Environment and Society at UNSW

Featuring Enviro & Society UNSW scholars

From UNSW Environment & Society PhD graduate Dr. Gretchen Miller: "A seismic shift is happening in Australian politics." https://bit.ly/3JfnZ7Z

The Independents | A Climate 200 Podcast Smart, experienced and savvy people are stepping up to challenge the political status quo. But who are they and what drives them? Meet the Independents.

Free webinar (co-sponsored and co-organised by the UNSW Environment & Society Group): Transcultural Conversations in Troubling Times, comprising three lively recorded conversations to watch and listen to at your own pace. The series hosts US cultural ecologist and geo-philosopher David Abram in conversation with Indigenous Australian thought leaders Mary Graham, Jakelin Troy, Linda Ford, Bruce Shillingsworth, Bruce Pascoe, Kevin Lowe, Anne Poelina & Tyson Yunkaporta.

Tune in to the entire program at:
https://bit.ly/3MMkcly

Or individual sessions:
Language & Kin:
https://bit.ly/3tb1AEe

Country & Culture:
https://bit.ly/3t7tLng

Deep Time:
https://bit.ly/3KIiAY8

#3 • DEEP TIME BETWEEN STORIES: TransCultural Conversations for Troubling Times • Session #3 of 3 • DEEP TIME • 10 DEC 2021 • Guests: Anne Poelina, Tyson Yunkaporta, David ...

Our masters/diploma/grad certificate program is focused on transformative learning and on nurturing change agents and leaders for these times. New program video just out (shot during a break in the rains!). Read more about the program in the UNSW Handbook: https://www.handbook.unsw.edu.au/.../programs/2022/8623...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2brflCUKkLo

Master Of Environmental Management (MEM) The Master of Environmental Management program is focused on transformative learning and on nurturing change agents and leaders for these times. Read about t...

Congratulations to the Environment & Society Group’s newest PhD, Dr. Gretchen Miller!

Gretchen’s PhD project and exegesis, titled “The Rescue Project,” is both a beautiful example of integrating creative work with research and of practice-based, theory-generating research that works closely with nonprofit organisations and community. Dr. Miller’s thesis received unanimous “outstandings" and two recommendations for the Dean’s Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis from her examiners.

We couldn’t be more proud, Gretchen! Here’s Gretchen’s thesis abstract and a link to the podcasts (some aired on ABC) and citizen-storytelling that make up the creative portion of the thesis.

Abstract
What is the experience of being a rescuer of damaged landscapes and broken creatures, at a time of environmental crisis in Australia? How do individuals and grassroots communities go about small acts of rescue, and how do they maintain the courage to do this work?
The Rescue Project is practice-based research. It includes a public digital storytelling site of 51 text rescuer story contributions and a podcast of four episodes, plus an exegesis providing critical reflection and analysis of the creative practice and the resultant thematic threads. The digital site was constructed in partnership with the non-government, volunteer-based, land regeneration organisation Landcare Australia.
This practice and exegesis contribute new thinking to the scholarship of environmental communication by considering the meaning of rescue, providing insights into the affectual themes of acts of rescue, articulating rescue relations, and introducing and developing several key terms: ecosonics, homeground, and citizen storytelling.
The themes which emerge from this project reveal the emotional affects and effects of undertaking rescues and suggest rescues take place within three related and iterative overarching themes. Firstly, the theme of humility that is required to begin an act of rescue. Secondly, the theme of attunement that builds resonances with both sentient figures and non-sentient features of homegrounds. Finally, the theme of courage concerning rescue activities, and its iterative outcome, encouragement.
Further, this practice and exegesis contribute to environmental communication through foregrounding listening and hearing, the spoken word, community storytelling, and the ecosonics of the more-than-human world. In giving space to the methodological processes of my creative practice, this exegesis offers environmental communication practitioners new ways to go about their work. It also responds to current calls within this scholarship for a listening modality: for too long we have been deaf to the sounds of the more-than-human world. The Rescue Project is a demonstration of how we might humbly hear these worlds speak.
To explore the digital space, please visit: https://web.archive.org/web/20200320110340/https://landcareaustralia.org.au/rescue/

Landcare Rescue - Landcare Australia Rescue Kind acts of environmental rescue

The Environment & Society Group is co-organiser of this upcoming series. You are invited to the Between Stories: Transcultural Conversations for Troubling Times series (3 live online sessions). Leading thinkers of Australia’s First Peoples and North American cultural ecologist David Abram explore our place in the more-than-human world. Sliding scale (including free) registration.
https://events.humanitix.com/between-stories-atn

BETWEEN STORIES: • Mon 6th Dec • Wed 8th Dec • Fri 10th Dec • 12.30-2.30pm AEDT (UTC+11) on Zoom, Hosted online, 6th of December | Humanitix Enjoy the BETWEEN STORIES: • Mon 6th Dec • Wed 8th Dec • Fri 10th Dec • 12.30-2.30pm AEDT (UTC+11) on Zoom, Hosted online, During 6th of December. Tickets are only $20 AUD + BF. Only on Humanitix

Environment and Society at UNSW updated their address.

Congratulations to the Term 1 graduates of Environment & Society's Master of Environmental Management program!

A great review of Enviro & Society Group's Gretchen Miller's PhD thesis project, the Rescue Project podcast w/ Landcare Australia. There are three other episodes in addition to the one linked/reviewed here:
"Mentally and physically depleted, but rescued: Living in the midst of the climate crisis can be both mentally and physically depleting. Forces, strangely unseen in many ways, attack your soul and drag you down and although “The Rescue Project” from the Climactic Collective does not side-step the issues at all, it simply makes you feel better and even stronger.
Gretchen Miller takes the listener deep into the crisis, but does it with a certain aplomb, allowing the seriousness of the what’s happening to earth to reach the crevices of your soul but then, through obvious action provides repair.
The 18-minute episode, “On History, Art and Loving a Tree” begins with the comforting sound of running water and while that husbands your soul, your intellect is taken on a journey with a story about philosopher and activist, Val Plumwood.
Invest just 18 minutes, well, 17 minutes and 57 seconds, and you will be repaid."
https://landcareaustralia.org.au/rescue/listen-to-the-rescue-project-on-history-art-and-loving-a-tree/?fbclid=IwAR3zogDSUr2LnEA7OsvOfVhDjd9qwTM2Riwo7vSz4RlAGpK4ILq_rcj7icw

Landcare Rescue - LISTEN TO The Rescue Project – On History, Art and Loving a Tree Share Read on Mobile Enter Reading Mode LISTEN TO The Rescue Project – On History, Art and Loving a Tree Posted on August 5, 2019 by Gretchen Miller Podcasts Uncategorised Grevillea Grevillea by Margaret Storey In On History, Art and Loving a Tree we listen to the history of land protection, hear ...

Free access/downloads of Environment & Society's John Carr's and Tema Milstein's just published article: “'See nothing but beauty”: The shared work of making anthropogenic destruction invisible to the human eye.' Geoforum's free link (here it is! https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1c-Sv3pILWMIZ) closes June 21.
'Abstract: The Florida Tampa Electric Company’s Manatee Viewing Center (MVC) and its fossil-fuelled Big Bend power plant are separated by a narrow ship channel that serves as state and federal sanctuary for threatened Florida Manatees. As humans have destroyed much of their warm spring habitat, many manatees are forced to rely on power plant hot water effluent to survive during cold winter months. Visitors’ reactions to the MVC are every bit as incongruous as a massive greenhouse gas pollutant source enabling a wildlife reserve. Notwithstanding its inescapable presence, visitor reviews of the MVC nearly uniformly ignore the immense power plant. We offer this study of online reviews of the MVC to examine how and why everyday people’s interactions are fundamental to making dominant practices of anthropogenic ecological destruction unremarkable and, therefore, unfixable. Specifically, we argue the collective blindness reflected in the findings of this study exemplifies a broader sociocultural tendency to articulate and reinforce spaces of ecological “invisibility.” In such spaces, our quotidian practices and discourses play a central role in enabling collective environmental inattention and environmental inaction, especially when we are confronted with places in which the constructed binary between human and “natural” realms spectacularly collapses.'

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.04.013

“See nothing but beauty”: The shared work of making anthropogenic destruction invisible to the human eye The Florida Tampa Electric Company’s Manatee Viewing Center (MVC) and its fossil-fuelled Big Bend power plant are separated by a narrow ship channel t…

Congratulations to our recent MEM graduate Deniz Yildiz, who was just awarded the "Enabling Cultures of Bushfire Readiness in Australian Communities Scholarship" as well as tuition fee scholarship to do her PhD for 4 years at the University of Tasmania!

For those in or near Sydney: Program convenor A/Prof Tema Milstein will be answering questions and recruiting for our Master of Environmental Management program at the May 19 postgrad evening at the Hyatt Regency. It will be a bit schmancy (wine, appetizers) and fun for prospective students. Free registration. This postgraduate program is all about ecocultural and political ecological perspectives!

Postgraduate Info Evening : Should the post-pandemic future be data-driven or humanity-driven?