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Item Metadata only "Ready-made" assumptions: Situating convenience as care in the Australian obesity debate(Taylor and Francis, 2019) Warin, M.J.; Jay, B.; Zivkovic, T.When it comes to food, eating and technologies, convenience is constructed as contradictory: on the one hand as a practice that saves time and effort, and on the other hand, an easy and often “unhealthy” choice, contributing to obesity rates. Moralizing, classed and gendered discourses around health and obesity mean that convenient options are rarely portrayed as “good choices”. Through ethnographic research on food and families in the suburbs of an Australian city, this paper disrupts negative and polarized constructions of convenience in obesity debates. Building on the work of Mol et al. and Jackson et al. we argue that convenience is shaped by multiple contexts, and in particular, gendered and classed practices of care. In doing so, we suggest that public health interventions that construct convenience foods and technologies as wholly negative miss important cultural contexts in which convenience and care intersect to enhance social relationships.Item Open Access Crowdsourcing and Crisis Mapping in Complex Emergencies: a Rapid Guide(Australian Civil-Military Centre/Department of Defence, 2019) Skuse, A.J.; Australian Government/Australian Civil-Military CentreItem Open Access Short Messaging in Complex Emergencies: a Rapid Guide(Australian Civil-Military Centre/Department of Defence, 2019) Skuse, A.J.; Australian Government/Australian Civil-Military CentreItem Open Access Wikis and Knowledge Management in Complex Emergencies: a Rapid Guide(Australian Civil-Military Centre/Department of Defence, 2019) Skuse, A.J.; Australian Government/Australian Civil-Military CentreItem Open Access Social Media in Complex Emergencies: a Rapid Guide(Australian Civil-Military Centre/Department of Defence, 2019) Skuse, A.J.; Australian Government/Australian Civil-Military CentreItem Open Access Complex Emergencies in a Digital World: A Rapid Guide(Australian Civil-Military Centre/Department of Defence, 2019) Skuse, A.J.; Australian Government/Australian Civil-Military CentreItem Open Access Managing Toxins and Making Water 'Safe': Consumer Buffering Practices in Contexts of Chemo-Uncertainty(Taylor and Francis, 2023) Drew, G.When it comes to water quality, seeing is not believing; even clear-looking water can harbour nefarious elements that are harmful to health. To protect against water’s hidden toxins, Indian consumers are adopting technologies designed to filter and mechanically ‘heal’ the waters they consume. This paper ethnographically examines the use(s) of household water management technologies based on ten weeks of ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Kochi, Kerala. It contemplates the socioeconomic and anthropological significance of measures to filter and alkalinise tap water and to transform ‘dead’ municipal waters into healing waters with the power to ‘cure cancer’. Technological and infrastructural innovation is a means to an end in these safeguarding efforts; it enables what I argue are ‘buffering practices’ that allow a potentially dangerous element to feel restorative and wholesome once more. These insights add to scholarship exploring the rise of middle-class solutions for water safety in contemporary urban India.Item Metadata only Tā, Vā, and Lā: Re-imagining the geopolitics of the Pacific Islands(Elsevier BV, 2023) Koro, M.; McNeill, H.; Ivarature, H.; Wallis, J.Oceanic perspectives seldom appear in the geopolitical discourse of metropolitan powers, and the agency of Pacific Island states and peoples is often overlooked. Inspired by calls from political geographers for ‘a more ambitious geopolitical imagination’ (Sharp, 2013), and from Oceanic scholars ‘to examine indigenous epistemologies, ontologies and cosmological ideas and philosophes so that global conversations include local and indigenous understandings’ (Vaai & Nabobo-Baba, 2017), our article represents a conversation between four scholars from differing backgrounds about how analyses of Pacific geopolitics could be re-imagined. We argue that dominant western accounts do not adequately account for the geopolitics of the Pacific because they overlook the multi-temporal, multi-spatial, multiscalar, and relational ways in which states and other actors behave in the Pacific, and how Pacific Island states and Oceanic peoples perceive, respond to, and influence their behaviour. We instead propose that the intersecting sociospatial conceptualisations of tā (based on the Tongan word taimi, time), vā (vava, spaceplace), and lā (lahi, big or wide-ranging) can be brought into conversation with the political geography concepts of time, space, and scale. We do not generalise from this example, nor imply that all Oceanic peoples will share our understanding – the region is highly heterogenous. We instead pursue the modest goal of demonstrating how gaps in understanding might be bridged.Item Metadata only Sun and Shadow: Art of the Spinifex People(Upswell Publishing, 2023) Carty, J.; Scholes, L.This continuous narrative was interrupted momentously by the Maralinga atomic testing in the mid-20th Century. But after returning to their homelands, Spinifex people began to fight for greater recognition.Item Metadata only Police Beat : the emotional power of music in police work(Cambria Press, 2007)Item Metadata only On the Commonness of Skin: An Anthropology of Being in a More Than Human World. In: McCallum, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4106-3_19-1(Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) Dennis, S.; McCallum, D.The point of departure of multispecies ethnography is that animals are good to be with, a proposal that seeks to destabilize human primacy and reveal new orders of human-nonhuman relations and becomings. This chapter explores the possibilities and limitations of “good to live with”. Close examination of how the undergirding theoretical principles informing multispecies ethnography have been operationalized reveals a somewhat romanticized research imaginary. This has manifested in the exploration of a limited and localized range of nonhuman life that does not include those animals who have become necroavailable to humans on an industrial scale. While there is pressure for multispecies ethnographers to take up animal rights agendas for the (meat and laboratory) animals that have the most to gain from decentering the human, there are quieter potentials that might be realized by multispecies ethnographers. These potentials might be attained if ethnographers recognized how the most unlikely of environments offer opportunity to trouble the ontological distinctions that they attempt to destabilize. These include those between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, and other binaries that compartmentalize messily entangled human and nonhuman lives. This chapter rehearses the possibilities that come available for realizing the potentials of multispecies ethnography in the laboratory, as well those that dwell on the cuticle that envelopes plant, animal, and human beings. These potentials are explored in this chapter in two case studies that provide readers with the full gamut of possibilities and limitations occasioned and entailed by doing multispecies anthropology in the Anthropocene.Item Metadata only Christmas Island : an anthropological study(Cambria Press, 2008) Dennis, S.This original and unprecedented ethnography reveals a complex island society, whose presence at the very edge of the nation reveals important information about a place and a group of people new to ethnographic study.Item Metadata only Remittance usage for rural hometown investing in the Philippines: A mixed methods study(Elsevier BV, 2023) Opiniano, J.; Tan, Y.; Marie Rudd, D.This paper analyzes differences in attitudes and strategies for investing and entrepreneurship among families receiving remittances from their overseas emigrants at two rural communities in the Philippines. It examines how these households in the origin country determine how to invest remittances, and the extent to which these decisions are influenced by topographical, socio-economic, political, and cultural factors in their local spatial contexts. How do individual behaviors, along with risk appetite and financial capabilities, interact with such contexts as origin households assess the hazards and likely returns of investing locally? Primary data collected through household surveys in 2018–2019, and a rapid qualitative inquiry methodology, enable us in this mixed methods research to explore the interplay between individual financial behaviors and spatial factors affecting decision making. We can report that migrants’ origin households, and local financial institutions and entrepreneurs, employ relevant costing in reaching economic decisions, and assess favorable and adverse investment considerations explicitly. Remittance-supported economic development in origin communities relies on enhancements in household financial knowledge, and on interventions —through policy and regulation— to sustain and improve the local investment climate. If these conditions are met, households and local investors and entrepreneurs will make productive decisions through this relevant costing strategy and will contribute resources that promote microeconomic development. Relevant costing is thereby vindicated as a valuable concept, in attempts to unravel besetting complexities in the migration–development nexus.Item Metadata only Djalu's Yidaki: bridge of sound(5 Continents Editions, 2021) Carty, J.; Petitjean, G.Lo yidaki, meglio conosciuto come didgeridoo, è l'iconico strumento musicale degli aborigeni, guadagnandosi un'enorme popolarità e diventando sinonimo dell'Australia aborigena.Item Open Access “Half a flood’s no good”: flooding, viticulture, and hydrosocial terroir in a South Australian wine region(Springer, 2022) Skinner, W.; Drew, G.; Bardsley, D.K.Floods generate both risks and benefits. In Langhorne Creek, South Australia, a historically-embedded system of shared floodwater management exists among farmers, who rely on semi-regular flood inundations as part of the region’s hydrosocial terroir – a dynamic conjunction of water, landscape, social relations and agricultural practice. Unruly floods coexist with a heavily regulated and precisely measured system of modern water management for viticultural irrigation across the region. Since the mid-twentieth century, groundwater extraction and new pipeline schemes have linked Langhorne Creek to the Murray Darling Basin water management system, which has displaced flooding as the primary source of irrigation water. The associated modernist shift towards the rationalization of water as a measurable resource has acted to sideline flood irrigation. Yet, floods maintain important viticultural, ecological and social roles in Langhorne Creek, adding to the flexibility and resilience of the region in response to water management challenges. The system involves technological and infrastructural components, such as flood gates and channels, but also relies upon the cooperation and coordination of community members. Local vignerons suggest that flood irrigation is environmentally as well as economically beneficial, rejuvenating riparian wetlands along watercourses. A more formal acknowledgement of the specific regional experiences of water management in a wine region like Langhorne Creek helps to fill a gap between emplaced and hydrosocial understandings of flood irrigation and broader assumptions about flooding as wasteful and inefficient.Item Metadata only Aboriginal Engagement in the Northern South Australian Opal Industry, c 1940-1980(Historical Society of South Australia, 2017) Harding, M.This article examines the role of Aboriginal people in the northern South Australian opal industry, in particular the Andamooka and Coober Pedy fields, from 1940 to 1980, and the distinctive nature of their participation. It explores an aspect of Aboriginal engagement in the economy that has not been examined in a scholarly way, making considerable use of oral testimony. It also highlights the agency of Aboriginal people who participated in the industry while also maintaining cultural continuity in an era when the official government policy of 'assimilation' was in full swing. The small scale and informal nature of the opal industry attracted Aboriginal people because of the level of workplace autonomy it provided and its capacity to accommodate important economic, social and cultural practices. Aboriginal people participated in a 'hybrid economy', consisting of the market, public and traditional customary spheres, and were able to participate actively in the South Australian opal industry in a variety of meaningful and skilled occupations, often in trying conditions that required patience and determination. At the same time, Aboriginal opal miners vigorously maintained important aspects of their traditional economic, social and cultural lives, which the industry readily accommodated. The opal industry provided many Aboriginal people with a regular source of income for many years, but by the 1970s, their engagement began to dwindle. A number of factors contributed to this, including declining levels of opal production, new technology driven by increasing fuel prices and the extension of unemployment benefits to Aboriginal people in remote areas.Item Metadata only Anthropology and Smoke: Editors’ Introduction to the Smoke Special Issue(Informa UK Limited, 2018) Dennis, S.; Musharbash, Y.In this introductory paper, we contemplate both a variety of anthropological approaches to smoke and how analyses of smoke – as object, material, phenomenon, practice, or political fact – might contribute to anthropological knowledge. We consider these questions in and through the themes cross-cutting this collection, including: the sensuous aspects of smoke (especially in the olfactory, visual and haptic relations it occasions, entails and denies); the politics of smoke (in particular regard to climate change, public health, and Indigenous knowledge); smoke’s temporal dimensions (from the human mastery of fire via industrial chimneys to vaping e-cigarettes); and its ritual functions (encapsulating transition par excellence, curing ills, placating spirits, and marking time). We conclude by pondering smoke’s inherent capacity to escape the bounds we might set for it, including the imposition of highly politicised spatial, temporal, and intellectual constraints.Item Metadata only The Nature and Significance of Aboriginal Work in the Northern South Australian Opal Industry c.1940-1980(Australasian Mining History Association, 2017) Harding, M.Item Metadata only Aboriginal engagement in the northern South Australian opal industry c. 1940-1980(Labour History Society (South Australia), 2018) Harding, M.Item Metadata only Unfinished Lives and Multiple Deaths(SAGE Publications, 2022) Zivkovic, T.M.This article examines an Australian campaign to increase organ and tissue donation for transplantation. It analyses the use of the gift rhetoric to promote community awareness and resources, target migrant groups, and recruit cultural and religious leaders to endorse organ and tissue donation as an altruistic act. In unpacking this ‘gift of life’ approach to organ donation, it explores the convergence of medical and religious bodies and pushes beyond uniform determinations of death to reveal how multiple deaths transpire in organ donation. Drawing on recent advances in the anthropology of becoming as a critical lens to examine death and organ donation, it examines how the ‘unfinishedness’ of donor bodies produces new possibilities for understanding donation. This article thus attends to the situated, layered and contradictory sensibilities that open up multiple and malleable understandings of the donation of body parts.