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This article investigates the relationship between disciplinarity and feminist knowledge-making in Australia's humanities and social sciences. To identify the conditions of possibility for successful feminist knowledge projects, we interpret career trajectories of senior feminist and gender researchers within five disciplines: economics, history, philosophy, politics and sociology. Feminist knowledge-making about gender occurs in every field, but it has uneven impact and status in relation to different disciplinary practices. Career trajectories are analysed to understand how feminist research is practiced within, or perhaps against or beyond, conventional disciplinarity. Strategies for feminist knowledge-making vary across and within fields. Epistemic pluralism is a key possibility condition necessary for feminist knowledge-making. In fields characterized by conceptual openness (sociology, history), feminist knowledge-making can most easily be practiced as 'core' disciplinary work. In disciplines characterized by epistemic closure, feminists are carving out new subfields within (economics, politics) and beyond (philosophy) their mainstream disciplinarities.

This study looks at the case of industrial energy transition campaigning by a traditional conservation group in a regional city that hosts coal- fired power and emissions-intensive industry. We ask, what tensions do metropolitan campaigners find when communicating the idea of just transition and building alliances in regional places? How do they deal with those tensions? What does this mean for the task of developing ‘useable useful theories of environmental justice’ ? Our results illustrate the need to navigate three principal tensions: inclusivity, recognition, and equity. The case of the Australian Conservation Foundation in Gladstone reveals that as these tensions get worked through, the campaign goal is reframed as something other than ‘just transition’ and more akin to a local environmental justice campaigning. Ultimately, the ENGO now wrestles with the local difficulties of building energy justice politics on the scale and time-frame that climate science implies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary replies to Joshua Newman's article and 'counter narrative' about the Rudd government's proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), shelved in 2010. Newman argues that other analyses of the CPRS amount to a 'prevailing narrative' that Labor should have pursued an alliance with the Greens and independents for stronger climate mitigation policy rather than bipartisan Coalition support in parliament. His narrower empirical focus on parliamentary norms and practices is not sufficient for establishing a compelling explanation of the events surrounding the CPRS. Newman's analysis is valuable, but it gives us a weak grip on the key issues of interpretation and explanation we're all facing with regard to that political moment. I reflect on the methodological challenges when establishing meaning and causation in political analysis of the CPRS because it involves evaluating party-political strategy amid a deepening crisis for the state as it (mis)manages climate change with ad hoc market solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the relationship between disciplinarity and feminist knowledge-making in Australia's humanities and social sciences. To identify the conditions of possibility for successful feminist knowledge projects, we interpret career trajectories of senior feminist and gender researchers within five disciplines: economics, history, philosophy, politics and sociology. Feminist knowledge-making about gender occurs in every field, but it has uneven impact and status in relation to different disciplinary practices. Career trajectories are analysed to understand how feminist research is practiced within, or perhaps against or beyond, conventional disciplinarity. Strategies for feminist knowledge-making vary across and within fields. Epistemic pluralism is a key possibility condition necessary for feminist knowledge-making. In fields characterized by conceptual openness (sociology, history), feminist knowledge-making can most easily be practiced as 'core' disciplinary work. In disciplines characterized by epistemic closure, feminists are carving out new subfields within (economics, politics) and beyond (philosophy) their mainstream disciplinarities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reporting on the origins and directions of social movement strategy on climate and energy issues in the last decade, the shifts in ‘climate movement’ practice are discussed using a neo-Polanyian account of the political economy of climate change combined with sociological analysis of the strategic decisions campaigners reported making. Since the mid-2000s, Australia’s climate movement has been engaged in three concurrent arenas of political contestation. The longest-standing arena of movement activity has been negotiations over climate policy. More recently, activists and communities are engaged in a struggle over the expansion of fossil fuels. A third contest has been waged over the present and future position of renewable energy technologies in Australia’s electricity market. In the wake of climate policy failure, energy campaigns have been deepened, and it seems that a broader energy justice agenda is being forged. New strategic dilemmas are visible in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carbon offsets produced from terrestrial (land-based) emissions reduction projects are a contested frontier of carbon market expansion. Experiments in legislating for and producing terrestrial offsets that come under the title REDD+ have met heated opposition. However, a political consensus about the desirability and feasibility of carbon offsets from avoided deforestation and various land-management practices has slowly emerged. How do terrestrial carbon offsets gain legitimacy in the face of contestation and compelling evidence that creating carbon commodities from land ecosystems is an elusive commodity fiction? It seems that a quiet compromise is emerging over the (re-)commodification of land through carbon trading vis-à-vis the broader process of legitimating marketized climate policy. This paper offers a political-economic analysis of state-led efforts to legitimate a market for land carbon sinks in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. The dynamics of legitimation and contestation play out as an iterative ‘double movement’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]