Associate Professor Michelle Duffy

Festivals and spectacles are significant to geographic inquiry as examples of the complex and diverse processes of placemaking and the constitution of identity operating within local and global contexts. Geographical literature focusing on festivals and spectacles ranges from studies of their cultural region, diffusion, and ecology to more recent analyses of the constitution of identity and place, collective belonging, social cohesion, cultural commodification, place regeneration, tourism, affect, and embodiment. Festivals and spectacles are important communal activities, expressing historical traditions and allegiances and constructing particular social and political identities. They are also forms of commodity that bring both social and economic capital into a community. They are actively constructed by local groups, governments, organizations, and audiences as representative of local communities situated in a particular place, celebrating local communal identity. The festival is an increasingly popular tool for initiating economic renewal, promoting community participation, enhancing community creativity, and fostering community well-being. Nonetheless, we can critique the use of festivals as a tool for economic renewal because using them as such can mean little more than renewing a neoliberal agenda. Festivals also function as sites in which hegemonic practices can be subverted, or in which notions of identity, community, and belonging can be playfully questioned or challenged.

The Australian summer is framed by a narrative of bushfi re. Southeastern Australia is recognized as one of the most highly bushfi re-prone regions in the world, with fi re very much part of the life cycle of the environment.1 Large bushfi re events, such as those dubbed Black Friday (1939), Ash Wednesday (1984), and the most recent, Black Saturday (2009), generate much media coverage, which records and narrates the stories of those caught by these fi restorms. Depictions of devastation and ruin, as well as of grief, despair, hope, and courage, are very much part of a national iconography,2 and are readily used to galvanize notions of mateship and community as a means to respond to those in need.

Methods relevant to the geographic examination of the sonic world need to take into consideration this world's two broad categories: sound and music. Although these methodologies may overlap, research focus and outcomes are quite different. Nor is this difference simply one of a physical versus a human geographic framework. Rather, the range of methods employed point to the complex ways that sound structures our experience and understanding of the world. The 'cultural turn' in geography in the 1990s led to an interest in the representation and interpretation of landscapes as art or texts, that can then be analyzed in terms of who created such landscapes and why, and how these creations have shaped social relations in that place. Yet even as such reconceptualizations of the landscape have enabled a more nuanced understanding of place and space, they retain a very strong dependence on a visual intellectual framework. Sound offers other ways of interrogating place. However, until recently, studies of place and space have been dominated by the visual, even in those instances where sound is purportedly the focus. For example, studies have examined sound and music as cultural signifiers and expressions of identity, as cultural products, or as markers demonstrating the diffusion of culture or social groups. The methodologies employed for these kinds of analyses are significant to geographical research but they do neglect the uniqueness of sound, the fact that our perceptions of place through sound are very different to that through vision. Geographical study of sound and music has led to critical and creative use of methodologies that explore the role of sound in our esthetic and affective experiences of place, as well as issues of social and economic relations and political agency. However, the nature of sound - its ephemerality and the difficulty in ascribing it meaning - has also led to developing methodologies that can take into account how sound actually acts in the world.

Festivals and spectacles are significant to geographic inquiry as examples of the complex and diverse processes of place-making and constitution of identity operating within local, as well as global, contexts. Geographical literature ranges from earlier studies of these events in terms of cultural region, diffusion, and ecology, to more recent analysis in terms of the constitution of identity and place, collective belonging, social cohesion, cultural commodification, place regeneration, tourism, affect, and embodiment. These events are important communal activities, expressing historical traditions and allegiances, constructing particular social and political identities, and forms of commodity that bring into a community both social and economic capital. They are actively constructed by local groups, government, organizations, and audiences as representative of local communities situated in a particular place and celebrating local communal identity. In turn, the festival is an increasingly popular tool for initiating economic renewal, in the promotion of community participation, enhancement of community creativity, and fostering of community well-being. Yet festivals also function as sites in which hegemonic practices are subverted, or where notions of identity, community, and belonging are playfully questioned or challenged.

In this paper we speculate on ways of listening with the planet as a way of producing multisensory knowledges of climate change. ¿Listening¿ is a visceral experience that helps us consider the intricate, deeply entangled relations between human and non-human worlds through multisensory attentions. We draw on Oliveros¿ notion of ¿deep listening¿ and methodological experimentation to explore and speculate about the effects of climate change in the polar regions. Such speculative practices are informed by audio recordings of the movement of iceberg and glaciers, sea ice measurements and satellite imagery of the Antarctic and Arctic. By experimenting with the mergers of scientific data and creative practices we suggest that practices of listening make experiences of multiscalar climate change in distant places visceral and immersive.

This paper draws on a visceral approach to explore the role of sound/music for people who drive cars. We examine the ways in which gendered subjectivities emerge from the pleasures associated with listening to sound/music during short car trips. The first part of the paper reviews the recent literature on ¿feelings for cars¿. We highlight why gender is often absent from the literature before offering a conceptual lens drawing on geographical feminist thinking to consider sound/music, feelings, gender and mobility. We draw on driving ethnographies to explore the role of sound/music in how gender is assembled with the flow of connections between bodies, spaces and affects/emotions. Considering the contextual pleasures of listening to sound/music on these trips and emergent gender subjectivities we provide a more nuanced interpretation of why people choose to drive cars. To conclude, we point to the implications for applied research for new context-specific transport and climate change policy.

This paper investigates the writing of situated knowledge and explores the possibilities of enacting difference by writing differently. We present a selection of research stories in which carrier bags, sounds, baskets, gardens and potatoes are interpreted less as objects of research or metaphors to aid in analysing phenomena, than as mediators of the stories. Our stories emphasise the ontological politics of engaging with and representing the relational, the messy, the spontaneous, the unpredictable, the non-human and bodily experiences. These stories demonstrate how writing is performative and how it is integral to the production of knowledge.

Underpinning much of the literature surrounding lifestyle migration, counter-urbanisation and second-home use is the question of motivations and future intentions. In this paper, we explore the characteristics and orientations for future use of land by second-home owners in two locales in Victoria Australia, Phillip Island and Inverloch. Using both qualitative and quantitative survey data we find that there are three areas of second-home governance which ought to be considered strongly for future planning in these areas, health, roads and infrastructure and climate change or sustainability. Using data from permanent residents and second-home owners from these areas in collaboration with demographic data, we argue that underlining these areas is a primary concern, that of ageing. However, while these issues burn brightly for both users of property in these places, the ability for the local government authorities to deal with them is limited because of a lack of resources.

Community festivals appear to be proliferating, partly in response to local government social justice policy imperatives around strengthening sense of community among their constituents. This has led to policies that encourage participation by all so as to minimise social isolation, increase opportunities for interaction and facilitate greater understanding of difference, as well as the maintenance of minority cultural practices [Lee, I., Arcodia, C., & Jeonglyeol Lee, T. (2012). Benefits of visiting a multicultural festival: The case of South Korea. Tourism Management, 33, 334¿340]. However, community is a contested and multifaceted term, and sense of community is intangible and therefore hard to measure. Taking a case study approach, this paper examined two community festivals in the growth corridor in the south-east of Melbourne, Australia; one a long-running grassroots festival celebrating the rural traditions of the area and the other a new festival designed and staged by the local authority to address their community strengthening objectives. The findings of the study show that both councils accept within their policies that festivals and events have strong connections with community and identity. However, their focus on a place-based definition of community and a relatively narrow view of what constitutes community has led to limited success in achieving their objectives.

We argue that a closer attention to the everyday visceral experiences of hearing and listening offers new insights into geographies of home and practices of sustainability. We suggest that this approach is significant to understanding how sound helps to assemble and reassemble the relationships that comprise home. We concentrate on a group of 10 amenity-led migrants in their 'new coastal home' in Bermagui, New South Wales, Australia. Each participant recorded a sound diary composed of their everyday sounds. Our interpretation explores the visceral connections in the processes of making bodies feel 'at home'. First, we discuss how the rhythmic affordances of both human and non-human sounds help configure and reconfigure the spatiality and temporality of home. Second, our interpretation explores how sound is bound up with sustainability politics of homemaking. We investigate experiential practices and performativities of listening and hearing that may help constitute and reconstitute 'a' subject. This approach extends current thinking that encourages engagement with the corporeal, affective and emotional dimensions of home. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

In a project that explores the role affect plays in processes of place-making, children aged 10-12 were asked to record meaningful sounds about their home spaces. This focus on sound and listening reminds us that the body is very much entangled in, and indeed fundamental to, processes of subjectivity and place-making. The methodologies used in this work are, therefore, about techniques of researching through bodies, rather than an examination about bodies. This paper explores what researching place through bodies means, with a close reading of one particular response from a young girl who captured the sounds of her friend playing on the slide. In a conversation about this captured sound, she explained that the slide was where she can be with one special person who 'understands', but how she presented this relationship was in the movement of the body moving down the slide and the expression of affect and its release - a joyous call of 'wheeee' as the body slid down. This paper seeks to contribute to discussions around the moving and feeling body as a means to think geographically about the requirement of having a body, how the physicality of the body and its actions with (and within) affective states constitute a sense of place and notions of connectedness. © 2013 The Author. Geographical Research© 2013 Institute of Australian Geographers.

This article examines what an embodied sense of rhythm can add to understandings of the relationship between festival spaces and people. Insights are given to how the rhythmic qualities of sound help orientate bodies in festival spaces, and how bodies produce festival space through embodied responses to the rhythmic qualities of sound. Our interpretation draws on extending examples of how researchers are using their bodies as 'instruments of research' by reflecting on a project conducted on rural festivals in Australia. We explore the different embodied rhythmic sound qualities of two parades held in the twin towns of Daylesford-Hepburn Springs, Victoria: the Swiss-Italian Festa and the ChillOut, pitched as Australia's largest lesbian and gay rural festival. We pay close attention to how the rhythmic qualities of sounds trigger embodied responses. Incorporating the embodied knowledge of bodily rhythms triggered by sounds is a crucial component to understanding the analysis of festival spaces as sites-of-belonging. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.

Drawing upon critical social theory on embodiment this article offers a contribution to the field of tourist performance through a focus on listening. Research findings on a classical musical festival in Australia are presented to argue that exciting challenges are available to tourism research when closer attention is given to the sonic knowledge of listening. The article discusses the conceptual and methodological implications when attention turns to the ear and then describes how festival attendees listened offers insights to how they conceived of themselves in and through time and place. Taken together, listening bodies offers an exciting future research agenda for tourism studies. © 2009.

Like every other work of art, music has become the stuff of social research: it has been interrogated for its economy, its politics, and its role in elaborating human life. Music has its geographies too: its cultural landscapes; its positioning in a soundworld; its embodiment; its materiality. But, intriguingly, until recently musical methodologies have remained half formed, fragmentary, hidden, elusive, out of sight, beyond words. This is partly a result of disciplinary histories and an unhelpful division of intellectual labour, it is partly an expression of what music is. This paper is a performance enacted to assemble the field of musical methodologies: to enlarge its scope; to engage with its strengths and limitations; to animate the soundworld; to participate in the art of doing and being (geographies of) music. © 2007 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain.

This paper explores the ways in which cultural difference is negotiated in local communities through the practices and actions of local individuals, groups and the policies of local government. Cultural difference is commonly managed through policies such as multiculturalism, and critiques of such policies tend to be either in terms of celebratory discourses of inclusiveness, or in negative terms which argue that such policies reiterate models of exclusivity and paternalism. The authors draw on current research in planning and cultural geography in order to explore the ways in which actual difference is negotiated at the local level through the institutional and civic spaces of local government. Two case studies for this discussion, the City of Greater Dandenong and Moreland City Council, demonstrate the importance of the physical body and its interactions with, and activities in, place to processes of local change and policy making. © 2007 The AuthorsJournal compilation © 2007 Institute of Australian Geographers.

The role of music in community festivals is often to assist in constructing a particular identity of place, and music functions in such instances as a means to provide a sense of belonging for participants. However, multicultural festivals complicate any simple relationship between place and identity, because such festivals demonstrate the heterogeneous state of both identity and place. Anxieties that arise around issues of cultural authenticity within such festivals point to concerns of hybrid identities that may challenge and threaten the maintenance of clearly demarcated identities in the face of transnational relations. Drawing on ethnographic material and theoretical conceptualizations of the self, this paper explores the dynamic and fluid constructions of identity at two Australian community music festivals, and raises questions on the sorts of practices that seek to regulate the ways in which these identities are constituted and performed. © 2005 Taylor & Francis.