Elizabeth R Straughan
Biographic Data
| ID | 92166 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elizabeth R Straughan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elizabeth R |
| FAMILY NAME | Straughan |
| SIGNATURE | STRAUGHAN E R |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5305-2715 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 315 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Volume and the urban forest: The vegetal politics of urban forestry contestations in Melbourne and Darwin, Australia
In this paper we take inspiration from geographies of volume to consider the drivers effecting tree canopy expansion in two Australian cities: Melbourne and Darwin. Presenting empirical material collected via semi-structed interviews with city residents and urban forest workers labouring with the urban forest, we contribute qualitative understanding about efforts to expand urban forests, understanding that has predominantly been captured through …
Scenes of detachment: Reconfiguring attachments to work
Geographical theories of attachment have illuminated why progressive change is so difficult to bring about, yet the question of how detachment from dominant ways of life is actually lived and felt remains an open one. This paper develops recent debates on attachment and detachment by examining the detachments that happen in fully-remote working from home among knowledge workers in Australia. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with almost fifty home…
The affects of pushing: Chronic illness, remote work, and crip epistemology
This article explores how different bodyminds experience working from home. During qualitative interviews with chronically ill women working remotely in Australia, ‘pushing’ emerged as a repeated refrain to describe their ways of navigating everyday experiences of pain, social relations, movements, and schedules. Beyond a generalised description of linear force, we develop the concept of ‘pushing’ in geography by unravelling its multiple affects.…
What does it mean to be present at work? Negotiating attention, distraction and presence in working from home
What it means to be present is an important yet underexamined geographical problem. Owing to the recent surge in working from home, which has forced a rethink of the affordances of both face‐to‐face and virtual presence, we contend that the time is right for a re‐evaluation of this foundational geographical concept. Our paper begins by synthesising existing geographical work to outline three ways that geographers have considered the concept of pr…
Microcultural Geographies: Navigating Awkwardness in the Postpandemic Workplace
Emotional geographies of an urban forest: Insights from an email-a-tree initiative
International and national policies are being used to prioritise increases in urban forest coverage and diversity, support equitable access to urban greenspaces, and advance sound environmental governance outcomes. Yet, the relationship between people's feelings about urban trees and public policy remains under-examined. Drawing on a unique dataset from an email-a-tree initiative, the objectives of this study were to identify how concern and conn…
Gratitude for and to nature: Insights From Emails to Urban Trees
Gratitude goes to the heart of discussions about ethics, care, and responsibility in a more-than-human world. Surprisingly, gratitude remains peripheral to geographical considerations of human-environment interrelations and sustainability. Moving beyond questions about whether gratitude to nature is sensible, we develop an understanding of gratitude that is relational, emotional, and practical (or enacted). We argue that focus on gratitude draws …
The power of lament: Reckoning with loss in an urban forest
This paper explores the lamenting for a street tree to better understand reactions to ecological loss. It responds to calls for social studies research into how ecological loss is felt and expressed, particularly when that loss and its emotional impact is unrecognised. Drawing on a unique dataset of emails to trees in Melbourne, we consider the most emailed tree, a tree felled despite collective action. Lamenting for this tree is explored as an i…
Posthuman landscapes
Cultural geography has a long tradition of embracing video as both an observational method and a form of public engagement with research findings. In this article, we describe the making of Posthuman Landscapes, a silent film composed of moving panoramic images depicting the landscapes of three regional Australian towns (Griffith, Port Hedland, and Port Lincoln), along with creative writing that responded to the material qualities of those places…
Finding comfort and conviviality with urban trees
This paper develops cultural geographic understandings of more-than-human comfort and conviviality by analysing emails sent to trees living in the City of Melbourne, Australia. The emails arrive from near and far, sharing personal dilemmas, jokes, poetry, confessions, political concerns, and more. These messages provide a unique opportunity to consider how trees become foregrounded in people’s everyday lives. Working through the geographies of co…
Working in the gig economy is boring: Non-encounters and the politics of detachment in platform capitalism
This paper develops the concept of the non-encounter for geography in the context of the changing experience of gig economy work during COVID-19. Supplementing political economy insights with a cultural geographic sensitivity to embodiment, we explore the fluctuating bodily capacities of food delivery drivers during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Melbourne, Australia. We reflect on fieldwork with gig workers which drew our attention t…
Curious encounters: The social consolations of digital platform work in the gig economy
This paper explores interpersonal encounters between workers and consumers who use gig economy apps to investigate how urban sociality is changing. It responds to calls for geographic research on planned, technologically mediated encounters to better discern how digital technologies are impacting patterns of sociality. Acknowledging the diversity of relations with multiple others that happen via digital platforms, our paper is concerned with an a…
Friends disconnected: How mobile work transforms friendships through absence and presence
In this paper, we focus on friendship as a significant interpersonal relationship that has not prominently figured in geographic discussions of mobile work. Taking friendship as our object of analysis, we explore how wellbeing becomes compromised for mobile workers and their friends. Responding to concerns outlined by our research participants during semi‐structured Skype interviews, we acknowledge mobile working practices transform friendships t…
The politics of stuckness: Waiting lives in mobile worlds
This paper develops our geographical understanding of the gendered politics of (im)mobility by exploring the hidden politics of waiting experienced by some mobile working households. Reflecting on qualitative fieldwork with female partners of mobile workers in Australia who remain at home, we explain how ‘stuckness’ is a specific form of waiting that highlights a power-geometry where their immobility is exacerbated by the mobility of their partne…
Losing Touch with People and Place: Labor Mobilities, Desensitized Bodies, Disconnected Lives
Losing touch is a pervasive bodily experience that has received surprisingly little geographical attention. Developing geographical thought on mobility and touch, our article aims to provide a more comprehensive account of the geographies of losing touch. Conceptually, we propose that enclosure and exposure are two spatial metaphors that can help to understand processes of losing touch in terms of reconfigured body–environment relations. Substant…
Exhausting rhythms: The Intimate Geopolitics of Resource Extraction
This article develops cultural geographical understandings of exhaustion through an exploration of the bodily pressures induced by mobile working practices. Through analysis of semi-structured interviews with resource sector workers in Australia who work away from home for periods of time as well as 'left behind' partners, we argue that exhaustion is a collective 'structure of feeling', but one that is differently experienced by mobile workers an…
A touching experiment: Tissue culture, tacit knowledge, and the making of bioart
In this paper I present an experimental project carried out at The University of Western Australia's art and science organisation, SymbioticA. The paper looks to the embodied practice of learning to make bioart through consideration of the tools and protocols required in the making process. In so doing, the paper traces through the process of “making” by attending to the sense of touch in the laboratory. As an analytical guide, I work through Pol…
Introduction: Placing Touch within Social Theory and Empirical Study
This chapter focuses on the sense of touch as it is experienced and deployed within the beauty salon, a site that is exemplary of the body industry. Luce Irigaray suggests that touch is premised upon the permeability of bodily boundaries, exemplified through a consideration of a feminine, corporeal materiality. Scientific treatments that can produce a sense of self-fragmentation are constituted in large part upon the search for bodily problems, r…
Geographical Aesthetics: Imagining Space, Staging Encounters
Contents: Preface Introduction: for geographical aesthetics, Harriet Hawkins and Elizabeth Straughan. Section 1 Towards a Lively Aesthetics: On aisthA*sis, 'inner touch' and the aesthetics of the moving body, Mark Paterson Anime cosplay as love-sublimation, Paul Kingsbury Activist pedagogies through Ranciere's aesthetic lens, Naomi Millner Relational urban interventions, Ashley Dawkins and Alex Loftus. Section 2 Aesthetic Encounters: Comforting o…
Entangled Corporeality: Taxidermy Practice and the Vibrancy of Dead Matter
Elizabeth R. Straughanaa Perth, AustraliaELIZABETH R. STRAUGHAN is currently an independent researcher whose work considers the volatile nature of the body through attendance to the skin as well as the material and metaphorical dynamics of touch. E-mail: . She has published in international journals such as Cultural Geography, Emotion, Space and Society, and Geography Compass
The Art of Socioecological Transformation
This article uses two artistic case studies, Bird Yarns (a knitting collective engaging questions of climate change) and SLOW Cleanup (an artist-driven environmental remediation project) to examine the “work” art can do with respect to socioecological transformations. We consider these cases in the context of geography's recent interest in “active experimentations and anticipatory interventions” in the face of the challenges posed by the environm…
The smell of the Moon
In a darkened room on Earth, an astronaut stands amongst a collection of moon rocks slowly and deliberately performing a maintenance task. With a grab stick in one hand and gas hose in another, he/she deploys the grab stick to pick up moon rocks spraying them, one by one, with the smell of the Moon. Titled Enter at Own Risk, this performance work is the creation of artist duo Hagen Betzwieser and Sue Corke who collaborate as WE COLONISED THE MOON…
Rhythm and Mobility in the Inner and Outer Hebrides: Archipelago as Art-Science Research Site
This paper explores some of the dimensions of mobility and rhythm emerging from a voyage to the Inner and Outer Hebrides, island collectives on the North West Coast of Scotland. In the summer of 2011, this voyage, combining boat, water and islands, as well as their inhabitants, became a research site for members of Cape Farewell, an organisation that seeks to produce creative responses to climate change. Crew members specifically sought to consid…
Nano-art, dynamic matter and the sight/sound of touch
Touched by water: The body in scuba diving
Geographies of Touch/Touched by Geography
Considerable attention within geography has been paid to the physiologies, knowledges and practices that give substance and import to the senses - sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch - and the manner in which these work alone, or in concert, to facilitate particular forms of relations between and amongst people, other life forms and objects. This article takes stock of the manner in which touch has entered into these debates and in particular …
Of human birds and living rocks: Remaking aesthetics for post-human worlds
Geographers have long pondered post-human worlds. And yet, whilst such analyses have explored the natural and physical sciences as a means of articulating the relationalities and commonalities that span species and kingdoms, an explicit consideration of the aesthetic has been largely absent. To a degree, this is because the aesthetic has been understood as a `humanist remain'. Here, we want to make a stronger claim for the value of the aesthetic …
Geographical Aesthetics: Imagining Space, Staging Encounters
Contents: Preface Introduction: for geographical aesthetics, Harriet Hawkins and Elizabeth Straughan. Section 1 Towards a Lively Aesthetics: On aisthA*sis, 'inner touch' and the aesthetics of the moving body, Mark Paterson Anime cosplay as love-sublimation, Paul Kingsbury Activist pedagogies through Ranciere's aesthetic lens, Naomi Millner Relational urban interventions, Ashley Dawkins and Alex Loftus. Section 2 Aesthetic Encounters: Comforting o…
The Art of Socioecological Transformation
This article uses two artistic case studies, Bird Yarns (a knitting collective engaging questions of climate change) and SLOW Cleanup (an artist-driven environmental remediation project) to examine the “work” art can do with respect to socioecological transformations. We consider these cases in the context of geography's recent interest in “active experimentations and anticipatory interventions” in the face of the challenges posed by the environm…
The politics of stuckness: Waiting lives in mobile worlds
This paper develops our geographical understanding of the gendered politics of (im)mobility by exploring the hidden politics of waiting experienced by some mobile working households. Reflecting on qualitative fieldwork with female partners of mobile workers in Australia who remain at home, we explain how ‘stuckness’ is a specific form of waiting that highlights a power-geometry where their immobility is exacerbated by the mobility of their partne…
Exhausting rhythms: The Intimate Geopolitics of Resource Extraction
This article develops cultural geographical understandings of exhaustion through an exploration of the bodily pressures induced by mobile working practices. Through analysis of semi-structured interviews with resource sector workers in Australia who work away from home for periods of time as well as 'left behind' partners, we argue that exhaustion is a collective 'structure of feeling', but one that is differently experienced by mobile workers an…
Nano-art, dynamic matter and the sight/sound of touch
The salon as clinic: Problematising, Treating, and Caring for Skin
In this paper I draw upon Foucault's concept of the clinic, as well as his later work on the 'care of the self', in a consideration of the problems that are diagnosed, and the treatments that take place, within the beauty salon. As biotechnology descends to the sub-molecular level, so those spaces that are linked to the laboratory through the diffusion of knowledges, practices and material products—such as the salon—are also reworked. Traditional…
Working in the gig economy is boring: Non-encounters and the politics of detachment in platform capitalism
This paper develops the concept of the non-encounter for geography in the context of the changing experience of gig economy work during COVID-19. Supplementing political economy insights with a cultural geographic sensitivity to embodiment, we explore the fluctuating bodily capacities of food delivery drivers during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Melbourne, Australia. We reflect on fieldwork with gig workers which drew our attention t…
Finding comfort and conviviality with urban trees
This paper develops cultural geographic understandings of more-than-human comfort and conviviality by analysing emails sent to trees living in the City of Melbourne, Australia. The emails arrive from near and far, sharing personal dilemmas, jokes, poetry, confessions, political concerns, and more. These messages provide a unique opportunity to consider how trees become foregrounded in people’s everyday lives. Working through the geographies of co…
Curious encounters: The social consolations of digital platform work in the gig economy
This paper explores interpersonal encounters between workers and consumers who use gig economy apps to investigate how urban sociality is changing. It responds to calls for geographic research on planned, technologically mediated encounters to better discern how digital technologies are impacting patterns of sociality. Acknowledging the diversity of relations with multiple others that happen via digital platforms, our paper is concerned with an a…
Losing Touch with People and Place: Labor Mobilities, Desensitized Bodies, Disconnected Lives
Losing touch is a pervasive bodily experience that has received surprisingly little geographical attention. Developing geographical thought on mobility and touch, our article aims to provide a more comprehensive account of the geographies of losing touch. Conceptually, we propose that enclosure and exposure are two spatial metaphors that can help to understand processes of losing touch in terms of reconfigured body–environment relations. Substant…
The smell of the Moon
In a darkened room on Earth, an astronaut stands amongst a collection of moon rocks slowly and deliberately performing a maintenance task. With a grab stick in one hand and gas hose in another, he/she deploys the grab stick to pick up moon rocks spraying them, one by one, with the smell of the Moon. Titled Enter at Own Risk, this performance work is the creation of artist duo Hagen Betzwieser and Sue Corke who collaborate as WE COLONISED THE MOON…
Gratitude for and to nature: Insights From Emails to Urban Trees
Gratitude goes to the heart of discussions about ethics, care, and responsibility in a more-than-human world. Surprisingly, gratitude remains peripheral to geographical considerations of human-environment interrelations and sustainability. Moving beyond questions about whether gratitude to nature is sensible, we develop an understanding of gratitude that is relational, emotional, and practical (or enacted). We argue that focus on gratitude draws …
A touching experiment: Tissue culture, tacit knowledge, and the making of bioart
In this paper I present an experimental project carried out at The University of Western Australia's art and science organisation, SymbioticA. The paper looks to the embodied practice of learning to make bioart through consideration of the tools and protocols required in the making process. In so doing, the paper traces through the process of “making” by attending to the sense of touch in the laboratory. As an analytical guide, I work through Pol…
What does it mean to be present at work? Negotiating attention, distraction and presence in working from home
What it means to be present is an important yet underexamined geographical problem. Owing to the recent surge in working from home, which has forced a rethink of the affordances of both face‐to‐face and virtual presence, we contend that the time is right for a re‐evaluation of this foundational geographical concept. Our paper begins by synthesising existing geographical work to outline three ways that geographers have considered the concept of pr…
Entangled Corporeality: Taxidermy Practice and the Vibrancy of Dead Matter
Elizabeth R. Straughanaa Perth, AustraliaELIZABETH R. STRAUGHAN is currently an independent researcher whose work considers the volatile nature of the body through attendance to the skin as well as the material and metaphorical dynamics of touch. E-mail: . She has published in international journals such as Cultural Geography, Emotion, Space and Society, and Geography Compass
The power of lament: Reckoning with loss in an urban forest
This paper explores the lamenting for a street tree to better understand reactions to ecological loss. It responds to calls for social studies research into how ecological loss is felt and expressed, particularly when that loss and its emotional impact is unrecognised. Drawing on a unique dataset of emails to trees in Melbourne, we consider the most emailed tree, a tree felled despite collective action. Lamenting for this tree is explored as an i…
Rhythm and Mobility in the Inner and Outer Hebrides: Archipelago as Art-Science Research Site
This paper explores some of the dimensions of mobility and rhythm emerging from a voyage to the Inner and Outer Hebrides, island collectives on the North West Coast of Scotland. In the summer of 2011, this voyage, combining boat, water and islands, as well as their inhabitants, became a research site for members of Cape Farewell, an organisation that seeks to produce creative responses to climate change. Crew members specifically sought to consid…
Golem geographies
In our response, below, we undertake a deeper engagement with one of the authors, Elizabeth Grosz, that a number of the respondents have evoked, implicitly as well as explicitly, in their response to our text and, in particular, Grosz's arguments on art as of the chaotic and of the animal. Whilst our comments on the bowerbird speak to the artistry involved in a sexuated mode of reproduction that increases biological difference, we emphasise an ab…
Emotional geographies of an urban forest: Insights from an email-a-tree initiative
International and national policies are being used to prioritise increases in urban forest coverage and diversity, support equitable access to urban greenspaces, and advance sound environmental governance outcomes. Yet, the relationship between people's feelings about urban trees and public policy remains under-examined. Drawing on a unique dataset from an email-a-tree initiative, the objectives of this study were to identify how concern and conn…
Posthuman landscapes
Cultural geography has a long tradition of embracing video as both an observational method and a form of public engagement with research findings. In this article, we describe the making of Posthuman Landscapes, a silent film composed of moving panoramic images depicting the landscapes of three regional Australian towns (Griffith, Port Hedland, and Port Lincoln), along with creative writing that responded to the material qualities of those places…
Friends disconnected: How mobile work transforms friendships through absence and presence
In this paper, we focus on friendship as a significant interpersonal relationship that has not prominently figured in geographic discussions of mobile work. Taking friendship as our object of analysis, we explore how wellbeing becomes compromised for mobile workers and their friends. Responding to concerns outlined by our research participants during semi‐structured Skype interviews, we acknowledge mobile working practices transform friendships t…
Geographies of Touch/Touched by Geography
Considerable attention within geography has been paid to the physiologies, knowledges and practices that give substance and import to the senses - sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch - and the manner in which these work alone, or in concert, to facilitate particular forms of relations between and amongst people, other life forms and objects. This article takes stock of the manner in which touch has entered into these debates and in particular …
The salon as clinic: Problematising, Treating, and Caring for Skin
In this paper I draw upon Foucault's concept of the clinic, as well as his later work on the 'care of the self', in a consideration of the problems that are diagnosed, and the treatments that take place, within the beauty salon. As biotechnology descends to the sub-molecular level, so those spaces that are linked to the laboratory through the diffusion of knowledges, practices and material products—such as the salon—are also reworked. Traditional…
Touched by water: The body in scuba diving
Golem geographies
In our response, below, we undertake a deeper engagement with one of the authors, Elizabeth Grosz, that a number of the respondents have evoked, implicitly as well as explicitly, in their response to our text and, in particular, Grosz's arguments on art as of the chaotic and of the animal. Whilst our comments on the bowerbird speak to the artistry involved in a sexuated mode of reproduction that increases biological difference, we emphasise an ab…
U-n-f-o-l-d: A Cultural Response to Climate Change The Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Glass Curtain Gallery, Chicago, IL, U.S.A., February 2011–April 2011. Exhibit web site: www.mocp.org/e…
February 01 2012 U-n-f-o-l-d: A Cultural Response to Climate Change The Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Glass Curtain Gallery, Chicago, IL, U.S.A., February 2011–April 2011. Exhibit web site: www.mocp.org/exhibitions/2011/03/unfold.php Elizabeth Straughan, Elizabeth Straughan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Deborah Dixon, Deborah Dixon Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar…
Of human birds and living rocks: Remaking aesthetics for post-human worlds
Geographers have long pondered post-human worlds. And yet, whilst such analyses have explored the natural and physical sciences as a means of articulating the relationalities and commonalities that span species and kingdoms, an explicit consideration of the aesthetic has been largely absent. To a degree, this is because the aesthetic has been understood as a `humanist remain'. Here, we want to make a stronger claim for the value of the aesthetic …
Nano-art, dynamic matter and the sight/sound of touch
Rhythm and Mobility in the Inner and Outer Hebrides: Archipelago as Art-Science Research Site
This paper explores some of the dimensions of mobility and rhythm emerging from a voyage to the Inner and Outer Hebrides, island collectives on the North West Coast of Scotland. In the summer of 2011, this voyage, combining boat, water and islands, as well as their inhabitants, became a research site for members of Cape Farewell, an organisation that seeks to produce creative responses to climate change. Crew members specifically sought to consid…
Entangled Corporeality: Taxidermy Practice and the Vibrancy of Dead Matter
Elizabeth R. Straughanaa Perth, AustraliaELIZABETH R. STRAUGHAN is currently an independent researcher whose work considers the volatile nature of the body through attendance to the skin as well as the material and metaphorical dynamics of touch. E-mail: . She has published in international journals such as Cultural Geography, Emotion, Space and Society, and Geography Compass
The Art of Socioecological Transformation
This article uses two artistic case studies, Bird Yarns (a knitting collective engaging questions of climate change) and SLOW Cleanup (an artist-driven environmental remediation project) to examine the “work” art can do with respect to socioecological transformations. We consider these cases in the context of geography's recent interest in “active experimentations and anticipatory interventions” in the face of the challenges posed by the environm…
The smell of the Moon
In a darkened room on Earth, an astronaut stands amongst a collection of moon rocks slowly and deliberately performing a maintenance task. With a grab stick in one hand and gas hose in another, he/she deploys the grab stick to pick up moon rocks spraying them, one by one, with the smell of the Moon. Titled Enter at Own Risk, this performance work is the creation of artist duo Hagen Betzwieser and Sue Corke who collaborate as WE COLONISED THE MOON…
Introduction: Placing Touch within Social Theory and Empirical Study
This chapter focuses on the sense of touch as it is experienced and deployed within the beauty salon, a site that is exemplary of the body industry. Luce Irigaray suggests that touch is premised upon the permeability of bodily boundaries, exemplified through a consideration of a feminine, corporeal materiality. Scientific treatments that can produce a sense of self-fragmentation are constituted in large part upon the search for bodily problems, r…
Geographical Aesthetics: Imagining Space, Staging Encounters
Contents: Preface Introduction: for geographical aesthetics, Harriet Hawkins and Elizabeth Straughan. Section 1 Towards a Lively Aesthetics: On aisthA*sis, 'inner touch' and the aesthetics of the moving body, Mark Paterson Anime cosplay as love-sublimation, Paul Kingsbury Activist pedagogies through Ranciere's aesthetic lens, Naomi Millner Relational urban interventions, Ashley Dawkins and Alex Loftus. Section 2 Aesthetic Encounters: Comforting o…
A touching experiment: Tissue culture, tacit knowledge, and the making of bioart
In this paper I present an experimental project carried out at The University of Western Australia's art and science organisation, SymbioticA. The paper looks to the embodied practice of learning to make bioart through consideration of the tools and protocols required in the making process. In so doing, the paper traces through the process of “making” by attending to the sense of touch in the laboratory. As an analytical guide, I work through Pol…
The politics of stuckness: Waiting lives in mobile worlds
This paper develops our geographical understanding of the gendered politics of (im)mobility by exploring the hidden politics of waiting experienced by some mobile working households. Reflecting on qualitative fieldwork with female partners of mobile workers in Australia who remain at home, we explain how ‘stuckness’ is a specific form of waiting that highlights a power-geometry where their immobility is exacerbated by the mobility of their partne…
Losing Touch with People and Place: Labor Mobilities, Desensitized Bodies, Disconnected Lives
Losing touch is a pervasive bodily experience that has received surprisingly little geographical attention. Developing geographical thought on mobility and touch, our article aims to provide a more comprehensive account of the geographies of losing touch. Conceptually, we propose that enclosure and exposure are two spatial metaphors that can help to understand processes of losing touch in terms of reconfigured body–environment relations. Substant…
Exhausting rhythms: The Intimate Geopolitics of Resource Extraction
This article develops cultural geographical understandings of exhaustion through an exploration of the bodily pressures induced by mobile working practices. Through analysis of semi-structured interviews with resource sector workers in Australia who work away from home for periods of time as well as 'left behind' partners, we argue that exhaustion is a collective 'structure of feeling', but one that is differently experienced by mobile workers an…
Curious encounters: The social consolations of digital platform work in the gig economy
This paper explores interpersonal encounters between workers and consumers who use gig economy apps to investigate how urban sociality is changing. It responds to calls for geographic research on planned, technologically mediated encounters to better discern how digital technologies are impacting patterns of sociality. Acknowledging the diversity of relations with multiple others that happen via digital platforms, our paper is concerned with an a…
Friends disconnected: How mobile work transforms friendships through absence and presence
In this paper, we focus on friendship as a significant interpersonal relationship that has not prominently figured in geographic discussions of mobile work. Taking friendship as our object of analysis, we explore how wellbeing becomes compromised for mobile workers and their friends. Responding to concerns outlined by our research participants during semi‐structured Skype interviews, we acknowledge mobile working practices transform friendships t…
Finding comfort and conviviality with urban trees
This paper develops cultural geographic understandings of more-than-human comfort and conviviality by analysing emails sent to trees living in the City of Melbourne, Australia. The emails arrive from near and far, sharing personal dilemmas, jokes, poetry, confessions, political concerns, and more. These messages provide a unique opportunity to consider how trees become foregrounded in people’s everyday lives. Working through the geographies of co…
Working in the gig economy is boring: Non-encounters and the politics of detachment in platform capitalism
This paper develops the concept of the non-encounter for geography in the context of the changing experience of gig economy work during COVID-19. Supplementing political economy insights with a cultural geographic sensitivity to embodiment, we explore the fluctuating bodily capacities of food delivery drivers during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Melbourne, Australia. We reflect on fieldwork with gig workers which drew our attention t…
The power of lament: Reckoning with loss in an urban forest
This paper explores the lamenting for a street tree to better understand reactions to ecological loss. It responds to calls for social studies research into how ecological loss is felt and expressed, particularly when that loss and its emotional impact is unrecognised. Drawing on a unique dataset of emails to trees in Melbourne, we consider the most emailed tree, a tree felled despite collective action. Lamenting for this tree is explored as an i…
Posthuman landscapes
Cultural geography has a long tradition of embracing video as both an observational method and a form of public engagement with research findings. In this article, we describe the making of Posthuman Landscapes, a silent film composed of moving panoramic images depicting the landscapes of three regional Australian towns (Griffith, Port Hedland, and Port Lincoln), along with creative writing that responded to the material qualities of those places…
Emotional geographies of an urban forest: Insights from an email-a-tree initiative
International and national policies are being used to prioritise increases in urban forest coverage and diversity, support equitable access to urban greenspaces, and advance sound environmental governance outcomes. Yet, the relationship between people's feelings about urban trees and public policy remains under-examined. Drawing on a unique dataset from an email-a-tree initiative, the objectives of this study were to identify how concern and conn…
Gratitude for and to nature: Insights From Emails to Urban Trees
Gratitude goes to the heart of discussions about ethics, care, and responsibility in a more-than-human world. Surprisingly, gratitude remains peripheral to geographical considerations of human-environment interrelations and sustainability. Moving beyond questions about whether gratitude to nature is sensible, we develop an understanding of gratitude that is relational, emotional, and practical (or enacted). We argue that focus on gratitude draws …
Sociology (21 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (16 works) · Art (15 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Aesthetics (13 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Political science (8 works) · Engineering (7 works)