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This paper examines three sites where diplomacy interacts with geoscience, international law, and military capabilities. These sites, invisible to the general public due to their subterranean character, are undersea long-distance telecommunications cables; submarine operations; and espionage operations. The paper uses these subterranean sites to shed light on the hidden dimensions of Australian statecraft. Taken as a whole, they illustrate the influence of elite economic interests in Australia's national security objectives. The covert instruments of statecraft are devoted not just to military security but to the power and interests of the private sector. These interests heavily influence the concept of "national interest" in Australia's external relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Qualitative study of Greek diaspora in Australia focusing on nation-building. • Explores linkages between diaspora and national identity through example of language. • Demonstrates tensions in Greek language usage in relation to identity negotiations. • Advocates flexible, inclusive notions of diasporic belonging to multiple nations. This paper uses a qualitative case study of the Greek diaspora in Australia in order to add to debates on the geographies of diaspora and diasporic identity in relation to nation-building and nationalism through an exploration of Greek language usage. Specifically, it contributes to ongoing research in geography, diaspora studies and beyond, which stresses the need to examine and tensions and disunities within diasporic 'communities' through a focus on the materialities and emotionalities of diasporic lives and identities. The paper stresses that although more fluid and in-between diasporic identity negotiations are important, it is also necessary to examine the ways in which those in diaspora attempt to 'hold onto' times and spaces of homeland national identity in order to perform more static, bounded and inflexible notions of diasporic identity. The paper uses the example of language to demonstrate how tensions over the role and importance of homeland language in diaspora reveal different imaginations and emotions around what it means to be, feel and belong in diaspora. The paper contributes to debates over the roots and routes of diaspora, as well as the need for boundary (re)making. In doing so, it stresses the need for geographical research on diaspora, and the important role that geographers can play in critical interpretations of the lives and identities of those in diaspora, 'on the move', within and across borders. It therefore adds to ongoing geographical debates about the need to envisage diasporas in flexible and inclusive ways, but also account for the ways in which nation-building and nationalism continue to form part of diasporic identity articulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates how the atmospheres of place act upon bodies, provoking thought and mediating the emergence of a more-than- human politics for living in the urban Anthropocene. Taking-place in a remote urban town, it explores the conditioning geographies of Indigenous-led activisms that harness the potential of place in recent political projects. Central to this is a thinking-with Indigenous felt approaches to place, specifically the work of Country as: a concept that maps geographies of belonging, co-existence and reciprocity; a living body that has the capacity to affect and be affected; and, an force that is felt as a diffuse-yet-palpable atmosphere. Through the narratives of Indigenous activists, this paper describes spacetimes of being-with- Country that dwell in the atmospheres and apprehend capacities to act upon and imagine other present-futures. To think of an environmental agent animated by the force of liveliness, is to work through the political status of the non-human, all the while experimenting and making a call for attention to the felt reality of human connection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Insurantial imaginaries' describes the shared structures of comprehension and action that establishes the social value of insurance and its practical influence. As insurance is a bricolage of economic, legal, political, cultural and moral elements that vary across time and space, for insurance to be intelligible and functional, these imaginaries render this dynamic complexity into stable and discrete forms. In this paper, we explore one such imaginary constituted through the intersection of housing and insurance norms, vis a vis house and contents insurance, in home-owning democracies. Drawing on the cases of Australia and the United Kingdom, we observe how a rise in renting in these countries is resulting in an increase in underinsurance, with renters less likely to insure their assets. This is refashioning a long-standing insurantial imaginary shaped by socio-cultural aspirations for home-ownership, liberal norms of individual autonomy, and links between home-ownership and democracy, including participation in voting. In observing that this imaginary valorises home-ownership and insurance, and problematises renting and underinsurance, we draw attention to the covert power of insurance in co-constituting everyday practices and identify a novel spatialised insurantial imaginary. In grounding our analysis within home-owning democracies, we also make a broader contribution to economic and financial geography by extending understanding of the complex spatial nature of financial mechanisms and processes, and how market-based economies appear to be reconfiguring democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Municipal authorities' nature-based urban sustainability strategies include composting household food waste. • Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage thinking is employed to better understand why households compost. • A composting sensory ethnography mapped the affective intensities that enhanced or diminished composting. • Pleasures of composting were enhanced by following scientific guidelines of the nutrient cycle and ecosystems. • Experimentation arose from a heightened sense of self from the discomforting sensations of breaking scientific guidelines. This paper seeks to better understand urban sustainability experimentation with reference to the bodily sensations of composting household food waste. Taking our lead from Deleuze and Guattari, we argue that experimentation is not just the result of the scientific knowledge of how to compost, but the sensations of bringing together materials, human, non-humans, and ideas into a working arrangement. We draw on Deleuze and Guattari's notion of molar, molecular and rupture lines to offer a way to envisage experimentation as an affective dimension that emerges from the opposing forces that dissolve and support bodily capacities to care for compost as working socio-material arrangements that make, remake, and unmake composting bodies and spaces. Based on a sensory composting ethnography conducted with 21 individuals of European ancestry and tertiary education in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia, we provide two significant insights. First, we argue that implications for the bodily capacity to care for compost are discerned from the sensations of molar lines of scientific household food waste management. The subjectivities and backyard territories created by the affective intensities of composting occur along molar lines of environmental citizenship that are narrated as pleasure, satisfaction, and love. Second, we illustrate how composting experimentation involves a heightened sensation of the self in backyards, through molecular lines generated by the presence of certain smells, temperatures, food waste, plants or animals that challenged the liveable order of backyards. We advance geographical scholarship by bringing new ways of approaching household sustainability transitions by conceiving of experimentation from the perspective of molar and molecular lines and how these may be used to apprehend sensations which stabilise, or undo, a sense of self and place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a complex geography to Aboriginal-dingo-settler-dog relationships in Australia. This paper examines aspects of that geography in a world heritage area, heavily contested by multiple stakeholders for whom the dingo has come to represent resource and identity, as well as a powerful symbol of nature. The Butchulla people were recently recognised in Australian law as holding native title to world-heritage listed K’gari-Fraser Island, a decision that confers recognition and consultation rights; however, genuine ownership and control of the island is denied through a lack of joint management of the island. This paper reviews evidence from some Butchulla people who declare their ongoing dispossession through various discourses and actions that attempt to circumvent extinguishment of their title to territory. They implied that dingoes have equally endured dispossession and extinguishment of territory through common colonial discourses that subjugate the ‘other’, albeit Butchulla people and dingoes have different forms of resistance and agency. Butchulla people in our study parallel their treatment under colonial structures of governance with those of the dingo in that both have endured limited freedom of movement and expressions of sovereignty. We argue some Butchulla people liken notions of dingo agency and resistance with their own attempts to assert sovereignty and responses to displacement. Aligning with the dingo (and broader discourses and politics that surround the dingo) may afford Butchulla people a greater entitlement to be a major voice in dingo 'management' specifically, and management of the island more broadly, than their native title resolution confers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how migration infrastructure conditions migrant mobilities within receiving states. The paper examines two infrastructural case studies, language testing and housing markets, in relation to Asian ‘middling’ migrants, that is, the relatively educated and skilled but not elite, who arrive in Australia on temporary visas. The analysis highlights the interplays and dependencies of different ‘logics of operation’ (Xiang and Lindquist, 2014) of infrastructure in relation to these migrants’ status mobilities and housing mobilities within the receiving society. The paper draws on data from in-depth narrative interviews with migrants to also understand how infrastructure produces perceptions and meaning-making around the migration process. This analysis reveals that, in this empirical context, migration infrastructure produces varied kinds of spatio-temporal insecurity as much as it mediates mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Steel is a critical material for modern-day societies, and more than half of the world’s steel is used in buildings. As the extraction of iron ore and the production and transport of manufactured steel have significant environmental costs, the fate of steel is important for socio-technical transitions towards more sustainable materials use. Using steel in buildings as a case study socio-technical transition, this paper develops a novel application of the multi-level perspective (MLP) that adopts an explicitly material lens. We focus on the circulation of steel between three key life stages for buildings which are treated as socio-technical regimes as described in the MLP. Drawing on concepts from assemblage theory, we consider the role played by the material and expressive qualities of steel within each of these regimes. Our material focus also requires attention to the spatial dimensions of these three regimes and their implications for socio-technical transitions. We describe the nexus of material affordances and inter-scalar relations that influences the use of steel in buildings and consider the potential for change. The main contribution of this paper is to extend the MLP to incorporate a focus on materiality and, in a related way, spatiality. Based on the analysis presented we consider how steel use in Australian buildings may be rendered more sustainable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catastrophic and unprecedented wildfires have unfolded across fire-prone landscapes globally over the last three years, with highly publicized loss of human life, property destruction and ecological transformation. Indigenous peoples within many nations have persuasively argued that traditional fire management can enhance existing wildfire mitigation strategies. However, there are considerable barriers to the further incorporation of Indigenous practices into existing wildfire policy. This paper explores the potential of Indigenous fire management to achieve broader institutionalization, emphasizing the social labour involved producing and sustaining intercultural collaboration in bureaucratic contexts. Our focus is southern Australia where Indigenous peoples' fire management, often termed 'cultural burning', has been facilitated by an Indigenous-led social movement and growing state support. We draw on interviews conducted with Aboriginal and white land and hazard management practitioners actively engaged in intercultural fire management collaborations largely occurring on public lands. In the absence of institutional clarity, established networks and accreted experience these practitioners work to generate enthusiasm, stabilise Aboriginal peoples' environmental authority and nullify pervasive societal fears surrounding the risk of fire. The case study demonstrates the significance of interpersonal factors in the emergence and maintenance of fraught intercultural collaborations. Despite global optimism, such insights highlight how the revival of Indigenous fire management in nations such as Australia is highly contingent and depends upon routine persuasive labour and fragile intercultural diplomacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• High uncertainty of marine offsetting processes presents risks for users of marine offsets. • These risks are managed by a focus on measurement and audit rather than biodiversity goals. • Marine offsets do not rely on accurate quantification of biodiversity losses and gains. • Auditability is good enough to meet reputational needs of organisations. • A focus on auditable offsets and marine NNL prevents transparency in ecological outcomes. Biodiversity offsetting is often presented as a way to manage competing demands of environmental protection and economic development. It is premised on the transparent demonstration of how aims of no net loss of biodiversity (NNL) or similar are met in practice. This is complicated in marine systems where ecological predictions are commonly highly uncertain, knowledge of ecological restoration is low and administrative governance is complex. Drawing on a case study of marine biodiversity offsetting in Australia, this paper shows how these uncertainties pose practical challenges for both producers and consumers of marine biodiversity offsets, needing to progress with decision-making while meeting increasing societal pressure for demonstrable NNL. These competing needs are met through the centrality of an auditable decision-making process that contributes to establishing an organisation's social licence to operate. The need for auditability drives the use of an imprecise measure of NNL through financial equivalency and the use of strategic offsetting projects. The coarse-grained interpretation of biodiversity offsetting best practice reduces the risks posed by explicit acknowledgement of biodiversity loss, offset failure or prohibitively large offset liabilities. Strategic relationship management across government, industry, academia and non-governmental organisations has raised the profile of biodiversity and its importance, but whether the auditing process has delivered on environmental protection is an open question. What is 'good enough' to meet governance standards may have become the over-riding goal. We conclude by acknowledging that the seemingly unattainable yet expected aim of NNL for marine systems prioritises auditability above discussions of 'acceptable' risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Papua New Guineans in Australia enact a transnational domestic moral economy. • Social investment in this moral economy is a strategy for insuring care in later life. • Changing intergenerational relations within the domestic moral economy redefine forms of belonging. Drawing on qualitative research conducted among Papua New Guineans living in North Queensland, Australia, this paper explores how people imagine and plan for later life in transnational contexts. We present 'planning' for old age as a socially embedded practice with specific spatial and temporal properties that emerge in everyday interaction. At issue are representations of difference in the cultures of care found in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Australia and the problem of intergenerational changes in care practices among Papua New Guineans resident in Australia. We argue that growing tensions in intergenerational relationships in Australia and PNG play a crucial role in changing the social relations of the transnational moral economy of care. These intergenerational problems are understood by PNG research participants, in their own critical analysis of their care relationships, as related to other concerns about estrangement from place, loss of culture and the difficulties of planning for later life. We conclude that transnational households are dynamically defined and transformed in terms of tensions central to their very operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Rights of nature tribunals are hearing cases on behalf of a range of ecosystems. • The cases rely on novel temporal strategies to bring attention to slow violence. • The result is a rescaling of dominant spatio-temporal frames. • These frames encourage more robust forms of environmental accountability. In his 2011 Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor , Rob Nixon argues that the 'slow violence' of environmental collapse - the too often 'invisible' violence that unfolds over decades or even centuries, from the acidification of the oceans to the radioactivity of depleted uranium – represents a formidable representational challenge for contemporary environmental activists. In an era in which 'the media venerate the spectacular and when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need', the challenges of making visible the 'staggeringly discounted casualties' associated with environmental destruction are both substantial and urgent (2011: 3). Based on ethnographic research with rights of nature activists in Peru and Australia, this paper analyses the narrative and performative strategies that are increasingly being experimented with at Rights of Nature Tribunals to subvert, extend, and otherwise complexify the spatio-temporalities of mainstream environmental policy making. Drawing on recent work in feminist posthumanism and post-colonial eco-criticism, I argue that these temporal tactics, while still largely marginal to hegemonic policy blocs, are raising important questions about the scalar habits and assumptions that continue to anchor much environmental policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I build on insights from temporal studies and more-than-human geographies to argue that there is need to delve more deeply into how, by whom, and to what ends the times in which we live become told. Empirically, the practice of beekeeping provides orientation for exploring intertwining temporalities and timescales as more-than-human accomplishments. Drawing on ethnographic research undertaken in Australia, three accounts are developed: the catastrophic futures related to calls to 'save the bees'; intimate, embodied tempos and negotiated timings of visiting a hive; and seasonal cycles and rhythms beyond but integral to the life of a colony. Employing the concept of 'telling times' enables a gathering of these three accounts and highlights not only the eco-social significance of the current times, but the ways in which time becomes experienced, shared, and resonates through more-than-human practices of time- and world-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Collaboratively written article with a decolonising approach to climate and weather. • Acknowledges more-than-human agency by recognising Country as lead author. • Offers alternatives to Western-scientific constructions of time, climate and weather. • Adds new Indigenous-led dimension to academic/policy discourse on climate change. • Calls for 'response-ability as' rather than 'responsibility for' weather. New engagements between humans and with the environment are vitally necessary in this perilous period of intensified environmental change. Climate change policy interventions and public discourses persistently frame climate as outside human experience, something to be controlled and understood within a strict, linear, universalist and ultimately colonising understanding of time. Yet constructions that suggest that humans are separate from, act upon or may manage or control a passive environment may be offensive to a sentient world, while relegation of the past to 'the past' ignores the many enduring violences of colonialism and multiple sustained efforts to nurture multi-temporal relationships of belonging and care. In this paper, our more-than-human Indigenous and non-Indigenous research collective share understandings of time led by the Yolŋu songspiral, Wuku n or Gathering of the Clouds, from northern Australia. Wuku n challenges many orders and disciplines of colonial structures, including those associated with time and climate change. In place of an abstract, distant and unbound climate, locked into a linear, passive timescape, Wuku n suggests time as multiple, agential, and a manifestation of co-becoming. Rather than being responsible to or responsible for climate as something passive and separate from humans, Wuku n signals a need to cultivate abilities to attend deeply to place's agency and act through co-becoming. In this way, we may understand and respond to climate change as relational and patterned, embodied and affective, and co-constituted through more-than-human placed and multi-temporal relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The Anthropocene requires experiments in nature-society relations. • Guitar industry resource actors experiment with diverse plantings via long timescales. • They seek to resolve extractive dependencies with care for trees and forests. • Such experiments grapple with scarcity, unknown futures, and arboreal time. • Experiments arise as grounded, uncertain efforts on the fringes of formality. The Anthropocene signals anticipation of unknown ecological volatility. Transformational change necessitates diversified experiments for unpredictable scenarios, accepting that many will fail. This paper uncovers insights on such experiments, from an initially unrelated research project 'following' guitar production networks 'back to the tree'. Across the Pacific Northwest, Hawai'i and Australia, resource actors in liminal positions between forestry and guitar manufacturing pursue new roles as forest stewards, experimenting with multi-species plantings for future use beyond their lifetimes. Cognisant of impending ecological volatility, and uncertain that industrial forestry (defined by monocultural, short-term chronotopes) will sustain supply indefinitely, new cultivation techniques are being trialled, and stewardship practices extended towards trees that they will not themselves harvest. In experimentation, resource actors seek to resolve their own extractive dependencies with understandings of trees and forest ecologies. They also grapple with arboreal time - the temporalities of forests and their growing cycles, material qualities and genetic predispositions - knowing that the trees will mature amidst a profoundly different climate. We illustrate the value of 'legacy' mentalities, enthusiasm for trial and error, and prosaic restorative cultures among resource stewardship actors, focusing on those whose present experimentation responds to lived experience of industrial capitalism's failures. Insights arise on efforts we must all make to craft a world that can survive the future we have wrought. Unpremeditated experimental relations with nonhuman others, and with the future, unfold materially in time and space - not through official policy initiatives, but extemporaneously, on the fringes of formality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trust is commonly understood as a mechanism that acts to improve transaction efficiency, or as a structural characteristic of organizations. It is a 'good' thing that can be built and harnessed for economic success. However, this type of conceptualisation maintains trust as a discrete and internally stable entity that is universally applied and cordoned off from socio-spatial complexities. In this paper, we present an empiric on trust in the insurance industry with an eye to reports on declining trust in banks, financial institutions and government. Analysing data from two Australian surveys, we map the social and political correlates of having house and contents insurance, consider how knowledge of insurance related issues and trust in insurance companies is associated with house and contents insurance, and measure how much trust Australians place in insurance companies relative to other public institutions. We use our findings as a spring broad for considering more spatialised understandings of trust and conclude by providing signposts for further geographical trust research - the first, qualitative investigations of the spaces and places of trust and its correlates, and the second, using geodemographics for mapping trust's socio-spatial variegations. In this we contribute to research into the socio-spatial variegations of financial processes and technologies, as well as contributing to work on institutional trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Assessment of policy mobilities across the lifetime of a policy. • Policy inflows and outflows are examined across five different policy stages, from agenda setting to evaluation. • We draw on quantitative analysis of reports, as well as qualitative interview data. • Identification of a peak in policy mobilities during the policy implementation stage. • Learning from elsewhere (policy inflows) continue even in later policy stages. This paper adds to scholarship on policy mobilities by borrowing a typology and set of ideas from political science about the different stages of the policy making process, namely agenda-setting, policy formulation, decision making, implementation, and evaluation. To date policy mobilities scholarship has mostly not been explicit about which stage of the policy process is being examined. We therefore provide a structure for analysing mobile policy inflows to, and outflows from, a policy over time, across the different stages, allowing the analysis of policy mobilities to be aligned more closely with government decision making processes. To test out our ideas we trace the policy mobilities associated with two Australian smart grid policies over their lifetime, i.e. in the lead up to the policy being implemented, and subsequently. The policies are the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) program in the State of Victoria, Australia (2009–2013) and the Australian federal government Smart Grid Smart City program (2010–14). We analyse a combination of codified and tacit forms of knowledge sharing, including through policy and industry reports, and interviews with policy practitioners. Key findings include a peak in policy mobilities during the implementation stage, and policy mobility inflows (learning from elsewhere) continuing even in later policy stages. In conclusion we advocate for greater attention to policy mobilities at different stages of the policy process, in order to broaden the scope of policy mobilities research and to develop a stronger understanding of the temporal dimensions of policy mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-firm actors have emerged in economic geography as significant in shaping regional industrial cultures and new industry pathways, though how knowledge and practice is shared with firm actors remains unclear. The case of enthusiasts or hobbyists is especially interesting when there are industry counterparts given the blurred lines between work and hobby. There has been limited discussion of such interactions, and how they might contribute to regional development or an industrial culture of problem solving. This paper explores this gap through a case study of beekeepers in Western Australia. It analyses the interview results from hobbyist and commercial operators to understand how practice is shared, the construction of group meaning and identity and how place-based problem solving occurs through a regional culture of exchange and mutual benefit. The findings point to the importance of informal non-firm actors in the development of regional industry culture of practice and entrepreneurship, and that supporting collaborations between enthusiasts and local business may produce broad industry and societal benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change increases the complexity and uncertainty of regional natural resource management (NRM), calling into question the appropriateness of linear knowledge-transfer approaches. In this paper we reflect on knowledge practices among a partnership of researchers and NRM planners, under a federal program of NRM investment intended to ‘deliver information’ to regional NRM planners to support planning for climate change. We unpack ‘container’ and ‘conduit’ metaphors of linear, one-way communication invoked by the starting conditions, and explore whether more relational ways of communicating were achieved. A key theme emerged early in the research that NRM planners felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available and discouraged by the irrelevance of much of it to their climate change planning. Our research-practice collaboration unfolded in this context and through ongoing face-to-face and virtual engagement over a period of two years. The collaborative approach featured joint identification of priority activities, co-design of planning approaches, and the iterative co-development of an online ‘information portal’, which acted as a boundary object. We report the emergence of a ‘knowing system’, resulting from these efforts to foster relationships and co-produce boundary objects in a particular geographic context. Our findings highlight the potential benefits of investing in the capacity of researchers and NRM practitioners to engage in collaborative research partnerships premised on the emergence of knowing systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers have become increasingly engaged with the notion of policy mobility. It is argued that in a globalised world policies have become more internationally mobile: we now live in an era of ‘fast policy’. Drawing on core concepts of mobility, neoliberalisation, and globalisation - and with a background primarily in geography and urban studies - policy mobility scholars have developed new ideas about how policies circulate internationally. In the process, however, theories of policy change developed within political science have been rather overlooked. In this paper it is shown how a political science theory with a shared interest in flows – the Multiple Streams Approach (MSA) – is complementary to policy mobilities scholarship. Two issues in particular are illuminated by the MSA: first, what constitutes policy, and, second, the role of the nation state in structuring the possibilities for, and timing of, policy change. In turn, policy mobilities scholarship highlights the different geographies of the multitude of objects, ideas, problems, processes, organisations, and regulations that constitute policy. It also raises questions about the validity of analytically separating politics from policy proposals, as advocated by the MSA. These issues are considered using the empirical case of smart electricity metering policy in Australia, in the period 2000–2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Indigenous peoples are increasingly being engaged in the management of natural hazards. • Settler natural hazard bureaucracies remain underexplored. • Our research provides a situated account of governance and policy enactment. • We find that affect conditions experiences of the state. • Policy brokerage involves a diverse ecology of personal styles and characteristics. In recent years settler governments have begun to seriously engage with Indigenous peoples' fire and other ecological knowledges in the context of managing natural hazards and resources. In Australia, Aoteroa New Zealand, Canada and the United States, Indigenous peoples and their ecological knowledge have become increasingly involved in combating such naturally—and socially constructed—threats as wildfires, floods, and storms. Nevertheless, while there has been significant research into the sociocultural dimensions of Indigenous peoples' ecological knowledges, until recently little analytic effort has been directed to understanding the other side of this intercultural interaction: what can be conceptualised as settler natural hazard management bureaucracies. Taking the emergence of government engagement with Indigenous peoples' fire knowledge in the southeast Australian state of Victoria as a case study, this paper contributes to the nascent body of ethnographically informed research focusing on the interaction between state natural hazard bureaucracies and Indigenous peoples. We do so by asking what motivated this change in government interest in Indigenous peoples and their fire knowledge. Informed by engagement with experienced fire sector staff, our findings reveal the presence and importance of affect and other more-than-representational qualities that animate state engagements with Indigenous peoples and their cultural burning knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades, a multitude of studies have examined the relational properties of corporate networks as a proxy for analyzing interurban hierarchies and structures. While this has been important in illuminating the nature of global connectivity, a significant conceptual lacuna exists in understanding how a multi-scalar analysis of interurban networks informs a more complete understanding of the geographies of globalization, and how cities within these networks act as regional globalizing centers. Building upon the theoretical and methodological foundations of ‘world city network’ (WCN) research, this paper investigates the corporate networks of the energy industry as a historic driver of globalization using social network analysis from an Australia geographical perspective. Globally and nationally scaled energy networks derived from the Platts and Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) corporate lists are used to explore the convergence of nationally and globally articulated networks, and identify cities instrumental in the globalization of the national industry sub-networks. These are strategic ‘globalizing centers’ which, in contradistinction to ‘global cities’ or ‘world cities’ as broad classifications, play nuanced roles in anointing industry-specific circuits of capital and information. The analysis of two complementary yet distinct networks provides theoretical insight into how scale plays an integral role in defining/articulating interurban relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments grapple with ways to integrate diverse values and interests to inform water management to satisfy utilitarian needs and to maintain healthy ecological and cultural landscapes. Engagement with Indigenous people has had limited success. In Australia, this is due to culturally inappropriate government-led engagement approaches, a lack of political will to prioritise Indigenous involvement in water planning, and a lack of culturally appropriate documentation of Indigenous water values, knowledge and interests. Planning processes tend to assume Indigenous water interests are ‘just cultural’ and thereby limit Indigenous perspectives and knowledge contributions. This paper shows how a co-operative research project enabled an Indigenous group from the Queensland Wet Tropics to better engage in water governance on their traditional country. It illustrates how the development of a boundary object (a research report) can act to translate Indigenous knowledge, values and management interests so as to maintain its cultural integrity and enable it to be more easily interpreted by non-Indigenous planners and scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Invasive species and their impacts have become a focus of global environmental management. Invasive, alien and feral species are understood to represent destructive categories of organisms. However, in the context of contemporary environmental change and uncertainty, the native/alien dichotomy is no longer tenable as the basis for decision-making, and the focus on impacts presents an impasse in environmental management. The differential status of camels ( Camelus dromedarius ) over time and space illustrates the complexity of species management. In this paper we seek to move beyond the native/alien dichotomy, and disrupt the discourse of impacts, through an analysis of camel assemblages in Australia. We draw on assemblage thinking to critique the circumstances under which camels are deemed to belong, or not, and to reveal aspects of the camel story often ignored in its contemporary telling. We present three case studies: first, an historical case of the introduction of camels to Australia; second, camel management through a national-scale culling program; and third, relations between camels and ‘weeds’ in which camels are deemed simultaneously to belong and not belong. We argue that assemblage thinking disrupts fixed categories, and reveals agency beyond that of individual species, thus contributing to multi-scalar considerations. We find that camel belonging does not emerge from the animal or species itself, but is contingent. Finally, we argue that camel management is currently firmly imagined and enacted at the national scale, but in the context of contemporary environmental change invasive species management must take into account processes and relations across multiple scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The life of those seeking asylum from persecution and other human rights abuses has become interminably precarious. As minority world governments deploy various apparatuses of security to govern the circulation of ‘unruly’ populations, the world’s most vulnerable people have been reconstituted as security threats. In this paper I trace this ‘transfer of illegitimacy’ and criminalisation of asylum seeker bodies in the context of the Australian government’s newly deployed Operation Sovereign Borders . Drawing on Foucault’s governmentality as a domain of security and Butler’s articulation of recognition, precariousness and grievability, I explore both the subjectivities formed as a function and technique of securing Australia’s borders and the way this framing produces a certain governed reality that ‘acts upon the senses’ to delimit public discourse. I argue that the range of discursive and non-discursive practises that make up Operation Sovereign Borders has dire implications for those seeking asylum in Australia. Not only do these practises constitute a social crafting where conditions for a flourishing life are diminished, but this crafting of precarity is carried out in the name of securing citizens lives. The life of the asylum seekers is a life unrecognised in the violent frames of Operation Sovereign Borders . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]