Professor Sarah Wright

This chapter discusses the experiences of one such social movement from the Philippines called Farmer-Scientist Partnership for Development or Magsasaka at Siyemtipiko para ang Pagunlad ng Agrikultura (MASIPAG). MASIPAG, a network of small, mostly subsistence farmers, promotes discourses of empowerment and hope as a strategy for engaging farming families in sustainable agriculture. Its focus is clearly on the articulation of alternatives, on building pathways that diverge from those associated with a top-down, corporatised and exploitative agriculture. Hope and fear are part of an emotional complex that weaves through our lives and mediates our experience. The generation and manipulation of these emotions are strongly bound up with political and economic life. While motifs of fear abound in the political landscape, influencing everything from immigration policies to planning and infrastructure, those associated with hope are less prevalent. As the network members imagine pathways and generate a sense of diverse possibilities, individuals are able to associate with a social and political project.

This chapter discusses the experiences of one such social movement from the Philippines called Farmer-Scientist Partnership for Development or Magsasaka at Siyemtipiko para ang Pagunlad ng Agrikultura (MASIPAG). MASIPAG, a network of small, mostly subsistence farmers, promotes discourses of empowerment and hope as a strategy for engaging farming families in sustainable agriculture. Its focus is clearly on the articulation of alternatives, on building pathways that diverge from those associated with a top-down, corporatised and exploitative agriculture. Hope and fear are part of an emotional complex that weaves through our lives and mediates our experience. The generation and manipulation of these emotions are strongly bound up with political and economic life. While motifs of fear abound in the political landscape, influencing everything from immigration policies to planning and infrastructure, those associated with hope are less prevalent. As the network members imagine pathways and generate a sense of diverse possibilities, individuals are able to associate with a social and political project.

How might deeply embodied student experiences and nonhuman agency change the way we think about learning theory? Pushing the conceptual boundaries of practice-based learning and communities of practice, this chapter draws on student experiential fieldwork 'on Country' with Indigenous people in the Northern Territory (NT), Australia, to explore the peculiar silence when it comes to more-than-human1 features of situated learning models. As students engage with, and learn from, Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, they become open to the ways their learning is co-produced in and with place. The chapter builds a case for an inclusive conceptualisation of communities of practice, one that takes seriously the material performativity of nonhuman actors - rock art, animals, plants and emotions in the 'situatedness' of socio-cultural contexts. As a co-participant in the students' community of practice, the more-than-human forms part of the process of identity formation and actively helps students learn. To shed light on the student experiences we employ Leximancer, a software tool that provides visual representations of the qualitative data drawn from focus groups with students and field diaries. Copyright © 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of academic geographers got together across borders to share our varied experiences. In this paper we illustrate how this storying of pandemia helped us critically and collaboratively understand, (re)imagine and reconfigure ways of living during a global pandemic. We were especially interested in exploring different forms and practices of collective thinking and academic labour, within and beyond the academy. This paper foregrounds emotions and lived experiences, power and positionality, natures, bodies, and relations, and how they have come to our attention in new, different, or more pronounced ways, through everyday geographies of pandemia. Our aim is to emphasise two important aspects: that pandemia is a state of being with/as/through pandemic, and, as a collective noun, pandemia centres plurality, focusing on the potential to attend to the ways experiences of pandemic are redolent with multiple, overlapping exclusions and belongings, openings and closures.

This study addresses freedom, work and organisation by problematising Amartya Sen¿s pluralistic notion of (development as) freedom through a fieldwork study of a Filipino non-governmental organisation that promotes sustainable agriculture. In this context, peasant farmers face increasing threat from intersecting agrarian and climate crises, exacerbated by mainstream economic paradigms for agricultural development. For Sen, development encompasses the process of expanding the ¿substantive freedoms¿ of people (freedom to), and removing sources of ¿unfreedom¿ (freedom from). However, it is not clear in Sen¿s work how such freedoms are relationally constituted and thus the manner of the ¿labour of agential becoming¿ at the core of Sen¿s thought. We therefore ask: how do agroecological work and organisational practices of grassroots development promote freedom for small-scale farmers under climate threat in the Global South? Our analysis identifies a novel form of freedom ¿ labelled ¿freedom with¿ ¿ defined as a set of relational, multi-actor capabilities and organising practices that constitute alternative, future-oriented ways of doing and being. ¿Freedom with¿ enables us to better understand how and why the labour of agential becoming works, offering a theoretical extension of Sen¿s notion of freedom with implications for debates in our field on sustainability and beyond-capitalist organising.

In Indigenous/settler colonial contexts, cities are both rich and lived, multitemporal Indigenous places/spaces and sites of ongoing Indigenous dispossession. In this paper, we aim to unsettle linear notions of time associated with mainstream constructions of colonisation. We suggest that doing urban politics on stolen land requires a reconstitution of the when of urban struggles to engage with colonising pasts, presents and futures, and with multi-temporal survivances of Indigenous peoples and Country, in the here and now. Time in and as city-as-Country is multiple, non-linear, active, and made through/as relationships. As we engage with the gifts and responsibilities of non-linear time, we are led by Meanjin [so-called Brisbane, Australia], the teachings of activists from the Brisbane Aboriginal Sovereign Embassy and week-long protest actions that took place to coincide with the G20 Leaders' Meeting in 2014. We do this as two settler geographers, with complicities and responsibilities in/to the present, past and future as uninvited guests on unceded Aboriginal land. We signal a need to deepen the engagements of urban geographical and anti-capitalist politics with the specificities of the urban as Indigenous place/space/Country in order to complicate geographical conceptualisations of the urban and work towards decolonising the city in Indigenous/settler-colonial contexts.

In this era of climate crisis, weather, once deemed the ultimate ¿natural¿ force within dominant Western accounts, is being deeply (re)considered. Yet these (re)considerations often approach theories of weather, and weather itself, as aer nullius, dismissing or downplaying prior relationships, belongings and becomings with/as weather and the power relations that mediate what weather means and does. In this article, we aim to speak back to aer nullius and consider weathers' many diverse sovereignties. We engage with weather in ways led by Indigenous scholars and their allies and trace our own positionalities and responsibilities through what it means to weather on unceded Indigenous land. Our focus is brought to power and weather, to the enrolment of weathers' beings and becomings to differentially discipline and empower. Entwining its way through these accounts, but in ways not generally acknowledged, are the sovereignties of weather knowledges and the sovereignties of weather itself. The beings and becomings of weather have their own Law/s, their own knowledges, their own survivances, their own sovereignties. We end the article with a consideration of academic positionalities and responsibilities as we weather and are weathered in entangled, more-than-human ways.

On Gumbaynggirr Country (mid-north coast New South Wales, Australia), an act of violence against the sacredness of life and Country resulted in Wirriiga, the Two Sisters, making the sea. When the waters rose, the people made their way back to their homeland by following a gut-string bridge made by Dunggiirr, the Koala Brothers. While the people were on the bridge, mischievous Baalijin, the eastern quoll, threatened to chop it down and made waves that nearly washed them off. Baalijin challenges complacency and forces change, and on that understanding in this article we consider what it means to be living this present time of instability and changes wrought by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19); ours is a perspective grounded in story and Gumbaynggirr Law/Lore. We write as Yandaarra, a research collective guided by the Old Fellas (ancestors) and led by Aunty Shaa Smith, storyholder for Gumbaynggirr Country, and her daughter Neeyan Smith, a young Gumbaynggirr woman. Learning from a Gumbaynggirr-led understanding of COVID-19¿as one manifestation of Baalijin and relationships fallen out of balance¿re-situates the pandemic in wider and longer histories of colonisation and destructive patterns of existence and broken agreements. Those learnings prompt us to call for Juungambala¿work involved in setting things right as a way to heal. Let Baalijin and COVID-19 be the wake-up call that forces the change that Country (and we) need.

In my response to Rose-Redwood et al.¿s (2018) ¿The Possibilities and Limits to Dialogue¿ (Dialogues in Human Geography 8(2): 109¿123), I attend to the question of what it means to refuse dialogue. Dialogue as it is often deployed is supported by a host of colonial logics that position many marginalized humans, and nonhumans, as unable to communicate ¿rationally¿ (that is to dialogue). Drawing on the work of Indigenous scholars, Glen Coulthard ((2014) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.), Audra Simpson ((2007) Ethnographic refusal: indigeneity, ¿voice¿ and colonial citizenship. Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue 9: 67¿80; (2014) Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, UK: Duke University Press.), and others, I suggest that refusal can mean more than merely stepping outside dialogue, allowing the problematic to pass unchallenged. Rather, refusal may be a way of resisting, reframing, and redirecting colonial and capitalist logics, constituting both an important political strategy and an assertion of diverse sovereignties and lifeworlds. Refusal, in these contexts, is neither a negation of the need for dialogue nor a withdrawal from the need to counter colonialism, but a refusal to be drawn into politics that enable colonialism, and so can be a strong assertion of sovereignty. I then position myself in relation to this work, thinking through what refusal as dialogue might mean as a non-Indigenous human geographer living and working on stolen land, committed to the complex, even intractable, task of supporting decolonization.

A diversity of place-based community economic practices that enact ethical interdependence has long enabled livelihoods in Monsoon Asia. Managed either democratically or coercively, these culturally inflected practices have survived the rise of a cash economy, albeit in modified form, sometimes being co-opted to state projects. In the modern development imaginary, these practices have been positioned as ¿traditional¿, ¿rural¿ and largely superseded. But if we read against the grain of modernisation, a largely hidden geography of community economic practices emerges. This paper introduces the project of documenting keywords of place-based community economies in Monsoon Asia. It extends Raymond William¿s cultural analysis of keywords into a non-western context and situates this discursive approach within a material semiotic framing. The paper has been collaboratively written with co-researchers across Southeast Asia and represents an experimental mode of scholarship that aims to advance a post-development agenda.

The Vidarbha region in Maharashtra, India, home to 3.4 million smallholder farmers, is a major cotton-producing region in one of the wealthiest Indian states. However, between 1995 and 2013, more than 60,000 farmers took their own lives. Many of these suicides have been linked to extreme debt created by the expensive mono-cropping of Bt cotton. Some farming households have responded to these pressures by abandoning Bt cotton growing and turning to sustainable agriculture using traditional mixedcropping methods. Yet the question remains: have the changes produced better livelihoods in Vidarbha? Using a food sovereignty framework, we assess the impact of these changes through an analysis of a 200-household survey across six districts in Vidarbha. We also explore the meaning of food sovereignty for those who practise it, seeking to better understand some of the complexities and experiences associated with the term.

We invite readers to dig for ganguri (yams) at and with Bawaka, an Indigenous Homeland in northern Australia, and, in doing so, consider an Indigenous-led understanding of relational space/place. We draw on the concept of gurrutu to illustrate the limits of western ontologies, open up possibilities for other ways of thinking and theorizing, and give detail and depth to the notion of space/place as emergent co-becoming. With Bawaka as lead author, we look to Country for what it can teach us about how all views of space are situated, and for the insights it offers about co-becoming in a relational world.

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.

In this paper, we invite you night fishing for wäkun at Bawaka, an Indigenous homeland in North East Arnhem Land, Australia. As we hunt wäkun, we discuss our work as an Indigenous and non-Indigenous, human and more-than-human research collective trying to attend deeply to the messages we send and receive from, with and as a part of Country. The wäkun, and all the animals, plants, winds, processes, things, dreams and people that emerge together in nourishing, co-constitutive ways to create Bawaka Country, are the author-ity of our research. Our reflection is both methodological and ontological as we aim to attend deeply to Country and deliberate on what a Yol¿u ontology of co-becoming, that sees everything as knowledgeable, vital and interconnected, might mean for the way academics do research. We discuss a methodology of attending underpinned by a relational ethics of care. Here, care stems from an awareness of our essential co-constitution as we care for, and are cared for by, the myriad human and more-than-human becomings that emerge together to create Bawaka. We propose that practising relational research requires researchers to open themselves up to the reality of their connections with the world, and consider what it means to live as part of the world, rather than distinct from it. We end with a call to go beyond ¿human¿ geography to embrace a more-than-human geography, a geography of co-becoming.