Rob Garbutt

Everyday peace, human rights, belonging and local activism in a 'peaceful' nation

Robert Garbutt — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 19:45:28 PDT

Wood for the trees

Robert Garbutt et al. — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 03:23:15 PST

Our paper focuses on the materiality, cultural history and cultural relations of selected artworks in the exhibition Wood for the trees (Lismore Regional Gallery, New South Wales, Australia, 10 June – 17 July 2011). The title of the exhibition, intentionally misreading the aphorism “Can’t see the wood for the trees”, by reading the wood for the resource rather than the collective wood[s], implies conservation, preservation, and the need for sustaining the originating resource. These ideas have particular resonance on the NSW far north coast, a region once rich in rainforest. While the Indigenous population had sustainable practices of forest and land management, the colonists deployed felling and harvesting in order to convert the value of the local, abundant rainforest trees into high-value timber. By the late twentieth century, however, a new wave of settlers launched a protest movements against the proposed logging of remnant rainforest at Terania Creek and elsewhere in the region. Wood for the trees, curated by Gallery Director Brett Adlington, plays on this dynamic relationship between wood, trees and people. We discuss the way selected artworks give expression to the themes or concepts of productive labour, nature and culture, conservation and sustainability, and memory. The artworks include Watjinbuy Marrawilil’s (1980) Carved ancestral figure ceremonial pole, Elizabeth Stops’ (2009/10) Explorations into colonisation, Hossein Valamanesh’s (2008) Memory stick, and AñA Wojak’s (2008) Unread book (in a forgotten language). Our art writing on the works, a practice informed by Bal (2002), Muecke (2008) and Papastergiadis (2004), becomes a conversation between the works and the themes or concepts. As a form of material excess of the most productive kind (Grosz, 2008, p. 7), art seeds a response to that which is in the air waiting to be said of the past, present and future.

A scholarly affair: activating cultural studies in the wilds of the knowledge economy

Baden Offord et al. — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 23:35:25 PDT

This paper reflects on the conceptual framework of the CSAA 2010 conference, which was focused on the theme of `a scholarly affair.' The argument posed is that cultural studies scholars have an ongoing concern for the difficulties, complexities, challenges, limitations as well as critical, creative and clarifying possibilities bound up in the very institutional and everyday contexts of knowledge and cultural production in which they live, work and play. An overview is given of how contributions in this special section of Continuum investigate diverse sites, theories, issues and methodologies that respond to this concern.

Activating human rights and peace: an overview of theory, practice and context

Bee Chen Goh et al. — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 23:25:23 PDT

Activating human rights and peace: theories, practices and contexts

Bee Chen Goh et al. — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 23:25:22 PDT

Human rights and peace issues and concerns have come about at a critical time. The world has recently witnessed a plethora of turning points that speak of the hopes and vulnerabilities which are inherent in being human and demonstrate that change in the service of human rights and peace is possible. At the same time, however, other events indicate that wherever there is life, there is vulnerability in a world characterized by instability and endemic human suffering. On top of all this, the collapse of the global financial system and the serious, rapid destruction of the environment have brought the world to a precarious state of vulnerability. Activating human rights and peace is, therefore, a project that is always in progress, and is never finally achieved. This enlightening collection of well thought through cases is aimed at academics and students of human rights, political science, law and justice, peace and conflict studies and sociology.

Into the borderlands: unruly pedagogy, tactile theory and the decolonising nation

Robert Garbutt et al. — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 18:25:21 PDT

Modern Australia has been defined as an immigrant nation, a settler society that is located in the South and yet is problematically, ontologically and epistemologically oriented towards the North. Australia's colonial experience and trauma – far from being resolved – are characterised by a condition of collective amnesia expressed in social, cultural and psychological boundaries. It is in this landscape that an active and transformative form of cultural studies pedagogy has emerged. This article critically unpacks aspects of this pedagogy through Borderlands, an undergraduate subject that we teach in the Cultural Studies programme at Southern Cross University, and that responds to collective postcolonial amnesia through the antidote of sentient engagement. Using borderland theory (Anzaldua 2007), Borderlands is driven by ethical, transformative imperatives regarding knowledge and responsibility for both student and teacher. Borderlands sets out to redefine cultural studies' pedagogical practice by utilising field trips as a means of epistemological unsettlement and disruption, invoking and engaging with the tangibles of migration, installation, dispossession and displacement. Our article joins students on an excursion into the field, to four specific sites. Through this architecture we argue that Borderlands is an example of an unruly, unsettling cultural studies pedagogy that lends itself to sentient decolonisation.

The locals: identity, place and belonging in Australia and beyond

Robert George Garbutt — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 22:40:44 PDT

This book presents the first comprehensive survey of being a local, in particular in Australia. In Australia the paradox is that the locals are not indigenous peoples but migrants with a specific ethnic heritage who became localised in time to label other migrants as the newcomers and outsiders. It explores questions via a multidisciplinary cultural studies approach and a mixed methodology that blends a critical language study of being local with auto-ethnographical accounts.

A scholarly affair: activating cultural studies

Robert Garbutt et al. — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:16:03 PST

This special issue is a product of the 2010 Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Annual Conference held at Byron Bay and organised under the auspices of the School of Arts and Social Sciences and the Centre for Peace and Social Justice at Southern Cross University.

A scholarly affair: proceedings of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia 2010 national conference

Baden Offord et al. — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 19:48:31 PDT

Cultural studies in action: principled socially inclusive pedagogy and higher education equity projects

Soenke Biermann et al. — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 18:34:06 PST

Local order

Robert George Garbutt — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 20:57:32 PDT

A sense of in-between shapes contemporary theoretical perspectives on identity through concepts such as fluidity, hybridity and diaspora. These concepts have traction when theorising global social and cultural orders characterised by ‘a delocalized transnation’. In this formation, Appadurai argues, ‘the formula of hyphenation (as in Italian-Americans, Asian-Americans, and African-Americans) is reaching the point of saturation, and the right-hand side of the hyphen can barely contain the unruliness of the left-hand side’ (803).

Yet in the relatively monocultural space of Anglo-Celtic rural Australia, delocalised and hyphenated transnational identities tend to make their presence felt most strongly on television. Rather than fluidity, rigidity appears to be a more appropriate metaphor for reading the divisions in rural settler-Australian identity that function as ‘uneven, local attempts to make sense of the world’ (Gilroy 98).

In Lismore on the north coast of NSW, for example, the relatively fixed notion of being “a local” maintains its power. Since returning to my home-town of Lismore in 1999 I have become particularly fascinated by the constant use of the word “local” in everyday conversation and in the local newspapers. When I share my fascination with students and colleagues, I am struck by the emotive engagement, both positive and negative, that the idea of being “a local” stimulates. That these students and colleagues have local knowledge of what it means to be “a local” is no doubt a factor in this emotion and engagement: being “a local” marks a divide in belonging and in the local social order.

Aged care needs, Lismore and Alstonville: statistical profile and community consultation

Michelle Wallace et al. — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:00:23 PDT

The Clearing: Heidegger's Lichtung and The Big Scrub

Robert George Garbutt — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:00:22 PDT

Clearings make settlement possible. Whether on a small scale using an axe and other hand implements to make way for a dwelling and a garden, or on a large scale with a chain strung between two D9 bulldozers in preparation for a major agribusiness development, the process of clearing creates spaces for installing something new. This paper uses the idea of (the) clearing, as practice, process, outcome and metaphor, to examine the installation of the locals in a settler society. Using Lismore on the far-north coast of New South Wales, Australia, as a case example, the particular work of clearing that is discussed here is a practice that enables a form of colonisation and settlement that distances itself from its history of migration. This is a history of settler locals who were 'always here', and a colonial form of clearing clears the land and the mind of troubling pasts and of troubling presences. For the locals within a place, then, clearing manages and simplifies a complex set of social and material relations, histories and identities.

Using Anthony Appiah's concept the 'space clearing gesture', the paper concludes with a reflection on the space in which the idea of "the clearing" and this paper appears. Do places, in this instance rural places, provide a type of clearing in which certain ideas might appear that may not appear elsewhere? If situatedness matters then the diversity of places where thinking is done is important for our ecology of thought, and in connection with this, perhaps what 'rural cultural studies' does is clear a particular type of space for thinking.

The locals: a critical survey of the idea in recent Australian scholarly writing

Robert George Garbutt — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 17:40:33 PDT

This paper provides a critical survey and analysis of (more recent) scholarly literature that deals explicitly with Australian locals, a theme of identity important to both regional lore and culture. It is somewhat surprising that while the idea of being a local is common in everyday Australian usage—whether in private discussions, in the media or in scholarly writing,—there is no sustained focus in Australia on what the idea means. This is not the case elsewhere. In published research on tourism in the developing counties, and in social research in the United Kingdom and in the United States of America (especially Hawai‘i, but also from the USA on locals and cosmopolitans) the locals have been objects of study for up to sixty years.

White on white: surveying the boundaires of local whiteness

Robert George Garbutt — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 03:05:23 PDT

The living library: some theoretical approaches to a strategy for activating human rights and peace

Robert George Garbutt — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:08:59 PDT

Lismore’s Living Library: Building communities conversation by conversation

Sabina Baltruiweit et al. — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:08:59 PDT

Towards an ethics of location

Robert George Garbutt — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:08:58 PDT

Communities: A review article

Robert George Garbutt — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:08:58 PDT

White “Autochthony”

Robert George Garbutt — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:08:58 PDT

Western conceptualisations of autochthony — that is, of being born of the earth itself — are a useful frame for understanding aspects of the settler Australian idea of “being a local”. The western tradition of autochthony underpins relationships between particular peoples and particular lands, and importantly, the implicit moral virtue of one people’s claim to specific territory over that of others. The virtue of being a local, of a local place or of the nation, rests on a false claim of white “autochthony” that to perform its social function must conceal Aboriginal autochthony.

Bringing Australian settler claims of autochthony into the light enables its critical examination, and complements the critical examination of that other fictional people-land relation, terra nullius. The usefulness of white “autochthony” as an idea is not simply the deconstruction of its fiction. A critique of white “autochthony” opens local and national spaces to a constellation of ethical considerations. In particular, it institutes an ethics of location.