For still possible cities: a politics of failure for the politically depressed

Abstract

We lost. Now what? "[the revolution] you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing" 1 Let us sit with the idea, for a moment, that we have lost. For every #metoo, there is a chorus of anxious necktie clutching about how things have gone too far, and the deeply misogynistic and bloodied claims of 'incels' are receiving mainstream thinkpiece consideration. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples are disproportionately criminalised (Australian Law Reform Commission 2017), and significant and devastating health gaps remain (Holland 2018). The Uluru Statement From the Heart and the Makarrata Commission it proposed offered a pathway to more substantive forms of justice (Delegates at the Referendum Convention at Uluru 2017), but was rejected by the Turnbull Government (Gordon 2017). Indeed, we live in 1 From Lauren Berlant (2011, p1): "A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project" (emphasis added).

Contesting imaginaries in the Australian city: Urban planning, public storytelling and the implications for climate change

“…Colonisation and climate change belong to the same history of western power, its ideologies and practices. ‘The monorealism that dominates western thought’, postcolonial critic Natalie Osborne (2018: 4) writes, ‘makes an apocalypse the apolocalypse’, but for Indigenous Australians, and many species of non-human life on the continent, too, the apocalypse has long-arrived.…”

Polluted Leisure and Blue Spaces: More-Than-Human Concerns in Fukushima

“…It does, after all, undermine any blue space, sport, therapeutic, health, and well-being correlations. However, for me, insisting on the recognition of pollution is about what Donna Haraway (2015) calls “staying with the trouble.” This refers to working through the toxic ruins and waste of capitalism, as well as challenging an Anglo-European separatist ontology/epistemology, to nurture alternative “ethical lifeways” (Osborne, 2019). These lifeways (which include leisure and sport) rest upon a premise of human and nonhuman co-existence and creation.…”

“…We alone cannot fix what we have broken (Tsing, 2015). Personally, I now realize I have much to learn from Indigenous Peoples who have survived following devastating violence, destruction, and trauma “even when we must piece those worlds together from gathered scraps” (Lee in Osborne, 2019, p. 147). My argument for registering polluted leisure as it relates to health, sport, well-being, therapy, and blue spaces is not simply a cynical intervention of negativity but also an attempt to open up a space for future research to locate and nurture ethical alternatives.…”

Academic freedom and an invitation to promote its advancement

“…Within academic institutions, themselves weakened by managerialism and growing corporatisation, the consequences threaten tenure and academic self‐governance in particular (Fichtenbaum, ; Sims, ; see also McDonald & Williams, ). There appears to be a far‐reaching reactionary malaise weakening progressive social reforms more generally (Osborne, ). The former Australian Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs has observed that human rights in Australia are ‘regressing on almost every front’ (Triggs cited in Slezak, ), which is also true of other areas of protection, including of the environment globally (Prieur, ).…”

“…Avenues for under‐heard and under‐represented voices and perspectives must be facilitated and systemic inequities and power imbalances actively addressed, including through research focusing and critiquing the activities of those in power. It is precisely these areas where geography has made and could make further contributions (see Castree, ; Crane & Grove, ; Howitt, ; Lave et al ., ; Osborne, ). One example is scholarship regarding the non‐human (and beyond‐human) and inter‐relationships with the environment.…”