Richard Howitt
Biographic Data
| ID | 218764 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard Howitt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard |
| FAMILY NAME | Howitt |
| SIGNATURE | HOWITT R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Macquarie University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3769-4678 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 63 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1048 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 63 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Janice Edith Jones Monk (13.03.1937–12.07.2024)
Enhancing meaningful Indigenous leadership and collaboration in international environmental governance forums
This is the first global empirical study that specifically explores the perspectives of Indigenous peoples, people working for Indigenous Peoples’ Organisations (IPOs) and people working in other relevant roles (e.g., conveners of large environmental NGOs) on the barriers to meaningful and effective participation in global environmental governance forums. A total of 30 key informant participants were interviewed for this study. Participants were …
Taiwan inside-out
This research deals with issues of Indigeneity and autonomy in Taiwan by notionally turning things inside-out. We aim to contextualise international geopolitics and local polity by considering the Tayal people, one of 16 nationally recognised Indigenous groups living in northern Taiwan. We reject the conventional geopolitical lens of Great Power claims as the only and best way to understand contemporary Taiwan and chooses to refocus and rescale t…
Obituary
Jan Monk, when visiting Sydney and surrounds, 2005 (photo: Bruce Ryan). Acclaimed Australian-American feminist geographer Janice Edith Jones Monk (13 March 1937–12 July 2024) has died in her adopted hometown of Tucson, Arizona. Jan was a beloved colleague and friend to many geographers, not just in her two countries of Australia and the USA but in many other countries as well. We write here to record some of her many achievements and to convey a …
Reconnecting to the social
Social Impact Assessment's incorporation into neoliberal management systems did not enhance their capacity to actually respond to social impacts. Efforts to integrate 'social' and 'environmental' assessments largely assumed that Social Impact Assessment rightfully belonged to key practitioners (professionals, academics, and corporate and government decision-makers). This article advocates rethinking ontological foundations for a different sort of…
Scale Matters
For the greater part of the 20 th century, hunter-gatherer societies were regarded as "small-scale societies" by modern sociology (see Barth ed.1978 for overview).The broad distinction between "small-scale" and "large-scale" was increasingly losing its overall analytical grip in the late 20 th century, also with regard to the classification of hunter-gatherers in these terms.Anthropologists who approached hunter-gatherers from ecological-evolutio…
Ethics as first method
Drawing inspiration from diverse Indigenous scholars and mentors, as well as Levinas’ advocacy of ‘ethics as first philosophy’, this article advocates a radical contextualist reframing of geographical research as needing to address the challenges targeted by this new peer review journal. Reframing our disciplinary challenges in this way might acknowledge the need to cast off the discipline’s Eurocentric (or more particularly, its Anglo-American) …
Challenging the colonial legacy of/at Macquarie
Macquarie University takes its name from a man known simultaneously as the founding father of Australia, its greatest colonial administrator, a key inspiration for Australia's egalitarian ethos, the military strategist who authorised the Appin Massacre, and committed civiliser of the uncivilised native peoples of Sydney who established the first institutions aimed at educating Aboriginal children by separating from their families, culture, and la…
Reflecting on How Social Impacts are Considered in Transport Infrastructure Project Planning
Urban rail transport megaprojects are promoted as generating positive social change at a metropolitan scale, yet they produce complex unplanned negative impacts at local scales. Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) and its follow-up help decision-makers assess and manage the social and environmental impacts of major projects. Using Western Sydney’s politically-successful South West Rail Link as an example, we identified the practice …
Metro infrastructure planning in Amsterdam
Amsterdam's North-South Metro Line (NZL) megaproject has had a long eventful history. From the initial proposal in the 1990s, through construction in the 2000s to 2010s, to its opening in 2018, the NZL overcame many challenges. Several geotechnical incidents in the Vijzelgracht neighbourhood in 2008 cost the City of Amsterdam and the Dutch government millions of Euros. These incidents required complex recovery management actions, and there was a …
Witnessing, saving, serving? A relational approach to community development in the suburbs of a global city
This paper considers the community development practice of The Salvation Army in a public housing estate in Sydney, Australia. Drawing on interviews with community members, officers, staff, and volunteers from The Salvation Army, we explore the transformative potential of relational, rather than transactional, community development practices. In accepting the theological principle of imago Dei as the foundation for its practice, The Salvation Arm…
New Indigenous geographies
The importance of relational values in river management
Mould, S. A., K. A. Fryirs, and R. Howitt. 2020. The importance of relational values in river management: understanding enablers and barriers for effective participation. Ecology and Society 25(2):17. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-11505-250217
Resettling, disconnecting or displacing? Attending to local sociality, culture and history in disaster settings
In many disaster settings, top‐down responses emphasise ‘expert‐led’ solutions that often involve relocating disaster‐affected communities. While the intention might be to move people from harm's way and facilitate recovery, failure to attend to local pre‐disaster circumstances as well as the interplay between power, resilience and vulnerability within and around affected communities often sees resettlement reconfigure as displacement or disconne…
Unsettling the taken (for granted)
Histories of colonial plunder produced geographies that settler societies take for granted as settled. While some aspects of the conqueror/settler imaginary have been unsettled in specific cases, and through the negotiation of new instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, various national apologies and modern treaties, much unsettling remains to be done. New geographies of plunder, violence and abuse …
Dr William James Albert Jonas AM (1941-2019)
Indigenous rights vital to survival
Reframing Indigenous water rights in ‘modern’ Taiwan
There is a widely accepted stereotype that Indigenous Taiwanese have lost their connection to country as a result of colonization and thus the Indigenous presence is often omitted in representations of ‘modern’ Taiwan. By asserting a modern/traditional binary that privileges the colonizer as modern these representations demean Indigenous cultures as ‘primitive’ or ‘traditional’. This paper challenges those biased dichotomies by exploring the expe…
Forests, law and customary rights in Indonesia
This paper reviews the emerging effects of the 2012 decision of the Constitutional Court of Indonesia relating to the customary management of Indonesia's traditional forests. It focuses on the challenge of moving from legal to political and societal recognition of Indigenous peoples’ rights. In its advocacy of customary land rights, Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN) successfully applied to the Constitutional Court for judicial review of th…
Decolonizing property in Taiwan
Indigenous Tayal experiences of dispossession in Taiwan reflect a familiar pattern of state-sanctioned property rights precluding recognition of Indigenous rights. This paper examines Tayal customary institutions and how they have governed, and continue to govern, land interests in customary domains. In an agricultural economy encompassing patterns of mobility and long-term movement between areas, Tayal people maintain continuing rights in land t…
Practicing Sociogeomorphology
Sustainable river management requires strong participation from technical and nontechnical experts. However, in many cases, the nontechnical element is lacking. This paper explores possibilities for participation that can emerge from a reorientation toward dialog. This reorientation is supported by a sociogeomorphological approach, which encourages recognition of the physical and social coproduction of a fluvial landscape, including a history of …
Weaving Indigenous and sustainability sciences to diversify our methods
Geographic contributions to institutional curriculum reform in Australia
In the context of continuing pressures from managerialist and neoliberal drivers of university reform in Australia, Macquarie University’s recent undergraduate curriculum innovation, based on “People,” “Planet,” and “Participation,” has resulted in the embedding and integration of experiential learning in its curriculum and institutional framework. Such an approach challenges academic and administrative staff, students, and partners in industry, …
Towards Closure? Coexistence, remoteness and righteousness in Indigenous policy in Australia
The policy framework claiming to support Indigenous people in remote parts of Australia is in disarray with Commonwealth, state and territory governments proposing closure of remote communities on a range of economic and social policy grounds, but facing significant criticism on economic, environmental, social and cultural grounds. Western Australia's proposal to close 150 remote communities, announced in late-2014, is reviewed and found to revea…
Procedural Vulnerability and Institutional Capacity Deficits in Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction
Post-disaster reconstruction relies on, and is shaped by, the good intentions of states, non-governmental organizations, and donors. These intentions, however, are inescapably framed by historical circumstances and cultural values. Consequently, post-disaster interventions can reinforce patterns of prejudice, injustice, and disadvantage that were entrenched in pre-disaster settings. Focusing on the experiences of Indigenous Rukai communities in s…
Rethinking the building blocks
The persistence of indigenous ontologies rooted in human systems that pre‐date the creation of colonial property rights and assertions of frontier conquest and dispossession unsettles the dominant idea that ‘management’ is an unproblematic and universally endorsed goal for communities, regions and nations in their environmental and development discourses. This paper argues that conceptual building blocks which render management, be it of environm…
Indigenous geographies I
Indigenous peoples live in challenging environments and engage in complex negotiations to access their rights. Yet research on their social mobilization often stereotypes them as victims of environmental management. We review three debates through which human geographers are beginning to engage more meaningfully with Indigenous environmentalism: the political ecology of neoliberalism; deliberation within claims settlement; and propertization of s…
Scale and the other
Weaving Indigenous and sustainability sciences to diversify our methods
A world in a grain of sand
Difficulties in relating local scale change to broader dynamics of social and economic restructuring continue to be reflected in much geographical research. This paper argues that inadequate conceptualisations of geographical scale restrict the relevance of much research to the agenda of an applied peoples' geography. A framework which conceptualises geographical scale as dialectically and internally related to the totality of social relations, i…
Scale as relation
The concept of geographical scale, despite being one of geography's foundational concepts, has been undertheorized compared to other core concepts such as environment, space and place. Two aspects of the concept of geographical scale (size and level) are relatively well recognized. A third aspect (scale as relation) is not. In this exploratory paper, the implications of the metaphors conventionally used to think and write about scale are consider…
Indigenous geographies III
Working with Indigenous peoples has stretched geographers’ presumptions about appropriate modes of engagement and representation. Early feminist geography prompted methodological experimentation that exercised significant and lasting influence on the discipline. The politics of working with Indigenous peoples yields similarly significant insights about research leadership and methodological choices that are now recognized more widely. We juxtapos…
Frontiers, Borders, Edges
Spatial metaphors that presuppose exclusion and separation rather than interaction and co‐existence dominated in representations of landscape on Australian frontiers prior to the 1990s legal, parliamentary and social recognition of native title. Metaphors of co‐existence have emerged from the public debate about native title. This constitutes a major challenge to previously hegemonic ideas that indigenous Australians were marginal to the Australi…
Procedural vulnerability
Creating Anti-colonial Geographies
In June, 2006, an international meeting on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island), Australia began a new journey for geography with the first gathering of the International Geographical Union's (IGU) newest commission on Indigenous Peoples' Knowledges and Rights. The formal launch of this new commission at the regional conference of the IGU in Brisbane, Australia, Regional Responses to Global Changes: A View from the Antipodes, was the culmination…
Indigenous geographies II
Required to negotiate a transcultural present in which their rights and opportunities are circumscribed by the pleadings of multicultural others, Indigenous peoples have attracted attention for their approaches to alliance-building, responsible co-existence and self-determined care. In this second report on Indigenous geographies 1 , we associate those projects with the geographies of hope but, recognizing that a futuristic gaze on allegedly prog…
Frontier imaginings and subversive Indigenous spatialities
Mining and Indigenous Peoples in Australasia
Constructing Engagement
This paper reflects on experience as an educator, education bureaucrat, researcher and indigenous rights activist to frame significant challenges facing geographical education in the contemporary university and beyond. It argues that the process of constructing engagements between 'students' in diverse settings within and beyond the confines of the tertiary classroom and addressing the intellectual and practical consequences of 'deep colonising' …
Natural and Unnatural Disasters
A key challenge for contemporary democratic societies is how to respond to disasters in ways that foster just and sustainable outcomes that build resilience, respect human rights, and foster economic, social, and cultural well‐being in reasonable timeframes and at reasonable costs. In many places experiencing rapid environmental change, indigenous people continue to exercise some level of self‐governance and autonomy, but they also face the burde…
The idea of ‘ C ountry
In Australian Aboriginal thinking, the idea of ‘ C ountry’ comprises complex ideas about relationships and connection. It simultaneously encompasses territorial affiliation, a social identification and cosmological orientation. It draws attention to what might be glossed as people‐to‐environment, people‐to‐people and people‐to‐cosmos relations. These relations influence disaster responses, but are rarely mobilised explicitly in shaping formal rec…
Unsettling the taken (for granted)
Histories of colonial plunder produced geographies that settler societies take for granted as settled. While some aspects of the conqueror/settler imaginary have been unsettled in specific cases, and through the negotiation of new instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, various national apologies and modern treaties, much unsettling remains to be done. New geographies of plunder, violence and abuse …
Procedural Vulnerability and Institutional Capacity Deficits in Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction
Post-disaster reconstruction relies on, and is shaped by, the good intentions of states, non-governmental organizations, and donors. These intentions, however, are inescapably framed by historical circumstances and cultural values. Consequently, post-disaster interventions can reinforce patterns of prejudice, injustice, and disadvantage that were entrenched in pre-disaster settings. Focusing on the experiences of Indigenous Rukai communities in s…
Can SIA empower communities
Sustainable indigenous futures in remote Indigenous areas
Some things do change
Using a recent editorial comment in this journal as a focus, this paper reviews the extent to which geography has been implicated in the ‘colonial project’ in Australia. It argues that recent work amongst geographers involved with indigenous Australians reflects a commitment to transcend this colonial past. The paper calls for geographers to work toward a wide‐reaching decolonisation of the discipline, and to develop a better understanding of the…
Decolonizing property in Taiwan
Indigenous Tayal experiences of dispossession in Taiwan reflect a familiar pattern of state-sanctioned property rights precluding recognition of Indigenous rights. This paper examines Tayal customary institutions and how they have governed, and continue to govern, land interests in customary domains. In an agricultural economy encompassing patterns of mobility and long-term movement between areas, Tayal people maintain continuing rights in land t…
Intercultural capacity deficits
Focusing on the coexistence of competing and contested interests in intercultural natural resource management ( NRM ) systems in A ustralia and M alaysia, this paper explores the ways in which ontological pluralism and the interplay of socio‐cultural, political–economic and biophysical influences shape NRM systems. We aim to foster a discursive space in which to reframe the challenges of capacity building in the rapidly changing spaces of intercu…
Ethics as first method
Drawing inspiration from diverse Indigenous scholars and mentors, as well as Levinas’ advocacy of ‘ethics as first philosophy’, this article advocates a radical contextualist reframing of geographical research as needing to address the challenges targeted by this new peer review journal. Reframing our disciplinary challenges in this way might acknowledge the need to cast off the discipline’s Eurocentric (or more particularly, its Anglo-American) …
Geographic contributions to institutional curriculum reform in Australia
In the context of continuing pressures from managerialist and neoliberal drivers of university reform in Australia, Macquarie University’s recent undergraduate curriculum innovation, based on “People,” “Planet,” and “Participation,” has resulted in the embedding and integration of experiential learning in its curriculum and institutional framework. Such an approach challenges academic and administrative staff, students, and partners in industry, …
Resource Development and Aborigines
The pervasive and dynamic influence of economic restructuring on political and social relations is highlighted in many aspects of Australian daily life. The effect of economic restructuring on already marginalised and disempowered groups in society is often overlooked Development of iron ore mines and associated new towns, railways and ports transformed the regional economy of Western Australia's Pilbara region in the 1960s and 1970s. For Aborigi…
Social impact assessment and resource development
Several approaches to Social Impact Assessment have been applied to resource development projects in Australia since the early 1970s. Debate amongst researchers and other participants has raised crucial issues for the practice of social scientists generally, and economic geographers in particular. Differences have emerged between those who see SIA as a formal inquiry process in a specific legislative framework, and those who see SIA as a means of…
Aborigines and restructuring in the mining sector
KEY WORDS: AboriginesLand rightsMiningNew regional geographySovereignty
Mining and Indigenous People in Australasia
Can SIA empower communities
Social Impact Assessment as ‘Applied Peoples' Geography’
The increasing imposition of requirements for formal impact assessment reports prior to government approval of major industrial developments provides an opportunity for professional geographers to address the research‐action agenda outlined by Harvey (1984) in his call for an applied peoples' geography. Using examples from impact studies involving indigenous peoples affected by Australian resource projects, this paper considers the conceptual bas…
A world in a grain of sand
Difficulties in relating local scale change to broader dynamics of social and economic restructuring continue to be reflected in much geographical research. This paper argues that inadequate conceptualisations of geographical scale restrict the relevance of much research to the agenda of an applied peoples' geography. A framework which conceptualises geographical scale as dialectically and internally related to the totality of social relations, i…
Mining and Indigenous Peoples in Australasia
Victims of Development
This combination of analysis and first-hand reportage looks at the connections between development, economic growth, social justice and the environment - not in theory, but as this tangle of relationships affects people in their daily lives. It is rooted in the experience and struggles of people all over the world - in the Himalayas or on the islands of Malaysia, in the slums of Manila and Delhi or the tenements of Sao Paulo, as well as in the in…
Some things do change
Using a recent editorial comment in this journal as a focus, this paper reviews the extent to which geography has been implicated in the ‘colonial project’ in Australia. It argues that recent work amongst geographers involved with indigenous Australians reflects a commitment to transcend this colonial past. The paper calls for geographers to work toward a wide‐reaching decolonisation of the discipline, and to develop a better understanding of the…
Scale as relation
The concept of geographical scale, despite being one of geography's foundational concepts, has been undertheorized compared to other core concepts such as environment, space and place. Two aspects of the concept of geographical scale (size and level) are relatively well recognized. A third aspect (scale as relation) is not. In this exploratory paper, the implications of the metaphors conventionally used to think and write about scale are consider…
Constructing Engagement
This paper reflects on experience as an educator, education bureaucrat, researcher and indigenous rights activist to frame significant challenges facing geographical education in the contemporary university and beyond. It argues that the process of constructing engagements between 'students' in diverse settings within and beyond the confines of the tertiary classroom and addressing the intellectual and practical consequences of 'deep colonising' …
Frontiers, Borders, Edges
Spatial metaphors that presuppose exclusion and separation rather than interaction and co‐existence dominated in representations of landscape on Australian frontiers prior to the 1990s legal, parliamentary and social recognition of native title. Metaphors of co‐existence have emerged from the public debate about native title. This constitutes a major challenge to previously hegemonic ideas that indigenous Australians were marginal to the Australi…
Second Nature
Rethinking Resource Management
This book offers students and practitioners a sophisticated and convincing framework for rethinking the usual approaches to resource management. It uses case studies to argue that professional resource managers do not take responsibility for the social and environmental consequences of their decisions on the often vulnerable indigenous communities they affect. It also discusses the invisibility of indigenous people' values and knowledge within tr…
Scale and the other
Elspeth Anne Young (1940–2002)
The importance of process in social impact assessment
Social impact assessment (SIA) presents an important opportunity to draw cross-cultural encounters arising from project-based development efforts into wider procedures of engagement and negotiation that might address the imbalance in relationships between local communities, project proponents and states. In the SIA literature, however, ethical considerations have received relatively little explicit attention, with greater attention given to outco…
On Teaching and Learning Resource and Environmental Management
This paper aims to improve preparation of stakeholders and affected interests for participation in natural resource management (NRM) processes. It argues that a reframing of relationships in multicultural NRM systems can improve individual and institutional capacities to think about and respond to intercultural domains. We argue that the professional toolkit needed to enhance the efficacy and openness of NRM must go beyond technical competence in…
Rethinking the building blocks
The persistence of indigenous ontologies rooted in human systems that pre‐date the creation of colonial property rights and assertions of frontier conquest and dispossession unsettles the dominant idea that ‘management’ is an unproblematic and universally endorsed goal for communities, regions and nations in their environmental and development discourses. This paper argues that conceptual building blocks which render management, be it of environm…
Hidden Histories in Geography
Many geographers benefit from the support of unheralded teachers whose inspiration leaves important marks on their thinking. This paper considers the legacy of Jan Monk's professional contribution in terms of her fostering of wider structures that support the development of a disciplinary capacity for and commitment to good educational practice, her work in researching and bringing to light the hidden disciplinary roles of women in the developmen…
Creating Anti-colonial Geographies
In June, 2006, an international meeting on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island), Australia began a new journey for geography with the first gathering of the International Geographical Union's (IGU) newest commission on Indigenous Peoples' Knowledges and Rights. The formal launch of this new commission at the regional conference of the IGU in Brisbane, Australia, Regional Responses to Global Changes: A View from the Antipodes, was the culmination…
Frontier imaginings and subversive Indigenous spatialities
Invisible institutions in emergencies
Tropical Cyclone Monica is one of the most intense Australian cyclones in recorded history, and threatened several Indigenous communities in April 2006. It prompted the evacuation of the remote island community of Warruwi, and caused considerable damage to the mainland township of Maningrida. The evacuation of Warruwi went smoothly as emergency services personnel, the community and the airline cooperated to airlift some 350 people to designated s…
Geography for and with indigenous peoples
Sociology (42 works) · Political science (39 works) · Geography (37 works) · Indigenous (32 works) · Law (25 works) · Law (23 works) · Environmental ethics (22 works) · Ecology (21 works) · Mining and Resource Management (18 works) · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights (17 works)