Dr Matthew Bunn

From the 1970s, state¿driven pursuits for coal and revenue have radically transformed rural landscapes and sociality in New South Wales, Australia. The region, which has a long history of coal mining, moved from being run by locally based enterprises that contributed to the sustainability of local communities to large-scale, global corporations relying on a translocal workforce. As coal operations emerged from the underground, a radical restructuring of spatial relations took place. This restructuring was also underpinned by the privatisation of coal and power supplies, with transnational extraction corporations becoming landholders in agricultural regions. As the mining boom intensified, mining companies emerged as a major landholder in rural areas of New South Wales. Seeking to purchase strategic properties for exploration, extraction or mitigation, mining companies approached and negotiated with individual, local landholders. In this paper, we consider how this process have followed class¿based lines and how class exposes distinct vulnerabilities and privileges in a meeting with a miner. We contend that there is a vacuum in the planning process, which exposes vulnerable communities that have limited capacity to contest these developments and define the future and meaning of their place of belonging.

This article explores an auto-ethnographic account of a climbing accident. Climbing communities invest large amounts of time in identifying ¿risks¿, that is, making the chances of involvement in a serious or fatal accident more calculable and controllable, and hence less likely. However, little attention has been given to understanding the post-risk state. Rather risk discourses are intended to sustain a sense of control over vertical spaces; spaces that greatly exceed the abilities of the human. Accidents, then, represent a substantial threat to this production of an orderly line between subjectivity and objectivity. While a climbing accident is not necessarily a threshold in the sense of a permanent or irreversible shift of being, it nevertheless reveals where such a threshold lies. This phenomenological account of the accident as a post-risk state offers a fruitful space for furthering accounts of agency, subjectivity and their borders into the ¿inanimate¿ world of the objects.

Formal evaluation of policies, programmes and people has become ubiquitous in contemporary western contexts. This is the case for equity and widening participation (WP) agendas in higher education, for which evaluation is often required to measure ¿what works¿. Although evaluation has a ¿fundamentally social, political, and value-oriented character¿ (Guba and Lincoln. 1989. Fourth Generation Evaluation. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 7), an experimental approach, situated within hegemonic positivist epistemologies, has tended to prevail. In this paper, we argue that it is misguided to pursue evaluation with an apolitical pretext of independence and objectivity. Drawing on Butler¿s concept of performativity, we explore how hegemonic anti-democratic evaluation practices can potentially re-inscribe and reproduce the very inequalities that WP seeks to address. By critiquing the technologies of evaluation, we lay out one way of understanding how democratic evaluation practices can reclaim evaluation to make possible more diverse and socially just worlds.

The concept of solastagia has been developed by environmental philosopher Albrecht to understand the psychological trauma, also referred to as place-based distress, experienced because of environmental change. In this article, we explore ways to further this concept. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in a village in the mid-western region of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, which is surrounded by three large open-cut coal mines. Over the past decade, the mines, in particular the Peabody-owned Wilpinjong mine closest to the village, have had a significant impact on biophysical, social and temporal landscapes in the area. We argue that whilst solastalgia may help explore the relationship between the environmental and human distress triggered in these circumstances, the sense of displacement and loss that emerge are entangled with questions of power and dispossession beyond the biophysical realm. Underpinned by a phenomenological framework of analysis, we contend that place-based distress should be understood as an ontological trauma, as the fabrics of place, belonging and the social relations embedded within disrupt the ongoing sense of being associated with home. These include the means to not only link to the past, but also to imagine the future.