James Dunk
Biographic Data
| ID | 1097050 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Dunk |
| GIVEN NAMES | James |
| FAMILY NAME | Dunk |
| SIGNATURE | DUNK J |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7733-8734 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Climate Distress and the Practice of Connection
How might we build community and connection as the wounded world grows warmer and more unlivable? How might we address climate distress in ways that honor right relationships between people, planet, place, and our more-than-human companions? We ask questions like these in this article and seek to answer them as we present a narrative case study of an Australian community of practice focused on climate distress. We draw from the transcripts of a s…
Eco-anxiety and environmental history
Environmental historians, like others who study and write about the environment, have long worked with the emotional and psychological impacts of environmental change, including grief, anxiety, rage and despair.But the increasing prevalence of ecological anxiety in recent years, prompted by new indicators of planetary distress, suggests the need for new histories which address humans as subject together with other species to these disruptions in …
Eco-psychology
This paper presents an argument that mainstream psychological practice is not equipped to respond to distress associated with the climate emergency. This is because the field focusses on individual pathology, rather than ecological context. It remains reticent about activism and politics and is ontologically aligned with the Anthropocene, a new era in which the human species is creating an observable effect in the geological record, to the detrim…
Wrongful confinement and the spectre of colonial despotism
In a penal colony, replete with anxieties of liberty and mobility, admission to a lunatic asylum carried particular significance. This article takes up the trope of wrongful confinement – the institutionalisation of the sane in institutions for the insane – in order to explore the aims and methods of a new field, the political history of madness. Elsewhere wrongful confinement registered cultural anxieties of the loss of rights and social death, …
From the margins
This Introduction situates the Australian scholarship on the histories of mental illness, madness, psychiatry and institutions in a wider perspective. It argues for the relevance and importance of histories of madness in our present
Planetary Health Histories
This essay charts a conceptual history of "planetary health," which holds that population health and the continuity of human civilization depend on the integrity—the health—of the Earth's life-support systems. It seeks to identify settler colonial and imperial genealogies of this distinctly ecological approach to human population health and flourishing, an assemblage of systems theory and planetary thinking as well as developments in environmenta…
Psychology as if the whole earth mattered
This article traces a genealogy for the various strands of contemporary psychology which are concerned with global environmental change, including conservation psychology, ecopsychology, and other subfields and interdisciplinary concentrations. Focusing on a network of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other researchers based at a research center founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1982, the article explores what those who first turned to the …
Carolyn Merchant. The Anthropocene and the Humanities
‘The earth itself will continue in some form,’ writes Carolyn Merchant, a professor of Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics at University of California–Berkeley—‘but perhaps in a much altered state’. This slim book introduces humanities students to the Anthropocene. Other language has been used to describe the crises that have been gathering on the horizon for half a century and more, writes Merchant, but the Anthropocene offers a more ‘…
The liability of madness and the commission of lunacy in New South Wales, 1805–12
The penal colony of New South Wales occupied an uncertain place within the highly mobile and volatile world of maritime trade. The incidence of maritime madness brought its peculiarities and vulnerabilities into view. This article examines three instances of madness between 1805 and 1812 to which the colony’s governors were forced to respond. Together they show the liabilities madness presented in such a place: the commercial liability faced by i…
Bureaucracy, archive files, and the making of knowledge
Work, paperwork and the imaginary Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum, 1846
Following the injunction of the field of paperwork to look at paper, rather than through it for information, a close read of the first volumes of the New South Wales State Archives & Records series NRS 5031 discloses a surprising history. The New South Wales Legislative Council appointed a select committee in 1846 to enquire into the management of Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum – into its work. Finding the work in order, the committee quickly turned…
Caring for the Incarcerated
Caring for the Incarcerated is an evocative exhibition presented by an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Wollongong and the Justice Health and Forensic Mental Health Networ
Catharine Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire
Catharine Coleborne’s latest monograph seeks to create new analytical space for asylum populations—an increasingly rare commodity—by situating them within a settler colonial world that historians have recently discovered was profoundly mobile. Coleborne describes the construction of colonial identities within two asylums, Yarra Bend in Victoria and Auckland Asylum, New Zealand, seeking to broach broader questions of identity formation and subject…
Eco-psychology
This paper presents an argument that mainstream psychological practice is not equipped to respond to distress associated with the climate emergency. This is because the field focusses on individual pathology, rather than ecological context. It remains reticent about activism and politics and is ontologically aligned with the Anthropocene, a new era in which the human species is creating an observable effect in the geological record, to the detrim…
Planetary Health Histories
This essay charts a conceptual history of "planetary health," which holds that population health and the continuity of human civilization depend on the integrity—the health—of the Earth's life-support systems. It seeks to identify settler colonial and imperial genealogies of this distinctly ecological approach to human population health and flourishing, an assemblage of systems theory and planetary thinking as well as developments in environmenta…
Bureaucracy, archive files, and the making of knowledge
Catharine Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire
Catharine Coleborne’s latest monograph seeks to create new analytical space for asylum populations—an increasingly rare commodity—by situating them within a settler colonial world that historians have recently discovered was profoundly mobile. Coleborne describes the construction of colonial identities within two asylums, Yarra Bend in Victoria and Auckland Asylum, New Zealand, seeking to broach broader questions of identity formation and subject…
Caring for the Incarcerated
Caring for the Incarcerated is an evocative exhibition presented by an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Wollongong and the Justice Health and Forensic Mental Health Networ
The liability of madness and the commission of lunacy in New South Wales, 1805–12
The penal colony of New South Wales occupied an uncertain place within the highly mobile and volatile world of maritime trade. The incidence of maritime madness brought its peculiarities and vulnerabilities into view. This article examines three instances of madness between 1805 and 1812 to which the colony’s governors were forced to respond. Together they show the liabilities madness presented in such a place: the commercial liability faced by i…
Bureaucracy, archive files, and the making of knowledge
Work, paperwork and the imaginary Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum, 1846
Following the injunction of the field of paperwork to look at paper, rather than through it for information, a close read of the first volumes of the New South Wales State Archives & Records series NRS 5031 discloses a surprising history. The New South Wales Legislative Council appointed a select committee in 1846 to enquire into the management of Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum – into its work. Finding the work in order, the committee quickly turned…
Psychology as if the whole earth mattered
This article traces a genealogy for the various strands of contemporary psychology which are concerned with global environmental change, including conservation psychology, ecopsychology, and other subfields and interdisciplinary concentrations. Focusing on a network of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other researchers based at a research center founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1982, the article explores what those who first turned to the …
Carolyn Merchant. The Anthropocene and the Humanities
‘The earth itself will continue in some form,’ writes Carolyn Merchant, a professor of Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics at University of California–Berkeley—‘but perhaps in a much altered state’. This slim book introduces humanities students to the Anthropocene. Other language has been used to describe the crises that have been gathering on the horizon for half a century and more, writes Merchant, but the Anthropocene offers a more ‘…
Wrongful confinement and the spectre of colonial despotism
In a penal colony, replete with anxieties of liberty and mobility, admission to a lunatic asylum carried particular significance. This article takes up the trope of wrongful confinement – the institutionalisation of the sane in institutions for the insane – in order to explore the aims and methods of a new field, the political history of madness. Elsewhere wrongful confinement registered cultural anxieties of the loss of rights and social death, …
From the margins
This Introduction situates the Australian scholarship on the histories of mental illness, madness, psychiatry and institutions in a wider perspective. It argues for the relevance and importance of histories of madness in our present
Planetary Health Histories
This essay charts a conceptual history of "planetary health," which holds that population health and the continuity of human civilization depend on the integrity—the health—of the Earth's life-support systems. It seeks to identify settler colonial and imperial genealogies of this distinctly ecological approach to human population health and flourishing, an assemblage of systems theory and planetary thinking as well as developments in environmenta…
Eco-psychology
This paper presents an argument that mainstream psychological practice is not equipped to respond to distress associated with the climate emergency. This is because the field focusses on individual pathology, rather than ecological context. It remains reticent about activism and politics and is ontologically aligned with the Anthropocene, a new era in which the human species is creating an observable effect in the geological record, to the detrim…
Eco-anxiety and environmental history
Environmental historians, like others who study and write about the environment, have long worked with the emotional and psychological impacts of environmental change, including grief, anxiety, rage and despair.But the increasing prevalence of ecological anxiety in recent years, prompted by new indicators of planetary distress, suggests the need for new histories which address humans as subject together with other species to these disruptions in …
Climate Distress and the Practice of Connection
How might we build community and connection as the wounded world grows warmer and more unlivable? How might we address climate distress in ways that honor right relationships between people, planet, place, and our more-than-human companions? We ask questions like these in this article and seek to answer them as we present a narrative case study of an Australian community of practice focused on climate distress. We draw from the transcripts of a s…
Political science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · History (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Psychology (7 works) · History (6 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Colonialism (4 works) · Environmental ethics (4 works)