54

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Kanaal • 3 programma’s

Zakelijk

Zakelijk

Maandelijks bijgewerkt
Overheid

Overheid

Wekelijks bijgewerkt
Technologie

Technologie

Wekelijks bijgewerkt

Overheid

Overheid

Wekelijks bijgewerkt
Zakelijk

Zakelijk

Maandelijks bijgewerkt
Technologie

Technologie

Wekelijks bijgewerkt

9 jun

The politics of clothing labels

Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. The real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE The British anti-slavery sugar boycotts - In the 1790s, a popular British movement urged ordinary households to refuse sugar produced by enslaved labour in the British Caribbean. The campaign was largely organised by women at household and parish level, used pamphlets, shop boycotts, and lists of grocers who sold only free-grown sugar, and drew an estimated three hundred thousand households into a “free produce” practice at its peak. - Elizabeth Heyrick (1769-1831), an English Quaker abolitionist from Leicester, published Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition in 1824, criticising William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson for accepting a gradualist position on the abolition of West Indian slavery. She organised a local boycott of slave-grown sugar so effective that within a year roughly a quarter of Leicester’s population had stopped buying sugar. The pamphlet spread among women’s anti-slavery societies in Britain and influenced American abolitionists including William Lloyd Garrison and Lucretia Mott. More than seventy women’s anti-slavery associations were active in Britain by the late 1820s. American consumer activism: leagues, labels, fair trade, anti-sweatshop - The National Consumers League, founded in New York in 1899, with Florence Kelley as long-serving general secretary, ran white-label and union-label campaigns for clothing and other goods produced under fair conditions, and campaigned for the abolition of child labour and for shorter working hours. - The fair-trade movement developed from the 1940s through the 1960s, with organisations such as Ten Thousand Villages and SERRV importing handicrafts on fair terms from producers in lower-income countries. Fairtrade certification was established in 1988. - The student-led anti-sweatshop movement of the 1990s and 2000s, including United Students Against Sweatshops, targeted university apparel licensing and major fashion brands, and pushed for codes of conduct, factory monitoring, and the right of garment workers to organise.Black American consumer politics - The Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work campaigns of the 1930s, beginning in Harlem and spreading across Northern cities, organised boycotts of white-owned stores that refused to hire Black staff. - The Montgomery bus boycott of December 1955 to December 1956, sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks, was sustained for more than a year by Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, refusing to use segregated buses. The Montgomery Improvement Association, led by Martin Luther King Jr., ran an alternative carpool network during the boycott. - Operation Breadbasket, founded in Atlanta in 1962 by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and later run by Jesse Jackson from a Chicago base from 1966, used selective patronage and threatened boycotts to win jobs and supplier contracts for Black workers and businesses from white-owned firms operating in Black neighbourhoods.The consumer cooperative movement - On 21 December 1844, in Toad Lane in the Lancashire mill town of Rochdale, twenty-eight weavers and craftsmen opened a small shop they owned together. The principles they wrote down, known as the Rochdale Principles, included democratic member control on the basis of one member one vote, open membership, distribution of surplus to members in proportion to purchases, political and religious neutrality, and the education of members. The model spread quickly across Britain and the world and became the constitutional basis of the modern consumer and worker cooperative movements. - The Mondragon Corporation was founded in 1956 in the Basque country of northern Spain by Father Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta and a small group of graduates from a local technical school. From a single workshop it has grown into one of the largest worker-owned cooperative networks in the world, with operations across industrial manufacturing, retail (the Eroski supermarket chain), finance (the Caja Laboral cooperative bank), and higher education (Mondragon University), employing tens of thousands of worker-owners. Australia and global garment supply chains - The Australian labour movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries built consumer cooperatives and union-label campaigns, including the Co-operative Bookshop tradition and Rochdale-style retail cooperatives in working-class suburbs. - Australian fair-trade and ethical-consumption institutions grew from the 1970s onwards, including the Oxfam Australia fair-trade shops and the Fairtrade Australia and New Zealand certification body. - Contemporary global garment supply chains depend heavily on the labour of migrant women in countries with low wages and weak protection of labour rights. A series of catastrophic factory deaths in the global garment industry in the 2010s, including factory fires and a major building collapse, focused international attention on conditions and prompted the Accord on Fire and Building Safety and the wider transparency movement now visible in Australian ethical-fashion brand campaigns. REFERENCES [1] Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (London: Allen Lane, 2016). [2] Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). [3] Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). [4] Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender and British Slavery, 1713-1833 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). [5] Elizabeth Heyrick, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition; or, An Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West Indian Slavery (London, 1824). [6] Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984). [7] Robert E. Weems Jr., Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1998). [8] Johnston Birchall, The International Co-operative Movement (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). [9] William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte, Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1988). [10] Race Mathews, Jobs of Our Own: Building a Stake-Holder Society (Sydney: Pluto Press Australia, 1999). [11] Naila Kabeer, The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka (London: Verso, 2000). FURTHER READING W. E. B. Du Bois, Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans (1907). The earliest scholarly study of mutual-aid and cooperative economic life in Black American communities. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Includes the “moral economy” thread that informs how historians read the early consumer-political tradition and the relationship between custom, refusal, and the market. Andrew Ross, No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers (1997). Essays on the 1990s anti-sweatshop campaigns and the politics of the global garment supply chain. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (1986). Connects feminist political economy to the global production of consumer goods. April Linton, Fair Trade from the Ground Up: New Markets for Social Justice (2012). On the development and contradictions of the fair-trade movement from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Greg Patmore and Nikola Balnave, A Global History of Co-operative Business (2018). A wide-ranging history including the Australian cooperative tradition alongside European and American developments. Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (1997). Glickman’s earlier book, on how the living wage became central to American labour politics and how consumer identity entered working-class political thought. All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com

9 jun

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11 min.
7 apr

Intention setting & strategy for my digital goals

Final round of the two truths game about what improvements I can make to support my digital goals, plus some meta-commentary on what this podcast even is. Spoiler: it's not educational, it's just me complaining and asking questions I don't have answers to. Setting intentions I probably won’t follow through on Hey, welcome back. We are on a three-part bender here. If you’re new, you have tuned into Liv versus the Surveillance State. In this podcast I talk about my experiences within the modern technological era and how bloody convenience and connection costs us. It often demands a payment of our psychological health and, dare I say, integrity. And today before we begin, let us say grace since we’re starting a new tradition here. Because I complain so much, I have to say one nice thing before I start complaining. I have to say at least one thing I’m grateful for. Today’s grace So today I think I’m going to say I’m grateful for very accessible podcast equipment. I would even say maybe too accessible.—I feel like every man (every straight man) needs a license to purchase podcasting gear the way we do with guns and firearms. If we need a license to buy guns, we need men to register and license for podcasting. Yeah okay, I’m just going to leave that there because that is a topic for another day.—So I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful for the chance to just sit here and talk to the world, talk out into the void, and upload what I say on the internet and then people just have access to it when they want to listen. Or even if they don’t want to listen, it is still there. I could upload this on the internet and no one could listen to it and that’s all right. Someday someone’s just going to find this on here maybe hundreds of years from now. But that’s cool. I just need to do this right now for my mental health. Alright, let’s get into it. I’m going to try to get through this episode real quick because I just feel like I ramble on, don’t I? Final round of two truths and a lie So for the third and final instalment of the two truths and a lie game we’ve been playing for the last couple of episodes, I am going to finally be answering the last question of the bunch. It is: what improvements can I make to my environment to better support my digital goals? Well, I said originally “better support my goals” but because this podcast is obviously about digital technology, social media, and online stuff, I’ve just kind of reworded it to be digital goals. I did get this journal prompt from a Pinterest journal list infographic. The other two questions that I answered are in the last couple of episodes. So again, if you are new here, please go back and listen right from the very start if you should want to. Otherwise you’re going to be wondering what the hell I’m talking about. Okay, so what improvements can I make to my environment to better support my digital goals? I guess before I answer this question, I want to acknowledge that within my immediate environment (as in the environment that I have direct control over) I already have everything I need to achieve my digital goals. My goals of either getting things ticked off my to-do list or just minimising reliance on stuff. So yeah, I have all the tools and resources I need right now and I should not want for more. If anything, I think that half the hurdle for me is just the mental work to just go and do it. And the other half of the hurdle would be the social and cyber structures that we are bound to, that we are limited to operate within. So perhaps I could think of answers to this question that are more focused on my mental environment, or the way I do things inside the boundaries of that, which would better support my digital goals. And to be cognisant of how privileged I am to have choices for and accessibility to such things, and of my personal limitations. My digital goals, just so we’re clear So to reiterate, my digital goals are to: 1) bloody finish organising my online filing and storage system. 2) minimise my everyday usage and reliance on digital tools such as doomscrolling on socials or YouTube or whatever video apps there are for my oxytocin fix. And 3) do all that while easing back into the world of social media this year. Very slowly. Very mindful. Very demure. Answer one, no socials on phone So I guess my first answer for two truths and a lie would be to continue not having social media on my phone, on my actual mobile phone, and to fight the urge to have it on my mobile device for prolonged periods. This is specifically for my portable gadgets though, that I take with me everywhere. So yeah, the phone that I take with me everywhere just because I have to. And just leave the social scrolling for when I’m on my laptop at home or when I’m sitting down doing something, especially now that I’m planning on getting back on social media in the future. Because I feel like the phone is something that we take with us everywhere and we’ve just gotten used to having that connection at any time we want. And I’ve been doing good, doing okay with beating my phone screen addiction for the last wee while. But I want to be able to maintain that. And I know now the work of maintaining that and the work of fighting the urge to not continuously scroll is just mental discipline honestly. And also just simply eliminating access to the addiction. These days I don’t reach out for my phone in public every 10 seconds. Even when I’m just at home, I often go a couple hours or so and I’m thinking, wait, where’s my phone? Because I’ve made my phone specifically only to be contacted via messaging and phone call. And checking emails and the weather. But there’s no constant stream of back and forth on social media, constantly talking to somebody on it. I think that’s what for me is the thing that has tied me to it before, this constant need of connecting and talking to someone. And also I’ve turned off all notifications a couple of years ago. Literally, even the badges. When I still had social media, I only had badges on when someone has specifically messaged me or tried to call me. And then after that I turned the badges off when someone comments or messages me. So I’ve been working on this a few years now, slowly taking off the need to look at it. And when I upload an app, I immediately turn off all notifications on it except for apps that really need it. For example, Uber, because you’re waiting, you need to know if the driver’s outside. Obviously the apps that you need it for. The ballet story So I don’t reach for my phone every few seconds now because I’ve just worked on the habit of that. I used to have this itch to look at my phone every 10 seconds when I’m just sitting and waiting for something in public, like waiting for my drink in a pub, or even worse when I’m at the movies and I’m itching to scroll my phone so bad while watching. But you’re not supposed to have your phone out in movies, which is great. It’s a great situation to put yourself in if you want to work on your screen addiction because you’re forced to sit in a space where you’re not doing an activity or anything. You’re literally just sitting there in the dark. And normally, if you’re watching a movie at home, you would also be doomscrolling, but you can’t just out of theatre etiquette and being considerate to people around you. I think the last time I felt that way before doing something about it was, I can’t remember, was that 2024 or 2025? During Auckland Arts Festival. Auckland Arts Festival used to invite me to watch a few of the show’s opening nights of my choosing. So they’d be like, choose four shows, we’ll give you tickets to it, and you can have a plus one. One of the shows I went to that year was the ballet, I think it was the Scottish Ballet or something, they came to Auckland and it was for A Streetcar Named Desire, the play but in ballet form. So if you are a patron of the arts, you know that the ballet and the opera and all that, they take ages and you just have an interval in the middle. So I took my friend Amber as my plus one because we both used to do ballet and she used to live in New Orleans, which is where A Streetcar Named Desire was set in. So it was just this cute little girls night out and it just made sense and it was really fun. And anyway, as everyone knows, you can’t have your phone out, especially in ballet. But ballets are just sooooo long and Amber and I, being of the Millennial/Gen Z era (and also at the time I think we were trying to work on quitting vaping) so our attention spans have already eroded by years of screen usage. And we were just sitting there itching to reach for our phones. Not that we weren’t interested in the show because I loved it. I love the ballet and I’m not going to say I love the story of A Streetcar Named Desire because the plotline is kind of effed up. But it’s not like we weren’t enjoying watching it. It’s just by habit we just want to reach for a phone. We’re itching. And we’re working on our nicotine addiction. It was just like-what are we-what is this era? We have this beautiful, beautiful ballet in front of us and all we want to do is do something else. And I just specifically remember that. Surely I felt that way in other situations, but that was one of the last times that I’ve felt that way, because I started thinking, oh my god, I fricking love the ballet. And here I am wanting to do anything else. What has happened to me? And I’ve since worked on this and no longer do I reach for my phone now. I just literally stare out into the open air and look like a creep in these situations, especially in the elevator. I’ll be standing in the elevator and literally seven people are on their phones and I’m just staring out over yonder. And I probably look like such a creep, honestly. So I’ve worked on it, I’ve add

7 apr

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25 min.
2 dgn geleden

The biopolitics of needle exchange in the United States

McLean, K. (2011) ‘The biopolitics of needle exchange in the United States’, Critical Public Health, 21(1), pp. 71–79. doi: 10.1080/09581591003653124. Abstract: Needle exchange began in the United States as a fragmented and illegal practice initiated by actors at the grassroots level; since the late 1980s, needle exchange has achieved increasing yet variable levels of institutional support across the country, receiving official sanction and funding from state and municipal governments. In turn, the practice(s) and discourse(s) of needle exchange have shifted significantly in many locales, becoming the purview of professional administration that advocates needle exchange as a necessary public health measure. This article is interested in the ways in which needle exchange has become implicated in and appropriated by networks of power seeking to discipline and regulate injection drug use. Drawing theoretically on Michel Foucault’s writings concerning biopower and governmentality, it will examine the proliferation of discourses, knowledges, and rules surrounding needle exchange in the United States. At the same time, this article will avoid a characterization of needle exchange that envisions the unilateral control of drug users by governmental power, illuminating instead both its negative and productive effects for drug users. Namely, it will explore how needle exchange creates both subjects of interest and subjects of resistance among drug users – that is to say, the governmentalization of needle exchange and its ‘clients’. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

2 dgn geleden

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2 min.
7 jun

Gendering (in)security: interrogating security logics within states of exception

Dingli, S. and Purewal, N. (2018) ‘Gendering (in)security: interrogating security logics within states of exception’, Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 3(2), pp. 153–163. doi: 10.1080/23802014.2018.1510295. Abstract: This collection contributes to debates, which seek to move feminist scholarship away from the reification of the war/peace and security/economy divides. However, rather than focusing on the terms of the debate, it foregrounds the empirical reality of the breakdown of these traditional divisions, paying particular attention to the ‘state of exception’ and similar frameworks. In doing so, contributors to this collection trouble the ubiquitous concept and practices of ‘(in)security’ and their effects on differentially positioned subjects. By gendering (in)securities in ‘states of exception’ and other paradigms of government related to it, especially in postcolonial and neo-colonial contexts, it provides an approach, which allows us to study the complex and interrelated security logics, which constitute the messy realities of different – and particularly vulnerable – subjects’ lives. In other words, it suggests that these frameworks are ripe for feminist interventions and analyses of the logics and production of (in)securities as well as of resistance and hybridisation. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

7 jun

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1 min.
4 apr

A Necropolitical Visual Regime: Banditry in Colombia, 1958–1964

Abstract: From 1958 to 1964 in Colombia, during the first years of the partisan power-sharing agreement known as the National Front, roving crews of gunmen labelled ‘bandits’ who had been mobilised and then abandoned by party elites terrorised local populations in the countryside. We track the gruesome photographic record of that violence: first, as it was produced by bandits who recruited photography in their bids for local sovereignty; second, as it circulated through government and media accounts that turned those same images back on the bandits as part of the military’s hunt for them as outlaws; and third, as a group of scholar-activists used them in academic publications that sought to shock the public into conscious concern and stimulate a sociological discussion about what caused and fuelled the violence. We argue that disparate uses of the same type of images – portraits of bandits and the cadavers, often mutilated, of their victims – constituted a necropolitical visual regime in which the elite consensus between government and press most effectively harnessed the photographs’ affective charge and channelled it into the pacification effort. Alexander L. Fattal & Andrés F. Caicedo Sierra (2023) A Necropolitical Visual Regime: Banditry in Colombia, 1958–1964, History of Photography, 47:4, 368-388, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2024.2429879 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

4 apr

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2 min.
2 dgn geleden

The politics of an environmental volunteer group

Episode 25, The Environmental Volunteer Group Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. The real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Climate adaptation and the rethinking of conservation - Conservation biology and restoration ecology have been internally debating the baseline question for at least two decades. The conventional baseline-restoration model targets the ecosystem as it was at a specific past date, often pre-industrial or pre-European-contact. The climate-adaptation model accepts that ecosystems are moving and asks how to support function and biodiversity through the transition. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group II Sixth Assessment Report (2022) treats ecosystem-based adaptation as a primary category of climate response, alongside hard-infrastructure and social-systems adaptation. - Coastal foreshore systems in southern Australia are showing measurable effects of sea level rise, salt intrusion, increased storm-surge frequency, and shifting species ranges. The CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology’s State of the Climate 2024 report documents these changes for Australian coastlines. Ecofeminism and environmental philosophy - The Australian ecofeminist Val Plumwood, who taught at the University of Tasmania and later at the Australian National University, published Feminism and the Mastery of Nature in 1993. The book is a foundational text in ecofeminist political philosophy and a sustained critique of Western dualistic thought. Plumwood died in 2008. Her unfinished work was published posthumously as The Eye of the Crocodile in 2012. - The Chinese-American anthropologist Anna Tsing, at the University of California Santa Cruz, published The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins in 2015. The book follows the matsutake mushroom commodity chain across the United States, China, Japan, and Finland, and argues for a multispecies, collaborative conception of life in damaged ecosystems. Community-based mangrove restoration in the Global South - The Sundarbans is the largest mangrove forest in the world, approximately ten thousand square kilometres straddling the Bangladesh-India border. Around four and a half million people live in the Bangladesh portion. The forest is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the country’s primary natural defence against sea level rise and tropical cyclones. - Community-based ecological mangrove restoration in Bangladesh has been documented by the Bangladesh Forest Department in partnership with NGOs including the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies. Women’s groups, fishing cooperatives, and youth networks participate in adaptive co-management arrangements. - Mekong Delta mangrove restoration in Vietnam responds to a layered ecological damage history: chemical defoliants used by United States forces in the Second Indochina War from 1961 to 1971; intensive shrimp aquaculture expansion from the mid-1980s; and contemporary sea level rise and salt intrusion. Community-led restoration networks coordinate with the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. - A broader international community-based adaptation movement, supported by networks including the Global Environment Facility Small Grants Programme and the International Institute for Environment and Development, has documented community-led ecosystem adaptation across the Global South since the early 2000s. The Australian volunteer environmental movement - The federal National Landcare Program was established in 1989 by the Hawke government, partly in response to advocacy from the National Farmers’ Federation and the Australian Conservation Foundation. It formalised and partially funded local volunteer groups doing on-ground restoration work. There are now more than five thousand Landcare and friends-of groups operating across Australia, supported by state and territory Landcare networks and federal funding cycles. - The campaign against the construction of the Franklin Dam on the lower Gordon River in southwest Tasmania, from 1982 through to the High Court’s decision in Commonwealth v Tasmania (Tasmanian Dam Case) on 1 July 1983, was a defining moment in the modern Australian environmental movement. The campaign produced the political formation that became the Australian Greens, founded as a national political party in 1992. - Tasmanian environmental politics has continued to be central to national debate, including through ongoing forestry, native forest logging, and World Heritage area campaigns. The political economy of environmental volunteer labour - The Australian Bureau of Statistics General Social Survey and related data sources estimate that approximately one hundred and fifty thousand Australians are active environmental volunteers in any given year. The cohort skews female, older than the median Australian adult, and more economically secure than the general population. - The foundational feminist critique of women’s unpaid labour being systematically erased from economic measurement was articulated by the New Zealand economist and former politician Marilyn Waring in her 1988 book Counting for Nothing, also published as If Women Counted. The argument has been extended to environmental and ecological labour by scholars including Joan Tronto on care ethics and Nancy Folbre on the political economy of care. - The contribution of unpaid environmental volunteer labour to Australian biodiversity outcomes, climate adaptation, and natural-asset maintenance is not captured in standard national accounts. Estimates of its notional economic value have been produced by various Landcare reviews but are not integrated into the System of National Accounts. REFERENCES [1] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Working Group II Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), particularly Chapter 2 on terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems. [2] Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993); Val Plumwood, The Eye of the Crocodile, edited by Lorraine Shannon (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2012). [3] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). [4] Bangladesh Forest Department and Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies, Community-Based Mangrove Restoration in the Sundarbans (Dhaka: Bangladesh Forest Department); Md Khalequzzaman and Reazul Ahsan, published research on Sundarbans community co-management. [5] Vu Quyet Thang and contributors, published research on Mekong Delta mangrove restoration; UNDP Vietnam, Community-Based Mangrove Management in the Mekong Delta (Hanoi: UNDP Vietnam). [6] International Institute for Environment and Development, Community- Based Adaptation: Lessons from the Field (London: IIED, 2018); Global Environment Facility Small Grants Programme, Community Action for Climate Adaptation reports. [7] Australian Government, National Landcare Program documentation (Canberra: Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry); Landcare Australia, State of Landcare Report (Sydney: Landcare Australia, 2023). [8] Commonwealth v Tasmania (Tasmanian Dam Case) (1983) 158 CLR 1; James McQueen, The Franklin: Not Just a River (Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Books, 1983); Bob Brown, Memo for a Saner World (Camberwell, Vic: Penguin Books, 2004). [9] Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth, second edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999; first published as If Women Counted, 1988); Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993); Nancy Folbre, The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (New York: The New Press, 2001). [10] Australian Bureau of Statistics, General Social Survey: Summary Results, Australia (Canberra: ABS); Landcare Australia, State of Landcare Report 2023 estimates of volunteer numbers and contributions. FURTHER READING Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). A companion to Tsing’s thinking on multispecies survival in damaged ecosystems, with extended reflections on collaborative ecological practice. Deborah Bird Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). An Australian environmental anthropologist’s work on extinction, mourning, and the ethics of living in breaking ecosystems. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949). The foundational American conservation philosophy text, against which much subsequent ecological thought has been written. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980). Foundational ecofeminist historical work on the parallel domination of women and nature in early modern European thought. Bron Taylor, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (London: Continuum, 2005). Useful reference on the wider intellectual traditions of human relationship to environment, including non-Western and Indigenous frames. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013). A Potawatomi ecologist’s argument for braiding Indigenous and scientific knowledge in ecological practice. Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and Peoples (Sydney: Reed New Holland

2 dgn geleden

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10 min.
10 apr

The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now

Morgensen, S. L. (2011) ‘The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now’, Settler Colonial Studies, 1(1), pp. 52–76. doi: 10.1080/2201473X.2011.10648801. Abstract: Settler colonialism is exemplary of the processes of biopower theorised by Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. However, settler colonialism remains naturalised within theories of biopower and theories of its relation to coloniality. White supremacist settler colonisation produces specific modes of biopolitics that sustain not only in settler states but also in regimes of global governance that inherit, extend, and naturalise their power. I extend Patrick Wolfe’s theory that a ‘logic of elimination’ constitutes settler colonialism in the genocide and amalgamation of Indigenous peoples, by indicating that this also indigenises and naturalises white settler nations as projections of the West. Agamben’s work illuminates how Indigenous peoples are eliminated in a state of exception to Western law, which by functioning to erase consanguinity – as the patriarch in Roman law eliminates the defiant son - explains Indigenous peoples’ seemingly contradictory incorporation within and excision from the body of white settler nations. This biopolitical process specific to settler colonialism also structures the manner in which white settler societies demonstrably universalize Western law, both within their bounds and in global arenas. My call to denaturalise settler colonialism in social theory is but a first step towards broader study of how the biopolitics of settler colonialism structure current modes of biopower and require concerted critique at the intersections of Indigenous and settler colonial studies. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

10 apr

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2 min.
5 apr

Saying grace / Saving grace

Starting a new ritual where I say one thing I’m grateful for before complaining about the surveillance state, because I realised I just complain too much. Also talking about Bunnings collecting our biometric data through implied consent and what I’ve been procrastinating on. Round two. Last we left off, we were in the middle of playing two truths and a lie. I took too long giving detailed answers in the first round. The Surveillance State loves data, apparently. I didn’t anticipate how in-depth my answers would be, so the rest of the game had to be continued into this episode. Maybe I can just answer the second round in this episode and the last question topic next time. That’s what we’ll do for episode three. However, on a more pressing note, I realised after last time that so much of what I say sounds like complaining. Actually, let me not sugarcoat that and call myself out on it. I am complaining. It doesn’t ‘sound like’ complaining, it IS complaining. I complain a lot about the state of the modern world right now, especially when it comes to the blurred boundaries between our lives and social media, what’s become normal, the technology and new digital social etiquettes we can’t opt out of, what’s expected and demanded of us digitally. Starting a new ritual because I complain too much So I have decided to start every single one of these episodes by saying one thing that I am grateful for before going on tangents and complaints about the digital world today. Basically, we are going to say grace before we even touch our food. That’s what we’re going to do now. It’s going to be a ritual in every episode. I am naturally a very critical person who’s skeptical of structures and authority. It started when I was a little Catholic school girl and I just hated existing in that realm of having to blindly follow things. I rebelled a lot and questioned everything. Which in part has been good because it’s sharpened my critical thinking skills. But sometimes it makes me lose sight of all the amazing things we do have. I would like to stop taking a lot of things for granted. First world problems, I know. Today’s grace Today I am grateful for the fact that I can just open any one of my devices and be connected to the world. Even though this kind of connection has dissolved and blurred some boundaries in privacy, there is still a lot to be grateful for when it comes to being able to connect with people from across the world. I mean, I just one day decided to turn on my microphone, start talking into it, and broadcast it to the world. Even though no one’s listening right now, I have the freedom and the options and the ability to do all that. It’s nice that we can connect that way. So I’m grateful for that. Okay, grace done. Side note about privacy and biometric data I’m going to leave all the privacy topic things for another episode because it’s overwhelming in my head sometimes. But actually, I just recently saw something, and I don’t know if this is real or not since we never really know if headlines we see online are all true these days. But apparently some people applying for US visas are being forced to put all of their social media accounts on public so immigration can see all of their information, what their life is like, what they post about, what their political standings are. Isn’t that just so weird? Privacy is really such a privilege for some of us, especially for those of us who don’t have the desperation to actively want to live in a developing third-world-country such as the United States of America. Which is so gross. And also another side note. I was also reading up on the Australian Privacy Act 1998 on the definition of privacy consent as either expressed or implied. Expressed consent or implied consent. And how organisations can rely on implied consent when collecting biometric data on you. On us, I guess. For example, if you enter a Bunnings Warehouse, you have then given implied consent for them to collect your biometric data. And you can’t really do anything about it except not go there, even if you need something, even if you need a hammer. Bunnings’ argument is that it’s just impractical to ask every single patron to give consent every time they come in and use their services. So they are permitted to use regular behaviour such as entering premises as consent for our biometric data to be taken, stored, analysed, and used however they want. “It’s now the default that by entering the public realm anything and everything about us is fair game — and we enable it too.” And yeah, I guess that’s probably going to be every establishment’s argument though. It is really impressive. Can you imagine every single person walking into any Westfield Mall, and being asked to sign a consent form first before they walk in? So that’s their argument there. But isn’t that just weird? It’s just a little something that’s been on my mind for the last couple of years. How it’s now the default that when we exit our private homes, as soon as we step out of that door, anything and everything about us is fair game by entering the public realm. And we enable it too by putting Ring cameras on our front doors, dashcams in our cars—Okay wait, I’m going on. I feel like this can be a topic for another episode because I can just go into this. But yeah, see, I’m just complaining. Complaining, complaining, complaining about all these systems in place these days that erode our rights to privacy. So back to the topic at hand. Stop complaining. Round two of two truths and a lie Alright, getting back to the second round of two truths and a lie today. The question topic was: what have I been putting off doing out of procrastination, fear, or overwhelm that could elevate my life? This question I found on a journal ideas infographic thing on Pinterest. Answer one, Microsoft exodus So two truths and a lie. My first answer, okay this is an easy one because I already touched on this last episode within one of my truth answers. But it would have to be that I really need to get to doing my storage transfer out of OneDrive (Microsoft OneDrive) so that I can get out of the Microsoft ecosystem for personal use. And I do this out of all three: procrastination, fear, and overwhelm. Procrastination because I have gotten used to intentionally avoiding stress lately and I know from experience it is stressful and tedious to do full-on drive transfers. Fear because drive transfers in the past have cost me losing so much of my old videos and photos and files and I’m scared that it’s going to happen again this time around. Overwhelmed because I know it’s going to be a huge job that may take weeks if not months if not a year. Just thinking of all the admin of it is giving me the anxiety tummy. But I do need to spring clean my digital accounts and organise it all into better systems. So I need to get into that sometime soon. Answer two, account clean-ups Answer number two would be deleting old accounts on websites I don’t even use anymore. So I have managed to keep track of most of my accounts that I’ve opened on websites here and there for the last few years. I used Dashlane to do all of that. Looking through all of these accounts that I have from one-off food ordering apps and appointment booking websites and free services of software websites that just want your email so that you can get a free PDF conversion or something. Things like that. Random websites that just want your email so that they can sell your email off to data farming companies, I guess. I have a lot of that. Because since I kept track of it on Dashlane, I have so much of it. And it’s just a lot of random shit. And it’s a lot of my info out there. So in the last few months, I’ve been logging back onto all of the ones I don’t use anymore and have been deleting my accounts with them manually. So I log on (extra steps if my logons don’t work), I literally have to go to the settings, press delete account (extra steps if there’s no simple button for it and have to contact customer service). I have to do that in each and every single one. And annoyingly for some of them, when you attempt to delete an account and even email customer service to delete your account and information, because some of them you can’t just delete that yourself, you have to actively contact customer service, anyway, for some of them, even if you do that, they don’t even delete your account. Even when you’ve confirmed it and you’ve asked them to do it. And in fact, they actually double down on sending you more promotional emails. I think it’s Etihad Airlines, I did that. And then someone from their customer service said, yes, can you confirm you want to do this? And I’m like, yeah, please delete it. And then I get another email saying, thank you for signing up to our newsletter. And I was like, what the... I didn’t do that. I specifically did not want to be part of this. And then now they’ve just completely spammed my Microsoft email. And luckily I don’t use my Microsoft email anymore. But I think they’re just doing that to be dicks about it, aren’t they? Like I had correspondence with them. And there’s a lot of places that say that you have to email them to delete an account and then they don’t even reply to that. So they just keep your information, I guess, forever and ever. So I’m still in the middle of doing those manually and I need to get them done in the next few months. I’m just putting them off. Answer three, eBooks And the last answer, answer number three, is that I need to organise all of my e-books on my Kindle. I have successfully given away and donated a lot of my old books before we moved overseas from New Zealand to Australia. And I was just not going to take all of my books with me. So I just kept some that I either couldn’t sell, nobody wanted to keep, or

5 apr

•

22 min.
21 mei

The politics of waste management

Episode 9 — The Waste Management Business Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. Identifying details are changed. Real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Australia - The Australian recycling crisis that arrived in early 2018 following China's National Sword policy, with council kerbside recycling cost increases of several hundred per cent and multiple public reports of collected kerbside material being sent to landfill while still being marketed as recycling. - The collapse of SKM Recycling in Victoria. The company stopped receiving recyclables from 33 Victorian councils in July 2019 and was placed in receivership in August 2019, owing approximately A$100 million. Cleanaway acquired five of the SKM sites in October 2019 for A$66 million, reopening material recovery facilities at Coolaroo, Hallam, Geelong, Laverton North (Victoria) and Derwent Park (Tasmania) through late 2019. - The South Australian Container Deposit Scheme, commenced under the Beverage Container Act 1975 (SA) and in full effect from 1977, making South Australia the first jurisdiction in the world to operate a comprehensive container deposit scheme. - State landfill levies progressively introduced and increased across Australian states from the late 1990s onward, shifting the economics of waste management toward diversion. - The Recycling and Waste Reduction Act 2020 (Cth) and the COAG National Waste Policy Action Plan 2019, beginning the phase-out of unprocessed waste exports: glass from 1 January 2021, mixed plastics from 1 July 2021, whole used tyres from 1 December 2021, single resin plastics from 1 July 2022, and mixed paper and cardboard from 1 July 2024. - The ABC's War on Waste documentary series, first broadcast May 2017, which immediately preceded the National Sword crisis and shifted Australian public conversation on waste. China - China's National Sword policy, with a WTO notification of 18 July 2017 announcing the import ban on 24 categories of solid waste effective 1 January 2018, and a 0.5% contamination threshold for non-banned recyclables effective 1 March 2018. - China had been the destination for approximately 45-50% of the world's exported recyclable plastic and paper waste from the early 1990s through to the National Sword policy. Ghana - The Agbogbloshie scrapyard in central Accra, occupying approximately 20 acres at the mouth of the Odaw River, draining into Korle Lagoon. Estimates of workers on-site before the 2021 demolition range from approximately 6,000 to 10,000, predominantly migrants from northern Ghana, with electronic waste accumulating at the site from the late 1990s onward from the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and other wealthy economies. - The demolition of Agbogbloshie on 1 July 2021 by the Greater Accra Regional Coordinating Council, with armed police and military backing, under the "Let's Make Accra Work" initiative led by then-Greater Accra Regional Minister Henry Quartey. - The Greater Accra Scrap Dealers Association, which organised after the demolition and pooled resources to purchase land at Teacher Mante, approximately 60-75 km north of Accra, in an effort to relocate informal e-waste activities to a sanctioned site. - The scholarly critique of the international "world's largest e-waste dump" framing of Agbogbloshie, led by Ghanaian and diaspora researchers including Grace Akese, Muntaka Chasant, and Uli Beisel, arguing that the framing was empirically overstated and politically used to legitimise state violence against informal waste workers. International - The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal (1989, in force 1992), the Basel Ban Amendment (in force 5 December 2019) prohibiting hazardous waste exports from OECD to non-OECD countries, and the 2019 plastic waste amendments (in force 1 January 2021) bringing most contaminated and mixed plastic waste under prior informed consent procedures. - The Global Alliance of Waste Pickers, founded 2008, coordinating organisations across Latin America, Asia, and Africa. - South-East Asian waste import restrictions through 2019-2020 following the Chinese ban, with Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam returning contaminated containers to wealthy-economy points of origin including Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Hong Kong. REFERENCES [1] World Trade Organization, Notification by China to the Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade, document G/TBT/N/CHN/1211, 18 July 2017. https://docs.wto.org/dol2fe/Pages/SS/directdoc.aspx?filename=q:/G/TBTN17/CHN1211.pdf; Patrick Sangster, "From Green Fence to red alert: A China timeline," Resource Recycling, 13 February 2018, https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2018/02/13/green-fence-red-alert-china-timeline/; Yifan Gu et al., "Impact of China's National Sword Policy on the U.S. Landfill and Plastics Recycling Industry," Sustainability 14(4) (2022): 2456. [2] Amy L. Brooks, Shunli Wang, and Jenna R. Jambeck, "The Chinese import ban and its impact on global plastic waste trade," Science Advances 4(6) (2018): eaat0131; Katherine Earley, "Piling Up: How China's Ban on Importing Waste Has Stalled Global Recycling," Yale Environment 360, 7 March 2019, https://e360.yale.edu/features/piling-up-how-chinas-ban-on-importing-waste-has-stalled-global-recycling. [3] Senate Environment and Communications References Committee, Never Waste a Crisis: The Waste and Recycling Industry in Australia (Commonwealth of Australia, June 2018); ABC News, "Recycling going to landfill after China bans Australian waste," 21 April 2018, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-21/recycling-going-to-landfill-after-china-ban-on-australian-waste/9682386; Joe Pickin et al., National Waste Report 2020, Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment; Victorian Auditor-General's Office, Recovering and Reprocessing Resources from Waste (2020); Inside Waste, "Former SKM facilities in Victoria reopened by Cleanaway," February 2020, https://www.insidewaste.com.au/former-skm-facilities-in-victoria-reopened-by-cleanaway/. [4] Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), https://www.dukeupress.edu/pollution-is-colonialism; Max Liboiron, Manuel Tironi and Nerea Calvillo, "Toxic Politics: Acting in a Permanently Polluted World," Social Studies of Science 48(3) (2018): 331-349; Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), https://civiclaboratory.nl/. [5] Grace Akese, Uli Beisel and Muntaka Chasant, "Agbogbloshie: A Year after the Violent Demolition," African Arguments, 22 July 2022, https://africanarguments.org/2022/07/agbogbloshie-a-year-after-the-violent-demolition/; Peter C. Little, Burning Matters: Life, Labor, and E-Waste Pyropolitics in Ghana (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); Peter C. Little and Grace A. Akese, "Centering the Korle Lagoon: Exploring Blue Political Ecologies of E-Waste in Ghana," Journal of Political Ecology 26(1) (2019): 448-465. [6] Akese, Beisel and Chasant, "Agbogbloshie: A Year after the Violent Demolition" (above); Muntaka Chasant, "Agbogbloshie Demolition: The End of An Era or An Injustice?," Muntaka.com (independent investigative research and photography), https://muntaka.com/agbogbloshie-demolition/; Electrònica Justa, "Crisis in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, caused by forced dismantlement of the landfill," July 2021, https://electronicajusta.net/crisis-in-agbogbloshie-ghana-caused-by-forced-dismantlement-of-the-landfill/?lang=en. [7] Grace A. Akese, "Electronic Waste (e-waste) Science and Advocacy at Agbogbloshie: The Making and Effects of 'The World's Largest E-Waste Dump'" (PhD Dissertation, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2019); Josh Lepawsky, Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Waste (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018); Augustus Sarpong, Dorothy M. M. Owusu and Esther O. Onallia, "Academic urban legend, Agbogbloshie: Sweeping away the 'World's Largest E-Waste Dumpsite'," Geoforum 159 (2024): 104180. [8] Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (Sydney: UNSW Press; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); Gay Hawkins, Emily Potter and Kane Race, Plastic Water: The Social and Material Life of Bottled Water (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). [9] Global Alliance of Waste Pickers, https://globalrec.org/about-us/; Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), Waste Pickers Programme, https://www.wiego.org/informal-economy/occupational-groups/waste-pickers; Melanie Samson, ed., Refusing to Be Cast Aside: Waste Pickers Organising Around the World (Cambridge, MA: WIEGO, 2009); Sonia Maria Dias, "Waste Pickers and Cities," Environment and Urbanization 28(2) (2016): 375-390. [10] Government of South Australia, Green Industries SA, Container Deposit Scheme background and history, https://www.greenindustries.sa.gov.au/container-deposit-scheme; Beverage Container Act 1975 (SA), consolidated under the Environment Protection Act 1993 (SA) Part 8 Division 2; Productivity Commission, Waste Management Inquiry Report, chapter 6 on extended producer responsibility (2006), https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/waste/report. [11] Recycling and Waste Reduction Act 2020 (Cth), https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2020A00119/latest/text; Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, "Australia's waste export ban," https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/protection/waste/exports/waste-export-ban; Council of Australian Governments, National Waste Policy Action Plan 2019, https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/protection/waste/publications/national-waste-policy-action-plan; state EPA landfill levy histories across NSW EPA, EPA Victoria, Green Industries SA, WA Department of Water and Environmental Regulation, and the Queensland Department of Environment. [12] Waste Managem

21 mei

•

10 min.
3 jun

Unsafe Homecoming: Unraveling Environmental Injustice and Land Dispossession in the Syrian Refugee Crisis

Ghazal Aswad, N. (2024) ‘Unsafe Homecoming: Unraveling Environmental Injustice and Land Dispossession in the Syrian Refugee Crisis’, Environmental Communication, 18(1–2), pp. 35–42. doi: 10.1080/17524032.2023.2296831. Abstract: This paper attends to the Syrian refugee crisis to argue that land dispossession is not only a political and humanitarian phenomenon, but one that cuts to the core of how we inhabit, experience, and belong on the land. Amid the forced repatriation of Syrian refugees to their country, activists used the hashtag #SyriaNotSafe to raise awareness about the detentions, disappearances, and torture of returnees. Beyond the immediate political persecution of refugees, this paper argues for crafting networked cultures of care attentive to the toxic environmental legacies of the Syrian conflict. Cultures of care must be sensitive to the affective relationships of interdependence between Syrians and their local ecosystems forged during the lifetime of revolutionary struggle. By shedding light on the toxicity of war, the weaponization of the environment, and the deliberate land dispossession by the Assad regime, the ability of Syrians to constitute acts of resistance in sympoiesis or “making with” the land is impacted. If we are to unite in acts of care for refugees, we must resist the inclination to imagine the necropolitical cultures in which we live as somehow distinct from the imperative for environmental justice and the ability to survive and thrive with the land. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

3 jun

•

2 min.

Welcome to Channel 54. My name is Liv and I make podcasts with a side of politics.

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