Donna Houston
Biographic Data
| ID | 199779 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Donna Houston |
| GIVEN NAMES | Donna |
| FAMILY NAME | Houston |
| SIGNATURE | HOUSTON D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Macquarie University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3181-3517 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 560 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Public spaces as infrastructures of care: Mundane doings of/in ordinary places
Assembling the plant-based meat proposition: Towards food systems transitions in Australia
The mounting social, ecological and animal welfare issues associated with animal agriculture have inspired research and development on novel protein technologies that promise pathways towards less harmful futures. Protein transitions advocates envision significant changes to food production, including the potential removal of millions of animals from food production systems. This future is not at all guaranteed and dependent upon the complex and …
Sustaining Care-Full Public Spaces
This paper develops a multidimensional framework for sustaining care-full public spaces. We open by engaging with key understandings of the affective and relational dimensions of both public spaces and urban care scholarship. We then set out the elements of a framework for conceptualising the possibility of care-full public spaces. Writing from feminist and decolonial standpoints, we review emerging and foundational research to delineate three ke…
On the researcher as parasite
An Australian reimagining of the Aesop fable of the fox, the flies and the hedgehog introduces critical exploration of spatial planning-related imaginaries whereby practices of settler colonialism and urban expansion have caused disruption and destruction of hundreds of thousands of human and other-than-human lives. The argument is grounded in Serres’ concept of the parasite, questioning what type of parasitic relationship spatial planning has wi…
Plant-based food politics: Veganism, quiet activism and small businesses in Sydney's foodscapes
Veganism is becoming more popular as the social, environmental, and ethical impacts of animal agriculture become better known. This is creating new opportunities and challenges as an array of economic actors seek to profit from and contribute to the movement. In this paper, we analyse how small plant-based food businesses are engaging with and influencing vegan politics through a case study of Sydney, Australia. Through interviews and an online a…
Offsetting
Cities in Covid-19: Reconsidering Urban Form, Mobility, Housing and Planning in Australasia
Cities in COVID-19: Reconsidering Urban Form, Mobility, Housing and Planning in Australasia
Legal Pluralism on Dyarubbin: Country-as-Lore/Law in Western Sydney, Australia
In Australia, urbanisation is synonymous with ecological and cultural fragmentation. In places that became cities through deeply colonising processes, this destruction is imbricated with the relegation of Indigenous Lore/Law below English-derived law. In this article we argue for appropriate recognition and respectful intercultural engagements with Country-as-Lore/Law as a counter to the conception of land as a passive subject of anthropocentric …
A manifesto for shadow places: Re-imagining and co-producing connections for justice in an era of climate change
In this article, on behalf of The Shadow Places Network, we outline a working manifesto of politics and practice. We mobilise the format of the manifesto to speak to an uncertain and damaged future, to begin to imagine other possible worlds. For feminist philosopher Val Plumwood, whose thinking inspires this network, shadow places are the underside of the capitalist fantasy, 'the multiple disregarded places of economic and ecological support'. In…
Quiet Activism: Climate Action at the Local Scale
Smart urban forests: An overview of more-than-human and more-than-real urban forest management in Australian cities
These are uncertain times in the Anthropocene, where the health and resilience of all urban inhabitants should be key themes for cities striving for sustainability. To this end, local councils in Australia are applying digital technologies with increasing complexity as components of their urban forest management. This paper applies a more-than-human lens to analyse Australian local council urban forest policies, documents and project information …
The Biopolitics of Cattle Methane Emissions Reduction: Governing Life in a Time of Climate Change
In this paper we analyse ongoing attempts to mitigate cattle methane emissions through the lens of biopower. Drawing on IPCC and FAO reports as well as the scientific literature, we detail how the problem of cattle methane has been made visible and the subsequent efforts that have emerged to govern human and non‐human life from molecular to global scales. Such efforts have been thwarted by the liveliness of cattle, farmers and consumers. Rather t…
Delivering the discipline: Teaching geography and planning during Covid-19
COVID-19 has radically changed the higher education sector in Australia and beyond. Restrictions on student movement (especially for international students) and on gatherings (which limited on-campus sessions) saw universities transition to fully online teaching modes almost overnight. In this commentary, we reflect on this transition and consider the implications for teaching the disciplines of geography and planning. Reflecting on experiences a…
Women’s mobility, neighbourhood socio-ecologies and homemaking in urban informal settlements
The paper contributes to the growing research on relational thinking about housing and home by exploring the informal homes of rural migrants in Khulna city, Bangladesh. The concept of ‘unbounding’ is used to trace the fluidity and connections established between migrant homes and neighbourhood socio-ecologies. Walking interviews exploring women’s livelihoods reveal that different expendable agencies of the urban environment (e.g. trash, weeds an…
Cities of care: Introduction to a special issue
Rethinking care as alternate infrastructure
Urban re-generations: Afterword to special issue on the politics of urban greening in Australian cities
‘Urban re-generations' is written as an afterword to the special issue of Australian Geographer on ‘The Politics of Urban Greening in Australian Cities'. The collection prompts a deep questioning of reparative and regenerative work associated with greening, green spaces and green infrastructures. The climate-driven 2019-2020 bushfire crisis and COVID-19 have amplified the visibility of the more-than-human connectivity of our cities and the deep u…
Neither sensibly homed nor homeless: Re-Imagining Migrant Homes Through More-Than-Human Relations
More-than-human relations have gained much attention in the study of home and homemaking in Western contexts. We contribute to and geographically expand this growing literature by focusing on informal homes established by climate migrants living in the urban fringes of Khulna city, Bangladesh. To explore these precarious dwellings we develop a more-than-human approach, focusing upon the agencies and relations of plants, animals and elements of na…
Teaching the Environmental Humanities
This article provides the first international overview and detailed discussion of teaching in the environmental humanities (EH). It is divided into three parts. The first offers a series of regional overviews: where, when, and how EH teaching is taking place. This part highlights some key regional variability in the uptake of teaching in this area, emphasizing important differences in cultural and pedagogical contexts. The second part is a critic…
Creating a thinking space for the rising stars of Australian urban geography
The Institute of Australian Geographers Urban Study Group and Australian Geographer present the first essay in our Leading Insights/Thinking Space partnership. We discuss Dr Natalie Osborne's 2018 essay, flag Dr Marilu Melo's 2019 essay and talk about creating a thinking space for the rising stars of Australian urban geography
Planning in the shadow of extinction: Carnaby's Black cockatoos and urban development in Perth, Australia
This paper explores the shifting ecological proximities of urban-human-animal relations in Perth via a story of Carnaby's Black Cockatoos, urban planning and extinction. The story is framed around a challenge and a provocation. The challenge, calls for a deeper consideration of urban planning in the shadow of extinction. Such a consideration involves two entangled elements: a deepening ethical and practical engagement with diverse urban lifeforms…
Photo‐response: Approaching participatory photography as a more‐than‐human research method
There is growing interest in “more‐than‐human” influences on places and practices. However, while the theoretical thinking in this field is well developed, methodology and methods lag behind. Borrowing insights from feminist geographers’ articulation of “response”, we explore how participatory photography can be used to examine more‐than‐human processes through a case study of marginal homemaking in Khulna city in Bangladesh. Our photo‐response m…
Economia política das catástrofes naturais
Storytelling environmental justice
This chapter focuses on cultural studies approaches to environmental justice activism and research. It brings together theories and methodologies from cultural studies to frame environmental justice as a mode of "storytelling" that performs and communicates what it means to live with environmental injury. Storytelling involves the enactment of "cultural methodologies", which include fictional, non-fictional, autobiographical, testimonial, and sci…
Unlearning the colonial cultures of planning
Make kin, not cities! Multispecies entanglements and 'becoming-world' in planning theory
Much planning theory has been undergirded by an ontological exceptionalism of humans. Yet, city planning does not sit outside of the eco-social realities co-producing the Anthropocene. Urban planners and scholars, therefore, need to think carefully and critically about who speaks for (and with) the nonhuman in place making. In this article, we identify two fruitful directions for planning theory to better engage with the imbricated nature of huma…
Rethinking care as alternate infrastructure
Procedural vulnerability: Understanding environmental change in a remote indigenous community
The Work of Performativity: Staging Social Justice at the University of Southern California
In this paper we offer an alternative reading of the role of performativity and everyday forms of resistance in current geographic literature. We make a case for thinking about performativity as a form of embodied dialectical praxis via a discussion of the ways in which performativity has been recently understood in geography. Turning to the tradition of Marxist revolutionary theater, we argue for the continued importance of thinking about the po…
Environmental Justice Storytelling: Angels and Isotopes at Yucca Mountain, Nevada
This paper discusses the productive role of storytelling in community struggles for environmental justice. The individual and collective task of environmental justice storytelling highlights where the politics of pollution intersect with geographical imaginations. Storytelling takes on a productive role in transforming localized and individual emotions and experiences of environmental injustice into public knowledge that is performed in the world…
Un‐earthing the Subterranean Anthropocene
In this paper, we argue that the role of the underground has been discursively absent from contemporary debates about the Anthropocene. We build on recent geographical scholarship that has challenged “surface bias” and call for geographical debate to go deeper into the third dimension; to explore the Subterranean Anthropocene; to embrace volume ontologies. We present three core arguments. (1) The Anthropocene is about our future underground, a ge…
Cattle in the Anthropocene: Four propositions
The “Anthropocene”, a proposed geological epoch in which humanity is positioned as the core driver of planetary change, is eliciting proposals oriented at reworking human–nature relations. The more common technoscientific responses call for more investment oriented at further controlling human and non‐human processes, whereas relational responses seek more convivial relations with non‐humans – recognising the diverse agencies present in more‐than…
Neither sensibly homed nor homeless: Re-Imagining Migrant Homes Through More-Than-Human Relations
More-than-human relations have gained much attention in the study of home and homemaking in Western contexts. We contribute to and geographically expand this growing literature by focusing on informal homes established by climate migrants living in the urban fringes of Khulna city, Bangladesh. To explore these precarious dwellings we develop a more-than-human approach, focusing upon the agencies and relations of plants, animals and elements of na…
Photo‐response: Approaching participatory photography as a more‐than‐human research method
There is growing interest in “more‐than‐human” influences on places and practices. However, while the theoretical thinking in this field is well developed, methodology and methods lag behind. Borrowing insights from feminist geographers’ articulation of “response”, we explore how participatory photography can be used to examine more‐than‐human processes through a case study of marginal homemaking in Khulna city in Bangladesh. Our photo‐response m…
Cities of care: Introduction to a special issue
The evolution of ecosystem services: A time series and discourse-centered analysis
Multiple Suburban Publics: Rethinking Community Opposition to Consolidation in Sydney
Since the late 1980s urban consolidation has become the dominant strategic planning paradigm across Australian cities; however, sites of densification are increasingly becoming sites of community resistance and conflict. In the context of theSydney Metropolitan Strategy, this paper explores Ku-ring-gai in Sydney's northern suburbs as a site of community resistance centred on opposition to urban consolidation. Moving beyond more traditional constr…
A manifesto for shadow places: Re-imagining and co-producing connections for justice in an era of climate change
In this article, on behalf of The Shadow Places Network, we outline a working manifesto of politics and practice. We mobilise the format of the manifesto to speak to an uncertain and damaged future, to begin to imagine other possible worlds. For feminist philosopher Val Plumwood, whose thinking inspires this network, shadow places are the underside of the capitalist fantasy, 'the multiple disregarded places of economic and ecological support'. In…
Crisis Is Where We Live: Environmental Justice for the Anthropocene
This article considers the material imaginations of environmental crisis and justice in the context of the Anthropocene. I argue that political action at the intersections between environmental degradation and environmental change produce ‘anticipatory histories’ (DeSilvey, 2012) of planetary crisis. ‘Anticipatory histories’ disorder linear and depoliticised understandings of external crisis and they support different social imaginaries of the re…
Planning in the shadow of extinction: Carnaby's Black cockatoos and urban development in Perth, Australia
This paper explores the shifting ecological proximities of urban-human-animal relations in Perth via a story of Carnaby's Black Cockatoos, urban planning and extinction. The story is framed around a challenge and a provocation. The challenge, calls for a deeper consideration of urban planning in the shadow of extinction. Such a consideration involves two entangled elements: a deepening ethical and practical engagement with diverse urban lifeforms…
Smart urban forests: An overview of more-than-human and more-than-real urban forest management in Australian cities
These are uncertain times in the Anthropocene, where the health and resilience of all urban inhabitants should be key themes for cities striving for sustainability. To this end, local councils in Australia are applying digital technologies with increasing complexity as components of their urban forest management. This paper applies a more-than-human lens to analyse Australian local council urban forest policies, documents and project information …
Revolutionary Ecologies: Ecosocialism and Critical Pedagogy
In this article, we argue that critical and revolutionary educational praxis is increasingly shaped by and through ecological politics and imaginaries. Indeed, given the pervasiveness of environmental crisis in our everyday lives and vocabularies, we argue that critical educators can no longer ignore questions of ecojustice. In keeping with a growing interdisciplinary field of green Marxist scholarship, we argue that "greening" critical pedagogy …
Women’s mobility, neighbourhood socio-ecologies and homemaking in urban informal settlements
The paper contributes to the growing research on relational thinking about housing and home by exploring the informal homes of rural migrants in Khulna city, Bangladesh. The concept of ‘unbounding’ is used to trace the fluidity and connections established between migrant homes and neighbourhood socio-ecologies. Walking interviews exploring women’s livelihoods reveal that different expendable agencies of the urban environment (e.g. trash, weeds an…
The Biopolitics of Cattle Methane Emissions Reduction: Governing Life in a Time of Climate Change
In this paper we analyse ongoing attempts to mitigate cattle methane emissions through the lens of biopower. Drawing on IPCC and FAO reports as well as the scientific literature, we detail how the problem of cattle methane has been made visible and the subsequent efforts that have emerged to govern human and non‐human life from molecular to global scales. Such efforts have been thwarted by the liveliness of cattle, farmers and consumers. Rather t…
Geographic contributions to institutional curriculum reform in Australia: The challenge of embedding field-based learning
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, …
Climate Cosmopolitics and the Possibilities for Urban Planning
Cosmopolitical action in a climate-changed city represents different knowledges and practices that may seem disconnected but constellate to frame stories and spaces of a climate-just city. The question this article asks is: how might we as planners identify and develop counter-hegemonic praxes that enable us to re-imagine our experience of, and responses to, climate change? To explore this question, we draw on Isabelle Stengers's (2010) idea of c…
Crisis and resilience: Cultural methodologies for environmental sustainability and justice
In a recent article in Cultural Studies Review Deborah Bird Rose asks the question: ‘what if the angel of history were a dog’? In her answering narrative, Rose concludes that ‘she is howling’ (Rose
Response to Bowers: The 'Nature' of Political Amnesia: A Response to C.A. 'Chet' Bowers
Controlling Bodies: The Punishment of Multiracialized Sexual Relations
Geographies of sexuality have paid minimal attention to interracial relations. To rectify this, we examine the genealogy of the criminalization and punishment of ‘interracial’ relations. Drawing on three historical moments in the evolution of race relations in Anglo‐America, we argue that the criminalization of these relations has historically been grounded in material relations and not in abstract ideals of racial purity or fears of racial degen…
Plant-based food politics: Veganism, quiet activism and small businesses in Sydney's foodscapes
Veganism is becoming more popular as the social, environmental, and ethical impacts of animal agriculture become better known. This is creating new opportunities and challenges as an array of economic actors seek to profit from and contribute to the movement. In this paper, we analyse how small plant-based food businesses are engaging with and influencing vegan politics through a case study of Sydney, Australia. Through interviews and an online a…
Controlling Bodies: The Punishment of Multiracialized Sexual Relations
Geographies of sexuality have paid minimal attention to interracial relations. To rectify this, we examine the genealogy of the criminalization and punishment of ‘interracial’ relations. Drawing on three historical moments in the evolution of race relations in Anglo‐America, we argue that the criminalization of these relations has historically been grounded in material relations and not in abstract ideals of racial purity or fears of racial degen…
The Work of Performativity: Staging Social Justice at the University of Southern California
In this paper we offer an alternative reading of the role of performativity and everyday forms of resistance in current geographic literature. We make a case for thinking about performativity as a form of embodied dialectical praxis via a discussion of the ways in which performativity has been recently understood in geography. Turning to the tradition of Marxist revolutionary theater, we argue for the continued importance of thinking about the po…
Revolutionary Ecologies: Ecosocialism and Critical Pedagogy
In this article, we argue that critical and revolutionary educational praxis is increasingly shaped by and through ecological politics and imaginaries. Indeed, given the pervasiveness of environmental crisis in our everyday lives and vocabularies, we argue that critical educators can no longer ignore questions of ecojustice. In keeping with a growing interdisciplinary field of green Marxist scholarship, we argue that "greening" critical pedagogy …
Response to Bowers: The 'Nature' of Political Amnesia: A Response to C.A. 'Chet' Bowers
Crisis and resilience: Cultural methodologies for environmental sustainability and justice
In a recent article in Cultural Studies Review Deborah Bird Rose asks the question: ‘what if the angel of history were a dog’? In her answering narrative, Rose concludes that ‘she is howling’ (Rose
Procedural vulnerability: Understanding environmental change in a remote indigenous community
Environmental Justice Storytelling: Angels and Isotopes at Yucca Mountain, Nevada
This paper discusses the productive role of storytelling in community struggles for environmental justice. The individual and collective task of environmental justice storytelling highlights where the politics of pollution intersect with geographical imaginations. Storytelling takes on a productive role in transforming localized and individual emotions and experiences of environmental injustice into public knowledge that is performed in the world…
Multiple Suburban Publics: Rethinking Community Opposition to Consolidation in Sydney
Since the late 1980s urban consolidation has become the dominant strategic planning paradigm across Australian cities; however, sites of densification are increasingly becoming sites of community resistance and conflict. In the context of theSydney Metropolitan Strategy, this paper explores Ku-ring-gai in Sydney's northern suburbs as a site of community resistance centred on opposition to urban consolidation. Moving beyond more traditional constr…
Crisis Is Where We Live: Environmental Justice for the Anthropocene
This article considers the material imaginations of environmental crisis and justice in the context of the Anthropocene. I argue that political action at the intersections between environmental degradation and environmental change produce ‘anticipatory histories’ (DeSilvey, 2012) of planetary crisis. ‘Anticipatory histories’ disorder linear and depoliticised understandings of external crisis and they support different social imaginaries of the re…
Junk into urban heritage: The Neon Boneyard, Las Vegas
This short photographic essay is a reflection on the practice of cultural geography in places that are in the process of becoming historically significant. My focus is on a visit I made to the Neon Boneyard in Las Vegas in 2004, where I photographed signs collected from demolished casinos, bars and hotels as part of a research project on waste, decay and cultural memory in Nevada. While I initially explored the site to glean memory-work for my do…
Suburban Toxicity: A Political Ecology of Asbestos in Australian Cities
This paper explores the toxic legacy of asbestos in Australian suburbs and cities. During the post-war period, Australia had one of the highest per capita rates of asbestos use in the developed world. As a consequence of this indiscriminate use, Australia also has one of the highest rates of asbestos dust disease in the world. Drawing on feminist approaches to urban political ecology (UPE) and the materialities of waste, we trace the entanglement…
Political Ecologies of Australian Cities
When the urban scholar and activist Jane Jacobs wrote her classic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), she used the ecological language of diversity, interaction and connectivity to critique the instrumental doctrines of modern urban planning. Jacobs argued that rationalist approaches to city-making laid waste to the messy interactions found in the myriad of urban places, transforming them into lifeless, fragmented, inhuman an…
The evolution of ecosystem services: A time series and discourse-centered analysis
Geographic contributions to institutional curriculum reform in Australia: The challenge of embedding field-based learning
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, …
Climate Cosmopolitics and the Possibilities for Urban Planning
Cosmopolitical action in a climate-changed city represents different knowledges and practices that may seem disconnected but constellate to frame stories and spaces of a climate-just city. The question this article asks is: how might we as planners identify and develop counter-hegemonic praxes that enable us to re-imagine our experience of, and responses to, climate change? To explore this question, we draw on Isabelle Stengers's (2010) idea of c…
Storytelling environmental justice
This chapter focuses on cultural studies approaches to environmental justice activism and research. It brings together theories and methodologies from cultural studies to frame environmental justice as a mode of "storytelling" that performs and communicates what it means to live with environmental injury. Storytelling involves the enactment of "cultural methodologies", which include fictional, non-fictional, autobiographical, testimonial, and sci…
Unlearning the colonial cultures of planning
Cattle in the Anthropocene: Four propositions
The “Anthropocene”, a proposed geological epoch in which humanity is positioned as the core driver of planetary change, is eliciting proposals oriented at reworking human–nature relations. The more common technoscientific responses call for more investment oriented at further controlling human and non‐human processes, whereas relational responses seek more convivial relations with non‐humans – recognising the diverse agencies present in more‐than…
Un‐earthing the Subterranean Anthropocene
In this paper, we argue that the role of the underground has been discursively absent from contemporary debates about the Anthropocene. We build on recent geographical scholarship that has challenged “surface bias” and call for geographical debate to go deeper into the third dimension; to explore the Subterranean Anthropocene; to embrace volume ontologies. We present three core arguments. (1) The Anthropocene is about our future underground, a ge…
Make kin, not cities! Multispecies entanglements and 'becoming-world' in planning theory
Much planning theory has been undergirded by an ontological exceptionalism of humans. Yet, city planning does not sit outside of the eco-social realities co-producing the Anthropocene. Urban planners and scholars, therefore, need to think carefully and critically about who speaks for (and with) the nonhuman in place making. In this article, we identify two fruitful directions for planning theory to better engage with the imbricated nature of huma…
Photo‐response: Approaching participatory photography as a more‐than‐human research method
There is growing interest in “more‐than‐human” influences on places and practices. However, while the theoretical thinking in this field is well developed, methodology and methods lag behind. Borrowing insights from feminist geographers’ articulation of “response”, we explore how participatory photography can be used to examine more‐than‐human processes through a case study of marginal homemaking in Khulna city in Bangladesh. Our photo‐response m…
Economia política das catástrofes naturais
Teaching the Environmental Humanities
This article provides the first international overview and detailed discussion of teaching in the environmental humanities (EH). It is divided into three parts. The first offers a series of regional overviews: where, when, and how EH teaching is taking place. This part highlights some key regional variability in the uptake of teaching in this area, emphasizing important differences in cultural and pedagogical contexts. The second part is a critic…
Creating a thinking space for the rising stars of Australian urban geography
The Institute of Australian Geographers Urban Study Group and Australian Geographer present the first essay in our Leading Insights/Thinking Space partnership. We discuss Dr Natalie Osborne's 2018 essay, flag Dr Marilu Melo's 2019 essay and talk about creating a thinking space for the rising stars of Australian urban geography
Planning in the shadow of extinction: Carnaby's Black cockatoos and urban development in Perth, Australia
This paper explores the shifting ecological proximities of urban-human-animal relations in Perth via a story of Carnaby's Black Cockatoos, urban planning and extinction. The story is framed around a challenge and a provocation. The challenge, calls for a deeper consideration of urban planning in the shadow of extinction. Such a consideration involves two entangled elements: a deepening ethical and practical engagement with diverse urban lifeforms…
Sociology (33 works) · Political science (32 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (22 works) · Geography (20 works) · Environmental ethics (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (17 works) · Social science (11 works) · Ecology (10 works)