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Network co-convener Gabi Mocatta has been elected to the board of the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA). She will serve as vice-president for two years from 2021 and then as president of the association for two years. The IECA is a professional nexus of practitioners, teachers, scholars, students, artists and organizations engaged in research and action to find more ethical and effective ways to communicate about environmental concerns in order to move society towards sustainability. The IECA’s mission is to foster effective and inspiring communication that alleviates environmental issues and conflicts, and solves the problems that cause them.The IECA’s Conference on Communication and the Environment is held every 2 years, with the next in-person conference due to be held in Hobart in June 2022 –  for the first time in the Southern Hemisphere. Follow the IECA on Twitter.

Network co-convenor Emily Potter has received ARC Special Research Initiative Funding (with Brigid Magner and Torika Bolatagici) of

$271,235.00 (2021-2023) to undertake:

Reading in the Mallee: The Literary Past and Future of an Australian Region 

This project addresses key challenges in regional Australia relating to literary activity and the infrastructure that supports it, including access to inclusive reading practices and spaces. Partnering with literary industry stakeholders in the Victorian Mallee region, the research will generate a series of reader-centred events that enhance and diversify the literary infrastructure of the region and produce translatable knowledge for industry stakeholders in regional Australia more broadly. Through innovative methodologies, Mallee readers, both past and present, will contribute knowledge to the first significant account of Mallee literary history, and to industry recommendations for future activities that support community diversity.

CCCNN members Emily Potter, Michele Lobo, Jack Kirne and Rachel Fetherston have recently published contributions to the digital environmental humanities project, ‘A-Z of Shadow Place Concepts’, published by The Shadow Places Network (co-edited by Fiona Miller, Donna Houston and Emily Potter). https://www.shadowplaces.net/concepts. 

The Shadow Places Network is a network of scholars, artists and activists who are collaborating to re-imagine connections between communities and places in a time of climate change.  As explained on the Shadow Place Network website, the network:

…seeks to make visible the place-based, material and imaginative structures, practices and relations that sustain the exploitative capitalist system, and the modern global history of colonisation, that underpin climate change. These structures, practices and relations actively construct a geography of injustice constituted of multiple shadow places.  

(Shadow Places Network, 2019)

The A to Z of Shadow Places Concepts is one example of an interdisciplinary collaboration drawing together academics and artists from different parts of the world.  The network and A-Z project draw their inspiration from the late environmental philosopher Val Plumwood who introduced the powerful concept of shadow places. Plumwood’s article is a treasure-trove of useful ideas.  One of the most enduring statements in the piece is her call to reformulate our attachments to place with the principles and practices of environmental justice:

“…to cherish and care for your places, but without in the process destroying or degrading any other places, where ‘other places’ includes other human places, but also other species’ places”. 

(Plumwood 2008)

‘The A to Z of Shadow Places Concepts’ collection is the outcome of invitations to authors and artists to reflect on the concept of shadow places in their own work and can be accessed here.