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This paper explores the hashtag #AboriginalLivesMatter on Instagram which was widely used in Australia as part of a global Black Lives Matter (BLM) response in 2020. We map the participants and themes of #AboriginalLivesMatter through the quantitative coding and qualitative thematic analysis of 603 Instagram posts published with this hashtag in June 2020. We find that this conversation is largely driven by celebrities and non-Indigenous participants and framed by themes including expressing the problem as first-person experience, offering solutions, reporting, performing empty statements, and expressing US-centrism. Drawing on critiques of connective action and our analysis of the Instagram platform, we suggest that these findings are indicative of the tensions negotiated between incorporating allies on platforms that prioritise sharing first-person experiences; balancing the communicative capacities of Instagram with its inherently commercialised digital cultures; and, drawing on the spreadability of global digital movements while maintaining cultural specificity for local activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyses of activism have inspired geographers for many years, but most of this work has focused on relatively short time-frames, events and struggles. This paper suggests that there is much to be gained from a greater engagement with issues of time and time--spaces. It outlines and applies the contrasting conceptions of chrono/chora and kairo/topos notions of time--space as potentially useful ways to interrogate geographies of activism. The paper focuses on two specific forms of activism--an Australian women's 'Heritage Project' and a New Zealand 'Fishbowl' evaluation of a community development programme--to show how politics is contingent on diverse temporal as well as spatial conditions. It reveals the complex navigations that are made as these politics are negotiated via both mutual learning processes and the forging of new activist--state relations. It is concluded that these 'timely partnerships' have involved moving beyond adversarial conceptions of 'state' and 'activist', but at the risk of reconstituting activism as 'social capital.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the light of Markus's notion of the decent society, this contribution examines the challenges facing public intellectuals in Australia's contemporary political public sphere. It observes, firstly, that Australia has a distinctly Benthamite political culture that listens more to bureaucratic solutions than to metaphysics, history and arguments grounded in human rights. It explains, secondly, how public opinion gives voice to underlying norms and should thus be treated as the starting point for intellectual activism. Thirdly, the article looks into confusion on the criteria for political deliberation in contemporary Australia. Consideration is then given to the growing constraints imposed on public intellectuals through various new forms of censorship and closure. The conclusion uses the gathering debates on adjustment to climate change to illustrate how public intellectual activism can break new ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]