Margaret Somerville

This ethnography follows a river-road into the deeper meanings of water and water places in the Australian experience. The site of this exploration is the iconic river system which forms the networks of natural and human landscapes of the Murray-Darling Basin.

Place-learning Through Art and Story

Water in a Dry Land

Our physical ecosystem is not indestructible and we have obligations to hold it in trust for future generations. The same is true of our metaphysical ecosystem - the values, principles, attitudes, beliefs, and shared stories on which we have founded our society. In Bird on an Ethics Wire, Margaret Somerville explores the values needed to maintain a world that reasonable people would want to live in and pass on to their descendants. Somerville addresses the conflicts between people who espouse "progressive" values and those who uphold "traditional" ones by casting her attention on the debates surrounding "birth" (abortion and reproductive technologies) and "death" (euthanasia) and shows how words are often used as weapons. She proposes that we should seek to experience amazement, wonder, and awe to enrich our lives and help us to find meaning. Such experiences, Somerville believes, can change how we see the world and live our lives, and affect the decisions we make, especially regarding values and ethics. They can help us to cope with physical or existential suffering, and ultimately put us in touch with the sacred - in either its secular or religious form - which protects what we must not destroy. Experiencing amazement, wonder, and awe, Somerville concludes, can also generate hope, without which our spirit dies. Both individuals and societies need hope, a sense of connection to the future, if the world is to make the best decisions about values in the battles that constitute the current culture wars.

Battles about Values in the Culture Wars

Bird on an Ethics Wire

Reading this book is like falling through a faultline, as we respond to poesis, both as poetry and as thought creation. Margaret Somerville attended the 1984 Pine Gap Women's Peace Camp where urban women and Aboriginal women demonstrated against military bases. As she moved through the landscape of this and other very different places, she recorded her interactions: with Aboriginal women in the desert in the mountains and at home, and with white women in the tropics and at home. It is a thoughtful challenge of all that we think. She concludes with reflections on the architecture of love.

Body Landscape Journals

Stephen Billett

Tara Fenwick

This book focuses on relations among subjectivity, work and learning that represent a point of convergence for diverse disciplinary traditions and practices. There are contributions from leading scholars in the field. They provide emerging perspectives that are elaborating the complex relations among subjectivity, work and learning, and circumstances in which they are played out.

Understanding Learning through Working Life

Work, Subjectivity and Learning

Rob Anderson

K. Kumaran

Public Health and Epidemiology at a Glance is a highly visual introduction to the key concepts and major themes of population health. With comprehensive coverage of all the core topics covered at medical school, it helps students understand the determinants of health and their study, from personal lifestyle choices and behaviour, to environmental, social and economic factors. This fully updated new edition features: • More coverage of audit and quality improvement techniques • Brand new sections on maternal and child health, and health of older people • New chapters on social determinants of health and guideline development • Expanded self-assessment material This accessible guide is an invaluable resource for medical and healthcare students, junior doctors, and those preparing for a career in epidemiology and public health.

Public Health and Epidemiology at a Glance

This is an invitation to readers to ponder universal questions about human relations with rivers and water for the precarious times of the Anthropocene. The book asks how humans can learn through sensory embodied encounters with local waterways that shape the architecture of cities and make global connections with environments everywhere. The book considers human becomings with urban waterways to address some of the major conceptual challenges of the Anthropocene, through stories of trauma and healing, environmental activism, and encounters with the living beings that inhabit waterways. Its unique contribution is to bring together Australian Aboriginal knowledges with contemporary western, new materialist, posthuman and Deleuzean philosophies, foregrounding how visual, creative and artistic forms can assist us in thinking beyond the constraints of western thought to enable other modes of being and knowing the world for an unpredictable future. Riverlands of the Anthropocene will be of particular interest to those studying the Anthropocene through the lenses of environmental humanities, environmental education, philosophy, ecofeminism and cultural studies.

Walking Our Waterways as Places of Becoming

Riverlands of the Anthropocene

Bronwyn Davies

Kerith Power

Susanne Gannon

Phoenix de Carteret

Place pedagogy change is a work of creative experimentation in which we explore the ways in which pedagogies of place can enable the relational learning of connections between people, places and communities. In adding the element of place to the dynamic relations between teacher, learner, and knowledge, we articulate a pedagogy of ethical uncertainty. Ethical refers to our mutual responsibilities to others and to the more-than-human world, and uncertainty to the unpredictability inherent in our relationship with this world. In Place pedagogy change, we examine the nature of such innovative pedagogies as they emerged across the curriculum from early childhood to school and community education, and in teacher education. The book will provide a useful text for teachers and teacher eductors wishing to address questions of place and sustainability in educational research and practice.

Place Pedagogy Change

Tony Perkins

A unique and inviting record, this volume explores the Aboriginal Gumbaynggirr people’s experience in maintaining the stories and songs of their New South Wales homeland. By taking up the metaphor of singing to capture a quality of voice, this remarkable record examines the particular qualities inherent in the coastal group’s songs and considers their universal sense of knowledge, understanding, and openness. This revelatory compilation is an indispensable read for those interested in understanding more about Aboriginal culture and engaging with the landscape.

Singing the Coast

Water in a Dry Land is a story of research about water as a source of personal and cultural meaning. The site of this exploration is the iconic river system which forms the networks of natural and human landscapes of the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. In the current geological era of human induced climate change, the desperate plight of the system of waterways has become an international phenomenon, a symbol of the unsustainable ways we relate to water globally. The Murray-Darling Basin extends west of the Great Dividing Range that separates the densely populated east coast of Australia from the sparsely populated inland. Aboriginal peoples continue to inhabit the waterways of the great artesian basin and pass on their cultural stories and practices of water, albeit in changing forms. A key question informing the book is: What can we learn about water from the oldest continuing culture inhabiting the world’s driest continent? In the process of responding to this question a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers formed to work together in a contact zone of cultural difference within an emergent arts-based ethnography. Photo essays of the artworks and their landscapes offer a visual accompaniment to the text on the Routledge Innovative Ethnography Series website, http://www.innovativeethnographies.net/. This book is perfect for courses in environmental sociology, environmental anthropology, and qualitative methods.

Place-Learning Through Art and Story

Monica Green

Through focusing on children's sustainability learning this book examines how school education can address the current environmental problems. It explores children's responses in literacy and language, arts-based approaches, and indigenous studies as well as scientific pedagogies to provide a unique insight into how children learn.

Margaret Somerville

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