Amelia Thorpe
Biographic Data
| ID | 112620 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Amelia Thorpe |
| GIVEN NAMES | Amelia |
| FAMILY NAME | Thorpe |
| SIGNATURE | THORPE A |
| AFFILIATIONS | UNSW Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0474-6286 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 54 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Tents and trespass: Material practices unsettling private property
In 2015, trespass law was used to evict a group of Indigenous people from a gentrifying area of inner city Sydney. What made this unusual was that the landowner was also Indigenous – the Aboriginal Housing Corporation (AHC) – and the site was the Block, one of the most recognizably Indigenous places in Australia. Led by Wiradjuri elder Jenny Munro, the trespassers set up a “tent embassy” in protest against the AHC’s plans for the site, plans Munr…
Moving methods for contested spaces: Video with working cyclists
This paper discusses the use of naturalistic video footage to examine the experience of cycling in Australia’s two largest cities. The study centres on commercial cyclists, a cohort which grew rapidly during the COVID pandemic. Studies of commercial cycling – and particularly food delivery cycling – have focused primarily on the ills of delivery platforms and the gig economy. Complementing this research, we focus less on the work done by these cy…
Charger rage, digital vigilantism, and the cultural politics of EV infrastructure
Mapping the frontiers of private property in New South Wales, Australia
This article addresses the process and patterns by which private property has been applied on the Australian continent. Alongside both lease-holdings that are limited by term or perpetual and squatting practices, identifying and documenting private property in both individual cases and in aggregate over a large geography offers a compelling approximation of the appearance and spread of British-Australian settlement. Plots and patterns of private …
Prefigurative legality: Transforming municipal jurisdiction
This paper argues that prefigurative legality plays an important role in crafting municipalist strategy. We explore the experience of the City of Sydney in relation to new municipalism, focusing on its trajectory as a ‘boundary case’ that generates incrementally accrued transformative potential under conditions of muted political partisanship. The paper argues that at least in a boundary case such as this, legality can be a key and underappreciat…
Speaking back to gender-based violence in New Brunswick schools through queer maker literacies with 2SLGBTQ+ youth
Schools are a site of gender-based violence for queer, trans, and non-binary youth. Drawing on a participatory visual research project with three queer, trans, and non-binary youth, we argue that selfie and cellphilm production offer a glimpse into queer maker literacies. We suggest that the practice of making do-it-yourself (DIY) media productions with queer youth and older community collaborators in out-of-school settings provides opportunities…
Solidarity Through Mail-Based Participatory Visual Research: Exploring queer and feminist futures through an art, activism and archiving project with 2SLGBTQ+ youth amidst Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic posed a logistical problem to our normal ways of engaging in participatory visual research. Our in-person art, activism and archiving with 2SLGBTQ+ Atlantic Canadian youth pivoted to use distanced engagement strategies that met the demands of the pandemic. We sought to create networks of solidarity while we were apart. Monthly, over the course of a year, we mailed out themed packages of art supplies and directions to fifty-f…
Prefigurative Infrastructure: Mobility, Citizenship, and the Agency of Objects
This article examines the unsanctioned installation of infrastructure for walking and cycling as a site of possibility. In contrast to accounts of everyday urbanism that see in these kinds of interventions possibilities for a politics in which the state subsides, I find instead an effort to reclaim the state for more progressive purposes. I focus on groups calling themselves transformation agencies and departments of transformation to argue that …
Facilitating gender-affirming participatory visual research in embodied and online spaces
How might participatory visual research with 2SLGBTQ+ be facilitated in gender affirming ways across physical and digital spaces? What do these practices look like, and how might facilitators adapt their practices in response to cisnormative language and binary physical spaces? This article describes the opportunities and challenges to facilitating two projects with 2SLGBTQ+ youth. The first project, Where Are Our Histories (2018–2020) – was a fa…
Place-based pedagogies of hope
The need to engage students in thinking about the politics of law, especially in a time of escalating climate and other crises, is increasingly urgent. In this paper, we discuss a series of place-based teaching strategies designed to foster critical legal thinking, but also hope and a sense of agency. Inspired by a range of scholars – Bruno Latour, Doreen Massey, Henry Giroux and J.K. Gibson-Graham – we use context in an effort to cultivate what …
Zine Production with Queer Youth and Pre-Service Teachers in New Brunswick, Canada: Exploring Connections, Divergences, and Visual Practices
Queer, trans, and non-binary youth navigate school spaces punctuated by erasures, silences, and oppression, and resist these experiences through solidarity-building, activism, and art practice. In this article, we seek to centre experiences of school and society as important spheres of inquiry through participatory visual research with queer, trans, and non-binary young people (ages 12 to 17) and pre-service teachers and community educators (ages…
Reclaiming the streets? Possibilities for post-pandemic public space
Public streets are the quintessential site of politics: not just marches and assemblies where rights are demanded and disrupted, but the everyday expression of collective decisions about how we live together, about who gets access to which space and for what purposes, about the role of the state and the rights and responsibilities of citizens Those collective decisions are often highly contested, so that the relative rights and responsibilities o…
Coproducing digital archives with 2SLGBTQ+ Atlantic Canadian youth amidst the Covid-19 pandemic
Purpose The authors explore the coproduction of a digital archive with 50 2SLGBTQ+ youth across Atlantic Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to catalyze broader public participation in understanding 2SLGBTQ+ youth-led activism in this place and time through art production. Design/methodology/approach Through a mail-based participatory visual research project and an examination of collage, zines and DIY facemasks, the authors highlight ho…
Trusted institutions: Expertise, gender, and legitimacy on planning panels
Experts are increasingly replacing elected representatives in the planning of Australian cities and regions. Following concerns about delays and corruption, expert decision‐making has been promoted as an important mechanism to restore trust in the planning process. Others have expressed concerns about the loss of democracy entailed in this shift, but this is not the whole story. The nature of expertise is itself significant, and we examine the co…
Regulatory gentrification: Documents, displacement and the loss of low-income housing
Within the vast literature on gentrification, law is not often discussed. Where it is mentioned, law tends to be discussed as a contributor to wider processes of displacement and dispossession. This article takes a different approach, examining law itself as a site of gentrification. My focus is the regulatory framework for the development of boarding houses in Sydney, Australia, contained within the State Environmental Planning Policy (Affordabl…
Cellphilm production as posthuman research method to explore injustice with queer youth in New Brunswick, Canada
Posthuman research methodologies center nonhuman actors and spaces. In this paper, we argue that technological mediation is a key component in a move toward the exploration of posthuman subjectivity in research and the restructuring of dominant understandings of gender and sexualized difference. Drawing on a cellphilm (cellphone + film production) based project with queer, trans, and non-binary youth in New Brunswick, Canada, we seek to center qu…
This Land is Yours’: Ownership and Agency in the Sharing City
As people try to remake cities in more collaborative ways, how do law and legality shape their actions and aspirations? Focusing on Lande , an organization that brings citizens together to transform vacant sites into parks, playgrounds, and productive gardens, this article finds a co‐constitutive relationship between law and citizen engagement. Established in Montreal, Canada, Lande drew inspiration and advice from organizations in New York and o…
Introduction: Law for a New Economy: Enterprise, Sharing, Regulation
Pop-Up Property: Enacting Ownership from San Francisco to Sydney
Through a detailed examination of PARK(ing) Day, a loosely organized international event to reclaim street space from cars, this article reveals the intimate connection between property and its social and material context. Private claims to public streets are not uncommon. In some cases, such claims are swiftly rejected. In others, they receive recognition and respect. Focusing on the particular set of proprietary claims within PARK(ing) Day, thi…
Hegel’s Hipsters: Claiming Ownership in the Contemporary City
Property is both revered and reviled. Praised for its connections to autonomy, agency, power and community, property attracts scorching critiques for its implication in exclusion, inequality and injustice. This article provides a new perspective from which to examine this dual nature of property. Drawing on fieldwork in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, property is examined in the context of citizen and community-led ‘do-it-yo…
Planning with the Public
Discussing planning law is not a great strategy for making friends at parties or the pub. Unless a development is proposed on their doorstep, most people would rather read their mobile phone contract than consider the complex system of legislation, regulations, plans and policies that shape our cities. In its proposals for reform of the planning system, however, the NSW government has succeeded in attracting an unprecedented level of attention: A…
Prefigurative legality: Transforming municipal jurisdiction
This paper argues that prefigurative legality plays an important role in crafting municipalist strategy. We explore the experience of the City of Sydney in relation to new municipalism, focusing on its trajectory as a ‘boundary case’ that generates incrementally accrued transformative potential under conditions of muted political partisanship. The paper argues that at least in a boundary case such as this, legality can be a key and underappreciat…
Mapping the frontiers of private property in New South Wales, Australia
This article addresses the process and patterns by which private property has been applied on the Australian continent. Alongside both lease-holdings that are limited by term or perpetual and squatting practices, identifying and documenting private property in both individual cases and in aggregate over a large geography offers a compelling approximation of the appearance and spread of British-Australian settlement. Plots and patterns of private …
Cellphilm production as posthuman research method to explore injustice with queer youth in New Brunswick, Canada
Posthuman research methodologies center nonhuman actors and spaces. In this paper, we argue that technological mediation is a key component in a move toward the exploration of posthuman subjectivity in research and the restructuring of dominant understandings of gender and sexualized difference. Drawing on a cellphilm (cellphone + film production) based project with queer, trans, and non-binary youth in New Brunswick, Canada, we seek to center qu…
Pop-Up Property: Enacting Ownership from San Francisco to Sydney
Through a detailed examination of PARK(ing) Day, a loosely organized international event to reclaim street space from cars, this article reveals the intimate connection between property and its social and material context. Private claims to public streets are not uncommon. In some cases, such claims are swiftly rejected. In others, they receive recognition and respect. Focusing on the particular set of proprietary claims within PARK(ing) Day, thi…
Hegel’s Hipsters: Claiming Ownership in the Contemporary City
Property is both revered and reviled. Praised for its connections to autonomy, agency, power and community, property attracts scorching critiques for its implication in exclusion, inequality and injustice. This article provides a new perspective from which to examine this dual nature of property. Drawing on fieldwork in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, property is examined in the context of citizen and community-led ‘do-it-yo…
This Land is Yours’: Ownership and Agency in the Sharing City
As people try to remake cities in more collaborative ways, how do law and legality shape their actions and aspirations? Focusing on Lande , an organization that brings citizens together to transform vacant sites into parks, playgrounds, and productive gardens, this article finds a co‐constitutive relationship between law and citizen engagement. Established in Montreal, Canada, Lande drew inspiration and advice from organizations in New York and o…
Coproducing digital archives with 2SLGBTQ+ Atlantic Canadian youth amidst the Covid-19 pandemic
Purpose The authors explore the coproduction of a digital archive with 50 2SLGBTQ+ youth across Atlantic Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to catalyze broader public participation in understanding 2SLGBTQ+ youth-led activism in this place and time through art production. Design/methodology/approach Through a mail-based participatory visual research project and an examination of collage, zines and DIY facemasks, the authors highlight ho…
Speaking back to gender-based violence in New Brunswick schools through queer maker literacies with 2SLGBTQ+ youth
Schools are a site of gender-based violence for queer, trans, and non-binary youth. Drawing on a participatory visual research project with three queer, trans, and non-binary youth, we argue that selfie and cellphilm production offer a glimpse into queer maker literacies. We suggest that the practice of making do-it-yourself (DIY) media productions with queer youth and older community collaborators in out-of-school settings provides opportunities…
Prefigurative Infrastructure: Mobility, Citizenship, and the Agency of Objects
This article examines the unsanctioned installation of infrastructure for walking and cycling as a site of possibility. In contrast to accounts of everyday urbanism that see in these kinds of interventions possibilities for a politics in which the state subsides, I find instead an effort to reclaim the state for more progressive purposes. I focus on groups calling themselves transformation agencies and departments of transformation to argue that …
Regulatory gentrification: Documents, displacement and the loss of low-income housing
Within the vast literature on gentrification, law is not often discussed. Where it is mentioned, law tends to be discussed as a contributor to wider processes of displacement and dispossession. This article takes a different approach, examining law itself as a site of gentrification. My focus is the regulatory framework for the development of boarding houses in Sydney, Australia, contained within the State Environmental Planning Policy (Affordabl…
Solidarity Through Mail-Based Participatory Visual Research: Exploring queer and feminist futures through an art, activism and archiving project with 2SLGBTQ+ youth amidst Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic posed a logistical problem to our normal ways of engaging in participatory visual research. Our in-person art, activism and archiving with 2SLGBTQ+ Atlantic Canadian youth pivoted to use distanced engagement strategies that met the demands of the pandemic. We sought to create networks of solidarity while we were apart. Monthly, over the course of a year, we mailed out themed packages of art supplies and directions to fifty-f…
Introduction: Law for a New Economy: Enterprise, Sharing, Regulation
Planning with the Public
Discussing planning law is not a great strategy for making friends at parties or the pub. Unless a development is proposed on their doorstep, most people would rather read their mobile phone contract than consider the complex system of legislation, regulations, plans and policies that shape our cities. In its proposals for reform of the planning system, however, the NSW government has succeeded in attracting an unprecedented level of attention: A…
Hegel’s Hipsters: Claiming Ownership in the Contemporary City
Property is both revered and reviled. Praised for its connections to autonomy, agency, power and community, property attracts scorching critiques for its implication in exclusion, inequality and injustice. This article provides a new perspective from which to examine this dual nature of property. Drawing on fieldwork in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, property is examined in the context of citizen and community-led ‘do-it-yo…
This Land is Yours’: Ownership and Agency in the Sharing City
As people try to remake cities in more collaborative ways, how do law and legality shape their actions and aspirations? Focusing on Lande , an organization that brings citizens together to transform vacant sites into parks, playgrounds, and productive gardens, this article finds a co‐constitutive relationship between law and citizen engagement. Established in Montreal, Canada, Lande drew inspiration and advice from organizations in New York and o…
Introduction: Law for a New Economy: Enterprise, Sharing, Regulation
Pop-Up Property: Enacting Ownership from San Francisco to Sydney
Through a detailed examination of PARK(ing) Day, a loosely organized international event to reclaim street space from cars, this article reveals the intimate connection between property and its social and material context. Private claims to public streets are not uncommon. In some cases, such claims are swiftly rejected. In others, they receive recognition and respect. Focusing on the particular set of proprietary claims within PARK(ing) Day, thi…
Cellphilm production as posthuman research method to explore injustice with queer youth in New Brunswick, Canada
Posthuman research methodologies center nonhuman actors and spaces. In this paper, we argue that technological mediation is a key component in a move toward the exploration of posthuman subjectivity in research and the restructuring of dominant understandings of gender and sexualized difference. Drawing on a cellphilm (cellphone + film production) based project with queer, trans, and non-binary youth in New Brunswick, Canada, we seek to center qu…
Zine Production with Queer Youth and Pre-Service Teachers in New Brunswick, Canada: Exploring Connections, Divergences, and Visual Practices
Queer, trans, and non-binary youth navigate school spaces punctuated by erasures, silences, and oppression, and resist these experiences through solidarity-building, activism, and art practice. In this article, we seek to centre experiences of school and society as important spheres of inquiry through participatory visual research with queer, trans, and non-binary young people (ages 12 to 17) and pre-service teachers and community educators (ages…
Reclaiming the streets? Possibilities for post-pandemic public space
Public streets are the quintessential site of politics: not just marches and assemblies where rights are demanded and disrupted, but the everyday expression of collective decisions about how we live together, about who gets access to which space and for what purposes, about the role of the state and the rights and responsibilities of citizens Those collective decisions are often highly contested, so that the relative rights and responsibilities o…
Coproducing digital archives with 2SLGBTQ+ Atlantic Canadian youth amidst the Covid-19 pandemic
Purpose The authors explore the coproduction of a digital archive with 50 2SLGBTQ+ youth across Atlantic Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to catalyze broader public participation in understanding 2SLGBTQ+ youth-led activism in this place and time through art production. Design/methodology/approach Through a mail-based participatory visual research project and an examination of collage, zines and DIY facemasks, the authors highlight ho…
Trusted institutions: Expertise, gender, and legitimacy on planning panels
Experts are increasingly replacing elected representatives in the planning of Australian cities and regions. Following concerns about delays and corruption, expert decision‐making has been promoted as an important mechanism to restore trust in the planning process. Others have expressed concerns about the loss of democracy entailed in this shift, but this is not the whole story. The nature of expertise is itself significant, and we examine the co…
Regulatory gentrification: Documents, displacement and the loss of low-income housing
Within the vast literature on gentrification, law is not often discussed. Where it is mentioned, law tends to be discussed as a contributor to wider processes of displacement and dispossession. This article takes a different approach, examining law itself as a site of gentrification. My focus is the regulatory framework for the development of boarding houses in Sydney, Australia, contained within the State Environmental Planning Policy (Affordabl…
Facilitating gender-affirming participatory visual research in embodied and online spaces
How might participatory visual research with 2SLGBTQ+ be facilitated in gender affirming ways across physical and digital spaces? What do these practices look like, and how might facilitators adapt their practices in response to cisnormative language and binary physical spaces? This article describes the opportunities and challenges to facilitating two projects with 2SLGBTQ+ youth. The first project, Where Are Our Histories (2018–2020) – was a fa…
Place-based pedagogies of hope
The need to engage students in thinking about the politics of law, especially in a time of escalating climate and other crises, is increasingly urgent. In this paper, we discuss a series of place-based teaching strategies designed to foster critical legal thinking, but also hope and a sense of agency. Inspired by a range of scholars – Bruno Latour, Doreen Massey, Henry Giroux and J.K. Gibson-Graham – we use context in an effort to cultivate what …
Prefigurative legality: Transforming municipal jurisdiction
This paper argues that prefigurative legality plays an important role in crafting municipalist strategy. We explore the experience of the City of Sydney in relation to new municipalism, focusing on its trajectory as a ‘boundary case’ that generates incrementally accrued transformative potential under conditions of muted political partisanship. The paper argues that at least in a boundary case such as this, legality can be a key and underappreciat…
Speaking back to gender-based violence in New Brunswick schools through queer maker literacies with 2SLGBTQ+ youth
Schools are a site of gender-based violence for queer, trans, and non-binary youth. Drawing on a participatory visual research project with three queer, trans, and non-binary youth, we argue that selfie and cellphilm production offer a glimpse into queer maker literacies. We suggest that the practice of making do-it-yourself (DIY) media productions with queer youth and older community collaborators in out-of-school settings provides opportunities…
Solidarity Through Mail-Based Participatory Visual Research: Exploring queer and feminist futures through an art, activism and archiving project with 2SLGBTQ+ youth amidst Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic posed a logistical problem to our normal ways of engaging in participatory visual research. Our in-person art, activism and archiving with 2SLGBTQ+ Atlantic Canadian youth pivoted to use distanced engagement strategies that met the demands of the pandemic. We sought to create networks of solidarity while we were apart. Monthly, over the course of a year, we mailed out themed packages of art supplies and directions to fifty-f…
Prefigurative Infrastructure: Mobility, Citizenship, and the Agency of Objects
This article examines the unsanctioned installation of infrastructure for walking and cycling as a site of possibility. In contrast to accounts of everyday urbanism that see in these kinds of interventions possibilities for a politics in which the state subsides, I find instead an effort to reclaim the state for more progressive purposes. I focus on groups calling themselves transformation agencies and departments of transformation to argue that …
Charger rage, digital vigilantism, and the cultural politics of EV infrastructure
Mapping the frontiers of private property in New South Wales, Australia
This article addresses the process and patterns by which private property has been applied on the Australian continent. Alongside both lease-holdings that are limited by term or perpetual and squatting practices, identifying and documenting private property in both individual cases and in aggregate over a large geography offers a compelling approximation of the appearance and spread of British-Australian settlement. Plots and patterns of private …
Tents and trespass: Material practices unsettling private property
In 2015, trespass law was used to evict a group of Indigenous people from a gentrifying area of inner city Sydney. What made this unusual was that the landowner was also Indigenous – the Aboriginal Housing Corporation (AHC) – and the site was the Block, one of the most recognizably Indigenous places in Australia. Led by Wiradjuri elder Jenny Munro, the trespassers set up a “tent embassy” in protest against the AHC’s plans for the site, plans Munr…
Moving methods for contested spaces: Video with working cyclists
This paper discusses the use of naturalistic video footage to examine the experience of cycling in Australia’s two largest cities. The study centres on commercial cyclists, a cohort which grew rapidly during the COVID pandemic. Studies of commercial cycling – and particularly food delivery cycling – have focused primarily on the ills of delivery platforms and the gig economy. Complementing this research, we focus less on the work done by these cy…
Political science (17 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Politics (9 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (7 works) · Engineering (6 works) · Social science (6 works) · Citizen journalism (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works)