Hi everyone

The call for abstracts for the IAG conference will open on the 7th February but we would like to promote our session ahead of time

Regional resilience and vulnerabilities in the Anthropocene

Session organisers:

Michelle Duffy: Michelle.Duffy@newcastle.edu.au

Beth Edmondson: beth.edmondson@federation.edu.au

Kaya Barry: k.barry@griffith.edu.au

In recent years an expanding literature has begun to explore regional vulnerabilities to anthropogenic climate change. Spanning many disciplines, this scholarship shows promising signs of supporting new understandings of some of the particularities of regions as sites of resilience and challenge. In Australia, regions are ‘often the first areas that suffer from and exhibit adverse impacts from changes’ (Sullivan, 2020: 1), and they are also often adept at responding to them. We are interested in extending these considerations to build new understandings of how regions are affected by climate change and how they experience the intersections of functioning as environments, societies, production centres, landscapes, sites of leadership, imagination and culture.

As an epoch characterised by rising human-induced instability across the complex and interconnected earth system, the Anthropocene casts a different light on regions.  At this time, regions are where anthropogenic climate change is happening to rivers, farms, animals, rainfalls, forests, food supply chains, how people sustain themselves and others, and relational dynamics between them. In regions, human and non-human species regions are experiencing firsthand problems such as biodiversity loss, climate change, deforestation and land degradation.

The goal of this session is to explore and engage with how people in regions are embedded, both as active agents and subjects of environmental changes that are occurring across human and non-human experiences. These changes are disrupting how human and non-human species live and interrelate.

We invite papers that address questions such as:

• How do regions engage with and experience the double-edged dynamics between resilience and vulnerability in responding to climate change?
• How can ideas of place and change, transition and resilience, and challenges for the future, provide new insights into lived experiences of relations between environment, landscape, livelihood and culture?
• Is the Anthropocene changing the meaning of region/s?
• How do regions bear witness to climate change?
• Can new understanding of the intimate and deep entanglements of human and non-human worlds contribute to new resilience in regions experiencing climate change?
• How can regions create buffering periods of transition as they respond to the most disruptive implications and effects of climate change?
• How are everyday practices of community resilience enacted informally across regions responding to climate change?
• How are regions ‘re-establishing landscape connectivity’ as they adapt to climate change (Grecequet et al. 2019: 198).

Associate Professor Michelle Duffy
Human Geography

Program Convenor of the Bachelor of Development Studies

School of Environmental and Life Sciences
Faculty of Science

T: + 61 2 492 15097
E: Michelle.Duffy@newcastle.edu.au


The University of Newcastle (UON)
University Drive, Callaghan NSW 2308 Australia

Ranked in the top 1% of universities in the world by
QS World University Rankings 2017/18

CRICOS Provider 00109J

I acknowledge the Aboriginal custodians of the land in the region where I live and work, the Awabakal and Worimi peoples. I acknowledge the Elders, past, present and future, and Country itself.