- Title
- ‘When you come here, you understand’: tracing women’s resistance to natural resource extraction in NSW, Australia
- Creator
- Ey, Melina
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2021
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Practices of Natural Resource Extraction (NRE) remain highly contested, and often produce deeply problematic consequences for people and place. Yet whilst the challenges associated with extractive practices (and innumerable strategies to address these) have formed the basis of extensive work across a range of disciplines, less work has attended to the imaginaries and ontologies underpinning and normalising extractive practices. This thesis approaches NRE as a logic which prescribes and designates particular ways of navigating human interdependency with more-than-human worlds; one that hinges on abstraction, dualism and exploitation. It also frames NRE as a form of strong theory, or “a series of powerful discourses which organise events into understandable and seemingly predictable trajectories” (Gibson-Graham 2014a, 148), that also work to erase other already existing ways in which people and place navigate their interdependencies and become together differently. This thesis (including the five published papers it incorporates) troubles and displaces the hegemonic claims of NRE by exposing it as a form of strong theory which erases other (multiple) becomings that co-constitute more-than-human worlds. To do this, it uses weak theory (Gibson-Graham 2006, 2014a, Sedgewick 1997, Stewart 2008, Wright 2015) to begin to trace the many ways in which twenty-one women continue to resist NRE in NSW, Australia. Using two case studies to attend to their resistance, and to the relationalities and people/place becomings that are threatened by NRE, this thesis foregrounds some of the messy, multiple and emergent ways that people and place become together and also challenge the claimed hegemony of NRE. The first case study in this thesis traces some of the ways in which women in the NSW Hunter Valley experience NRE as a deeply violent and destructive practice that dismisses the complex affective, emotive, and more-than-rational relations they share with place. It also highlights the ways in which the techno-scientific framing of Social Impact Assessment (SIA) continues to struggle to conceptualise (and legitimise) relations with place that are more-than-capitalist. Furthermore, it considers the ways in which these messy and pervasive relations also propel resistance to extraction. In paying attention to resistance, the second case study in this thesis follows the work of the Knitting Nannas Against Gas (KNAG), a social movement that facilitates the participation of older women in creative and non-violent resistance to resource extraction. In highlighting their distinctive and often unexpected practices of resistance, this thesis gestures toward the work of the Knitting Nannas in order to challenge persisting assumptions about the bodies and subjects that resist NRE, and the way that these practices participate in shifting “the world’s becoming” (Wright 2014, 706). Through both of these case studies, this thesis uses weak theory to foreground the multiplicity of women’s resistance to NRE in NSW, and to oppose some of the strong theoretical framings of the ways that women engage in resistance. Rather than continuing to try to ‘make sense’ of or explain why women resist NRE, this thesis instead turns to attending to multiplicity in tracing women’s diverse more-than-gendered, more-than-human resistances and participation in different becomings with place. If, as J. K Gibson-Graham remind us ‘women are everywhere’ (2005, 2006), this thesis posits that the invitation is to trace the multiplicity of women’s becomings with place – becomings that confound the universalising logic of NRE. In attending to stories and practices of resistance from women and places which continue to resist extractive projects in NSW, Australia, this thesis undertakes a commitment to ‘read for difference’ (Gibson-Graham 2008) and to foregrounding other possibilities, other practices, and other worlds in order to “make them more ‘real’, more credible, more viable as objects of policy and activism” (Gibson-Graham 2008, 618). In a world where the destructive consequences of NRE are becoming increasingly pronounced, the work of imagining and performing these relations differently becomes increasingly urgent. This thesis participates in the work of highlighting and foregrounding some of the multiple and emergent relations and becomings that always/already exist, in order to contribute to displacing the strong claims of NRE and its adverse consequences for people and place.
- Subject
- resistance; resource extraction; weak theory; gender; thesis by publication
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1494272
- Identifier
- uon:53756
- Rights
- Copyright 2021 Melina Ey
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 5 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 181 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |