How to do Things with Green Culture

A review of Adrian Parr's Hijacking Sustainability (MIT Press, 2009) and Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller's Greening the Media (OUP, 2012)

Mocking and farting: Trickster imagination and the origins of laughter

This essay examines the use of trickster imagination and the appropriations of trickster mythology by writers from formerly colonised countries as a rich and relevant arsenal of material for their project of cultural transformation and critique. It shows the trickster figure as an ambivalent image and discusses the functions of laughter in trickster imagination. One of the most famously recorded trickster figures is Coyote, the trickster of American Indian mythology (Radin 1972). Coyote is a somewhat unfortunate being

How to do Things with Green Culture

A review of Adrian Parr's Hijacking Sustainability (MIT Press, 2009) and Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller's Greening the Media (OUP, 2012)

Academics and the new public intellectual

In this essay, we outline an emerging form of public intellectualism in the humanities sector of Australian higher education. We argue that debates over public intellectualism and its relation to the academy in Australia have largely been focused on the tension between polemics and politics. These debates have also tended to ignore or overlook policy drivers within the sector and alternative or new media sites of public intellectualism. Shifting the focus towards policy drivers in the knowledge economy—such as knowledge transfer and third-stream funding—and understanding the nature of the university as a public sphere in itself reveals a new economy of the public intellectual as a professional knowledge worker. This new economy, we argue, may well render obsolete many of the previous debates over public intellectualism in the humanities. However, we anticipate that it will generate new debates over the relationship between the individual and the institutional, and between the concepts of public profile and public role—debates that will affect, in particular, early career academics who are the inheritors of this new economy of the public intellectual

Editorial: 'Turf'

Thirteen years ago, Kenichi Ohmae proclaimed that the world had become “borderless,” and the nation-state nothing more than a “bit actor” in a globalised economy. Around the same time, “interdisciplinarity” appeared as the prime strategy for breaking down the rigid stratifications of traditional disciplines, promising an equivalently borderless academe. However, despite the rhetoric of globalisation and interdisciplinarity, territorial boundaries—both physical and conceptual—remain in evidence and under contention..

Green Criminology

This chapter provides a brief overview of green criminology as a theoretical perspective, and of environmental crime as a specific type of crime. Green criminology provides a distinctive lens through which to explore and explain environmental harm, one that includes reference to activities that transgress the rights and well-being of humans, specific ecosystems, and animal and plant species regardless of legality. The chapter provides examples of environmental crime that can be seen in both Australia and New Zealand and considers the crime of ecocide in relation to practices contributing to climate change