Fiona Allon
Biographic Data
| ID | 640438 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Fiona Allon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Fiona |
| FAMILY NAME | Allon |
| SIGNATURE | ALLON F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western Sydney University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1932-1464 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 210 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Domus, Dream, Domicide
This article explores the way in which bushfires challenge our theoretical frameworks for comprehending both ‘home’ and ‘home destruction’. Disaster scholarship has long argued that the very idea of ‘natural disaster’ remains inadequate as a term of description for the entanglements of the human and natural – acutely so for the entanglements that are at the heart of a changing climate and its consequences. The article proposes a new conception of…
The Temporalities of Waste
The multiplication of the margin
Price is one of the key axioms of capitalism. This paper seeks to understand the axiomatic status of this category in material terms by focusing on the nexus between housing, price, wealth and inequality. Within theories of marginal utility, it is the periphery – the margin – of a field of exchange that defines value and the ways in which it can be priced in circulation. However, even a brief assessment of contemporary housing markets reveals tha…
Money after Blockchain
Blockchain technologies are central to what has been described as a new 'smart social contract'. With blockchain, individual cryptographic identity becomes the basis for new forms of money and for a whole suite of restructured social, political and financial transactions. But what do these developments signal for feminist engagements with the money economy? The transparency and pseudonymity that the blockchain provides has been welcomed as a 'fem…
Everyday Leverage, or Leveraging the Everyday
Credit, debt and indebtedness are key terms for understanding contemporary social and economic life. In many recent accounts of debt, however, debt is largely an ahistorical category that remains constant throughout time, or seen simply in terms of a quantum of interest accrued over time that can then serve as a proxy for both the accumulation of profit and measurable oppression and exploitation. This forecloses analytical investigation of contem…
"Money, Debt, and the Business of "Free Stuff
The overexposed, overindebted neoliberal consumer has become one of the most representative figures of financial capitalism. But both the commonsense claim that all money is essentially debt and its converse, that all debt is now money that can beget more money, foreclose analytical investigation of contemporary shifts in monetization and the specificity of creditor-debtor relations. This essay focuses on the dialectical relationship between the …
Working Lives
At Home in the Suburbs
This essay uses the concept of domopolitics (literally, home politics) to explore ideas and images of ‘home’ in Australian political discourse. It examines a number of episodes from the postwar period, focusing on the particular form of sociality that was idealised as the Australian Dream. This brief historical moment, typically characterised by regular, secure employment, suburban domesticity and economic prosperity (for some) has been reified a…
The Feminisation of Finance
This article focuses on recent reconfigurations of the home as a space of financial calculation and speculation that requires new kinds of domestic labour. It considers the 2008 financial crisis, but redirects the analysis towards the ordinary and normalised presence of financial capitalism at the level of domesticity, home-life and the everyday 'calculative agencies' which households are now regularly called on to perform. It also examines the c…
No Escape
This essay suggests that cultural studies, media studies and communications need to focus on the changes and challenges associated with this particular historical conjuncture, and re-assess the kinds of analysis that can most fruitfully contribute to this critical project. This requires rethinking some conventional assumptions about everyday life, media texts and communications technologies so that a more nuanced understanding of the imbrication …
Litter and Monuments
The hype that dominates so much of urban governance today has made it impossible to miss the claim that the 21st century is the century of the city. The statistics routinely cited by bureaucrats, politicians and planners confirm that more than half the world’s population now lives in cities. With the number of city dwellers swelling, the urbanization of more and more of the world will only develop in significance in all kinds of ways. The combina…
Ghosts of the Open City
Since reunification, Berlin has been celebrated as both a creative, cosmopolitan “Open City” (the “new Berlin”) and as a project for demonstrating the diversity and openness of the “new Germany.” But this reinvention of urban space has heralded a selective vision that entails the willful forgetting and deletion of some marginal histories, at the very same time as other “sexier” urban identities and pleasures are promoted. This article explores th…
The labour of leisure
The Global Financial Crisis and the Culture of Continual Growth
The proximate causes of the global financial crisis (GFC) have been widely attributed to ‘financialisation’. However, we argue that the global financial crisis had cultural conditions of possibility that were imbricated with economic factors in complex ways. The idea that the crisis was the function of independent financial forces that spread through society fails to consider cultural rationalities that constituted the citizen as someone enjoined…
Speculating on Everyday Life
The economic crisis has generally been understood in terms of financial excess, speculation and fraud. This article suggests that there is a need to decenter this focus on financialization and instead reflect on the crisis as a cultural as much as an economic event. It addresses the normalisation of practices of calculation and investment within everyday life, especially in the figure of the ‘citizen-speculator’ who is now required to view housin…
Ali as Icon
Intimate encounters
This paper examines some of the tensions between local government authorities, residents, and backpackers occurring in a group of Sydney coastal suburbs that are the host destinations for large numbers of young independent travellers. Drawing on the concepts of ‘intimacy’ and ‘encounter’, it focuses on the kinds of embodied encounters occurring when the transnational networks of these travellers become overlaid on, and in conflict with, the patte…
Mutant Mobilities
This essay explores the complex mobilities of contemporary backpackers. Backpackers are not just tourists; they are also frequently students, working holidaymakers, highly skilled professional workers, and even, at times, long‐term semi‐permanent residents. How to define this group of physically and conceptually mobile travellers is often problematic, especially for local authorities. It is difficult to discern what cultural space and identity th…
Everyday Water
In this paper we will present the Everyday Water project as a case study of recent cultural research on domestic water use and its application to natural resource policy and practice. This project is innovative not only because it is a research partnership between a development company and a university but also because of the cultural research approach the project brings to the issue of water resource sustainability and management. The Everyday W…
Backpacker Heaven
This article explores the changing cultural dynamics of “amenity-rich” touristic landscapes in Sydney, Australia, focusing on the specific group of young budget travelers known as backpackers. The article also considers the consequences of diverse mobilities, including contemporary forms of travel, for the identities and social relations of places and communities. It also addresses recent suggestions that the focus of analysis should be turned aw…
Translated spaces/translated identities
(2002). Translated spaces/translated identities: The production of place, culture and memory in an Australian suburb. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 26, No. 72, pp. 99-110
Nostalgia Unbound
(2000). Nostalgia Unbound: Illegibility and the synthetic excess of place. Continuum: Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 275-287
Between Sydney and Hong Kong
Between Sydney and Hong Kong: doing cultural research without guarantees
The Feminisation of Finance
This article focuses on recent reconfigurations of the home as a space of financial calculation and speculation that requires new kinds of domestic labour. It considers the 2008 financial crisis, but redirects the analysis towards the ordinary and normalised presence of financial capitalism at the level of domesticity, home-life and the everyday 'calculative agencies' which households are now regularly called on to perform. It also examines the c…
Speculating on Everyday Life
The economic crisis has generally been understood in terms of financial excess, speculation and fraud. This article suggests that there is a need to decenter this focus on financialization and instead reflect on the crisis as a cultural as much as an economic event. It addresses the normalisation of practices of calculation and investment within everyday life, especially in the figure of the ‘citizen-speculator’ who is now required to view housin…
Everyday Water
In this paper we will present the Everyday Water project as a case study of recent cultural research on domestic water use and its application to natural resource policy and practice. This project is innovative not only because it is a research partnership between a development company and a university but also because of the cultural research approach the project brings to the issue of water resource sustainability and management. The Everyday W…
Intimate encounters
This paper examines some of the tensions between local government authorities, residents, and backpackers occurring in a group of Sydney coastal suburbs that are the host destinations for large numbers of young independent travellers. Drawing on the concepts of ‘intimacy’ and ‘encounter’, it focuses on the kinds of embodied encounters occurring when the transnational networks of these travellers become overlaid on, and in conflict with, the patte…
Mutant Mobilities
This essay explores the complex mobilities of contemporary backpackers. Backpackers are not just tourists; they are also frequently students, working holidaymakers, highly skilled professional workers, and even, at times, long‐term semi‐permanent residents. How to define this group of physically and conceptually mobile travellers is often problematic, especially for local authorities. It is difficult to discern what cultural space and identity th…
Backpacker Heaven
This article explores the changing cultural dynamics of “amenity-rich” touristic landscapes in Sydney, Australia, focusing on the specific group of young budget travelers known as backpackers. The article also considers the consequences of diverse mobilities, including contemporary forms of travel, for the identities and social relations of places and communities. It also addresses recent suggestions that the focus of analysis should be turned aw…
The Global Financial Crisis and the Culture of Continual Growth
The proximate causes of the global financial crisis (GFC) have been widely attributed to ‘financialisation’. However, we argue that the global financial crisis had cultural conditions of possibility that were imbricated with economic factors in complex ways. The idea that the crisis was the function of independent financial forces that spread through society fails to consider cultural rationalities that constituted the citizen as someone enjoined…
Nostalgia Unbound
(2000). Nostalgia Unbound: Illegibility and the synthetic excess of place. Continuum: Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 275-287
Money after Blockchain
Blockchain technologies are central to what has been described as a new 'smart social contract'. With blockchain, individual cryptographic identity becomes the basis for new forms of money and for a whole suite of restructured social, political and financial transactions. But what do these developments signal for feminist engagements with the money economy? The transparency and pseudonymity that the blockchain provides has been welcomed as a 'fem…
Translated spaces/translated identities
(2002). Translated spaces/translated identities: The production of place, culture and memory in an Australian suburb. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 26, No. 72, pp. 99-110
Domus, Dream, Domicide
This article explores the way in which bushfires challenge our theoretical frameworks for comprehending both ‘home’ and ‘home destruction’. Disaster scholarship has long argued that the very idea of ‘natural disaster’ remains inadequate as a term of description for the entanglements of the human and natural – acutely so for the entanglements that are at the heart of a changing climate and its consequences. The article proposes a new conception of…
"Money, Debt, and the Business of "Free Stuff
The overexposed, overindebted neoliberal consumer has become one of the most representative figures of financial capitalism. But both the commonsense claim that all money is essentially debt and its converse, that all debt is now money that can beget more money, foreclose analytical investigation of contemporary shifts in monetization and the specificity of creditor-debtor relations. This essay focuses on the dialectical relationship between the …
Ghosts of the Open City
Since reunification, Berlin has been celebrated as both a creative, cosmopolitan “Open City” (the “new Berlin”) and as a project for demonstrating the diversity and openness of the “new Germany.” But this reinvention of urban space has heralded a selective vision that entails the willful forgetting and deletion of some marginal histories, at the very same time as other “sexier” urban identities and pleasures are promoted. This article explores th…
The multiplication of the margin
Price is one of the key axioms of capitalism. This paper seeks to understand the axiomatic status of this category in material terms by focusing on the nexus between housing, price, wealth and inequality. Within theories of marginal utility, it is the periphery – the margin – of a field of exchange that defines value and the ways in which it can be priced in circulation. However, even a brief assessment of contemporary housing markets reveals tha…
Between Sydney and Hong Kong
Between Sydney and Hong Kong: doing cultural research without guarantees
Nostalgia Unbound
(2000). Nostalgia Unbound: Illegibility and the synthetic excess of place. Continuum: Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 275-287
Translated spaces/translated identities
(2002). Translated spaces/translated identities: The production of place, culture and memory in an Australian suburb. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 26, No. 72, pp. 99-110
Backpacker Heaven
This article explores the changing cultural dynamics of “amenity-rich” touristic landscapes in Sydney, Australia, focusing on the specific group of young budget travelers known as backpackers. The article also considers the consequences of diverse mobilities, including contemporary forms of travel, for the identities and social relations of places and communities. It also addresses recent suggestions that the focus of analysis should be turned aw…
Everyday Water
In this paper we will present the Everyday Water project as a case study of recent cultural research on domestic water use and its application to natural resource policy and practice. This project is innovative not only because it is a research partnership between a development company and a university but also because of the cultural research approach the project brings to the issue of water resource sustainability and management. The Everyday W…
Mutant Mobilities
This essay explores the complex mobilities of contemporary backpackers. Backpackers are not just tourists; they are also frequently students, working holidaymakers, highly skilled professional workers, and even, at times, long‐term semi‐permanent residents. How to define this group of physically and conceptually mobile travellers is often problematic, especially for local authorities. It is difficult to discern what cultural space and identity th…
Ali as Icon
Intimate encounters
This paper examines some of the tensions between local government authorities, residents, and backpackers occurring in a group of Sydney coastal suburbs that are the host destinations for large numbers of young independent travellers. Drawing on the concepts of ‘intimacy’ and ‘encounter’, it focuses on the kinds of embodied encounters occurring when the transnational networks of these travellers become overlaid on, and in conflict with, the patte…
Speculating on Everyday Life
The economic crisis has generally been understood in terms of financial excess, speculation and fraud. This article suggests that there is a need to decenter this focus on financialization and instead reflect on the crisis as a cultural as much as an economic event. It addresses the normalisation of practices of calculation and investment within everyday life, especially in the figure of the ‘citizen-speculator’ who is now required to view housin…
The labour of leisure
The Global Financial Crisis and the Culture of Continual Growth
The proximate causes of the global financial crisis (GFC) have been widely attributed to ‘financialisation’. However, we argue that the global financial crisis had cultural conditions of possibility that were imbricated with economic factors in complex ways. The idea that the crisis was the function of independent financial forces that spread through society fails to consider cultural rationalities that constituted the citizen as someone enjoined…
No Escape
This essay suggests that cultural studies, media studies and communications need to focus on the changes and challenges associated with this particular historical conjuncture, and re-assess the kinds of analysis that can most fruitfully contribute to this critical project. This requires rethinking some conventional assumptions about everyday life, media texts and communications technologies so that a more nuanced understanding of the imbrication …
Litter and Monuments
The hype that dominates so much of urban governance today has made it impossible to miss the claim that the 21st century is the century of the city. The statistics routinely cited by bureaucrats, politicians and planners confirm that more than half the world’s population now lives in cities. With the number of city dwellers swelling, the urbanization of more and more of the world will only develop in significance in all kinds of ways. The combina…
Ghosts of the Open City
Since reunification, Berlin has been celebrated as both a creative, cosmopolitan “Open City” (the “new Berlin”) and as a project for demonstrating the diversity and openness of the “new Germany.” But this reinvention of urban space has heralded a selective vision that entails the willful forgetting and deletion of some marginal histories, at the very same time as other “sexier” urban identities and pleasures are promoted. This article explores th…
At Home in the Suburbs
This essay uses the concept of domopolitics (literally, home politics) to explore ideas and images of ‘home’ in Australian political discourse. It examines a number of episodes from the postwar period, focusing on the particular form of sociality that was idealised as the Australian Dream. This brief historical moment, typically characterised by regular, secure employment, suburban domesticity and economic prosperity (for some) has been reified a…
The Feminisation of Finance
This article focuses on recent reconfigurations of the home as a space of financial calculation and speculation that requires new kinds of domestic labour. It considers the 2008 financial crisis, but redirects the analysis towards the ordinary and normalised presence of financial capitalism at the level of domesticity, home-life and the everyday 'calculative agencies' which households are now regularly called on to perform. It also examines the c…
Everyday Leverage, or Leveraging the Everyday
Credit, debt and indebtedness are key terms for understanding contemporary social and economic life. In many recent accounts of debt, however, debt is largely an ahistorical category that remains constant throughout time, or seen simply in terms of a quantum of interest accrued over time that can then serve as a proxy for both the accumulation of profit and measurable oppression and exploitation. This forecloses analytical investigation of contem…
"Money, Debt, and the Business of "Free Stuff
The overexposed, overindebted neoliberal consumer has become one of the most representative figures of financial capitalism. But both the commonsense claim that all money is essentially debt and its converse, that all debt is now money that can beget more money, foreclose analytical investigation of contemporary shifts in monetization and the specificity of creditor-debtor relations. This essay focuses on the dialectical relationship between the …
Working Lives
The multiplication of the margin
Price is one of the key axioms of capitalism. This paper seeks to understand the axiomatic status of this category in material terms by focusing on the nexus between housing, price, wealth and inequality. Within theories of marginal utility, it is the periphery – the margin – of a field of exchange that defines value and the ways in which it can be priced in circulation. However, even a brief assessment of contemporary housing markets reveals tha…
Money after Blockchain
Blockchain technologies are central to what has been described as a new 'smart social contract'. With blockchain, individual cryptographic identity becomes the basis for new forms of money and for a whole suite of restructured social, political and financial transactions. But what do these developments signal for feminist engagements with the money economy? The transparency and pseudonymity that the blockchain provides has been welcomed as a 'fem…
The Temporalities of Waste
Domus, Dream, Domicide
This article explores the way in which bushfires challenge our theoretical frameworks for comprehending both ‘home’ and ‘home destruction’. Disaster scholarship has long argued that the very idea of ‘natural disaster’ remains inadequate as a term of description for the entanglements of the human and natural – acutely so for the entanglements that are at the heart of a changing climate and its consequences. The article proposes a new conception of…
Sociology (17 works) · Political science (14 works) · Law (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (6 works) · Finance (5 works)