper explores the sustainability implications of everyday decisions to fashion, consume, and share resources around the home, through the lens of extended family households. Through interviews with extended family …


Trial By Fire: Natural Hazards, Mixed-Methods And Cultural Research, Christine Eriksen, Nicholas J. Gill, Ross A. Bradstock Dec 2012

Trial By Fire: Natural Hazards, Mixed-Methods And Cultural Research, Christine Eriksen, Nicholas J. Gill, Ross A. Bradstock

Christine Eriksen

This paper considers the issues of research 'relevance' and 'use' to reflect upon a cultural geography research project on bushfire that did not begin with any specific aim of being useful to policy makers but which has garnered considerable and ongoing interest from a broad audience. It provides an example of how the integration of quantitative and qualitative research methods and data can enhance research into cultural aspects of natural hazards whilst simultaneously playing a key role in ensuring that the research results are of interest to a wide range of groups. Using a mixed-methods research approach was found to …


Trial By Fire: Natural Hazards, Mixed-Methods And Cultural Research, Christine Eriksen, Nicholas J. Gill, Ross A. Bradstock Sep 2012

Trial By Fire: Natural Hazards, Mixed-Methods And Cultural Research, Christine Eriksen, Nicholas J. Gill, Ross A. Bradstock

Nicholas J Gill

This paper considers the issues of research 'relevance' and 'use' to reflect upon a cultural geography research project on bushfire that did not begin with any specific aim of being useful to policy makers but which has garnered considerable and ongoing interest from a broad audience. It provides an example of how the integration of quantitative and qualitative research methods and data can enhance research into cultural aspects of natural hazards whilst simultaneously playing a key role in ensuring that the research results are of interest to a wide range of groups. Using a mixed-methods research approach was found to …


Unnatural River, Unnatural Floods? Regulation And Responsibility On The Murray River In The 1950s, Emily O'Gorman Jun 2012

Unnatural River, Unnatural Floods? Regulation And Responsibility On The Murray River In The 1950s, Emily O'Gorman

Emily O'Gorman

No abstract provided.