Browsing by Author "Dombroski K"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 23
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    Can the commons be temporary? The role of transitional commoning in post-quake Christchurch
    (3/04/2019) Dombroski K; Diprose G; Boles I
    In recent work on commons and commoning, scholars have argued that we might delink the practice of commoning from property ownership, while paying attention to modes of governance that enable long-term commons to emerge and be sustained. Yet commoning can also occur as a temporary practice, in between and around other forms of use. In this article we reflect on the transitional commoning practices and projects enabled by the Christchurch post-earthquake organisation Life in Vacant Spaces, which emerged to connect and mediate between landowners of vacant inner city demolition sites and temporary creative or entrepreneurial users. While these commons are often framed as transitional or temporary, we argue they have ongoing reverberations changing how people and local government in Christchurch approach common use. Using the cases of the physical space of the Victoria Street site “The Commons” and the virtual space of the Life in Vacant Spaces website, we show how temporary commoning projects can create and sustain the conditions of possibility required for nurturing commoner subjectivities. Thus despite their impermanence, temporary commoning projects provide a useful counter to more dominant forms of urban development and planning premised on property ownership and “permanent” timeframes, in that just as the physical space of the city being opened to commoning possibilities, so too are the expectations and dispositions of the city’s inhabitants, planners, and developers.
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    Community economies: Responding to questions of scale, agency and indigenous connections in Aotearoa New Zealand
    (Counterfutures, 2017) Diprose GJ; Dombroski K; Healy S; Waitora J
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    Cultivating commoners: Infrastructures and subjectivities for a postcapitalist counter-city
    (Elsevier B.V., 2023-12-01) Dombroski K; Conradson D; Diprose G; Healy S; Yates A
    In this paper, we investigate how infrastructure and care shape commoner subjectivities. In our research into an urban youth farm in Aotearoa New Zealand, we heard and observed profound tales of growth and transformation among youth participants. Not only were our interviewees narrating stories of individual transformation (of themselves and others), but they also spoke of transformations in the way they engaged with the world around them, including the land and garden and its many species and ecological systems, the food system more generally, the wider community and their co-workers. Such transformations were both individual and collective, having more in common with the collective caring subject homines curans than the autonomous, rational work-ready subject of homo economicus. Using postcapitalist theory on commons, commoning and subjectivity, we argue that these socio-affective encounters with more-than-human commons enabled collective, caring commoner subjectivities to emerge and to be cultivated through collective care in place. We suggest that the commons can be thought of as an infrastructure of care for the counter-city, providing the conditions for the emergence and cultivation of collective caring urban subjects.
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    Cultivating community economies: tools for building a liveable world
    (Routledge, 2020-10-20) Gibson-Graham JK; Cameron J; Dombroski K; Healy S; Community Economies Collective; Miller E; Speth, G; Courrier, K
    Amid the failure of traditional politics and policies to address our fundamental challenges, an increasing number of thoughtful proposals and real-world models suggest new possibilities, this book convenes an essential conversation about ...
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    Delivering Urban Wellbeing through Transformative Community Enterprise
    (2019) Dombroski K; Diprose G; Conradson D; Healy S; Watkins A
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    Dialogues for wellbeing in an ecological emergency: Wellbeing-led governance frameworks and transformative Indigenous tools
    (SAGE Publications, 20/06/2022) Yates A; Dombroski K; Dionisio R
    At a time of ecological emergency there are pressing reasons to develop more responsive wellbeing-led governance frameworks that engage with both human and more-than-human wellbeing. Attempts to incorporate wellbeing indices into wellbeing-led governance include the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, the Gross National Happiness index of Bhutan, and a variety of emerging wellbeing-led governance frameworks in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Some of these frameworks have begun to include more-than-human wellbeing indices in their toolkit, but like many geographers and Indigenous scholars, we are wary of the dangers of universalising and abstractionist ‘indexology’ (Ratuva, 2016). In this paper, we review wellbeing-led governance frameworks with a view to more-than-human wellbeing and Indigenous knowledge. We outline an emerging pluriversal and prefigurative project where Indigenous scholars engage with partners in co-creation methods in place, incorporating Indigenous-Māori cultural perspectives into more situated and holistic wellbeing tools. We argue that while critique is important, so too is engaging in Indigenous-led research interventions fortransformative metrics and tools, particularlyin these times of socio-ecological crisis. As we ‘stay with’ this trouble (Haraway, 2018), we hope to contribute to a culturally specific place-based set of wellbeing indices and tools to inform wellbeing-led governance for more-than-human wellbeing.
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    Diverse more-than-human approaches to climate change adaptation in Thai Binh, Vietnam
    (Victoria University of Wellington and John Wiley and Sons Australia Ltd., 1/04/2022) Do Thi H; Dombroski K
    Climate change adaptation is a key shared endeavour of our time. In Thai Binh Province of Vietnam, rice farmers have been adapting to environmental change for generations and have developed sophisticated strategies of paying attention to non-human entities. Such strategies stand in stark contrast to modernist, developmentalist climate change adaptation interventions prioritising mastery and control over the environment. In this article, we think about farmers and other species ‘surviving well’ in the context of climate change adaptation in Thai Binh. We examine the strategies for adaptation already present and the implications of such strategies for climate change adaptation approaches in Vietnam and further afield. We argue that local practices of listening to non-human entities and imagining them as kin can challenge modernist developmentalist approaches to adaptation, providing innovative locally appropriate adaptations. Beyond this, such practices can lead the way in developing non-exploitative and mutually beneficial relationships in ‘more-than-human’ ecological communities for long-term survival.
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    ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHIES: Navigating Research and Activism
    (2022-01-01) Dombroski K; Roelvink G
    This chapter focuses on a sub-field of economic geography that has activism at its core: community economies. We begin by situating community economies research within economic geography, in doing so placing our methodological discussion in the context of broader intellectual trends. The chapter then focuses on three challenges shaping community economies methodology today. In contextual challenges of uncertainty, we explore how community economies researchers are “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016), rejecting simplification in favour of unknown yet hopeful possibility. Embracing our work as a ‘performative ontological practice', community economies research has a clear political agenda in this methodological ‘making of other worlds', one that is guided by ethical economic principles and practice. A central challenge in this work is how our methodology, and use of particular methods, is created and enacted with human and more-than-human others. This includes working with those of other intellectual traditions and different ontologies and well as more-than-human participants whose agency is often not recognized.
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    Emerging transitions in organic waste infrastructure in Aotearoa New Zealand
    (John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2023-04-01) Diprose G; Dombroski K; Sharp E; Yates A; Peryman B; Barnes M
    Aotearoa New Zealand is at a critical juncture in reducing and managing organic waste. Research has highlighted the significant proportion of organic waste sent to landfills and associated adverse effects such as greenhouse gas emissions and loss of valuable organic matter. There is current debate about what practices and infrastructure to invest in to better manage and use organic waste. We highlight the diversity of existing organic waste practices and infrastructures, focusing on Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. We show how debates about organic waste practices and infrastructure connect across three themes: waste subjectivities, collective action in place and language.
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    Ethnography In and With Bodies: Embodied Learning and the Academic Life
    (Victoria University of Wellington, 2019-12-19) McKinnon K; Dombroski K
    The body is a vital part of ethnographic experience and learning. This essay reflects on the complex work that the body does during ethnography, not just as an instrument for data collection, but as a means of collaboration, a site of embodied learning, and a conduit for connection and communication that is more-than-verbal. In this contribution we reflect on research engagements that have been profoundly embodied, involving deep embodied learning and communication, touch and connection in the contexts of childbirth, infant care, and midwifery. Building on experiences in China, Laos, New Zealand, and Australia, we discuss the richness and the challenges of consciously collaborating with, in, and via bodies and embodied communications. We also explore what might be learned from the embodied experience of ethnography that we can bring back into academic life: are there lessons we can learn from collaborating with bodies that can help us to thrive amongst the challenges of the neoliberal university?
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    Feminist geographies in Aotearoa New Zealand: cultural, social and political moments
    (1/01/2019) Adams-Hutcheson G; Bartos AE; Dombroski K; Le Heron E; Underhill-Sem Y
    Aotearoa New Zealand is a nation of promise, potential and enigma: it was the first country in the world where women gained the vote in 1893 and now boasts the youngest woman world leader in 2017. It is also a postcolonial nation where structural racism, homophobia, and sexism persist, yet it has also given legal personhood to a river. Our Country Report foregrounds Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographic scholarship that responds to, reflects, and sometimes resists such contrasts and contradictions at the national scale. We employ the lens of the 2017 national election to critically engage with current gendered and indigenous politics in the country. Analyzing these politics through three ‘feminist moments,’ our paper highlights the breadth and scope of current Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographic scholarship and directions.
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    Food for people in place: reimagining resilient food systems for economic recovery
    (MDPI (Basel, Switzerland), 2020-11-11) Dombroski K; Diprose G; Sharp E; Graham R; Lee L; Scobie M; Richardson S; Watkins A; Martin-Neuninger R
    The COVID-19 pandemic and associated response have brought food security into sharp focus for many New Zealanders. The requirement to “shelter in place” for eight weeks nationwide, with only “essential services” operating, affected all parts of the New Zealand food system. The nationwide full lockdown highlighted existing inequities and created new challenges to food access, availability, affordability, distribution, transportation, and waste management. While Aotearoa New Zealand is a food producer, there remains uncertainty surrounding the future of local food systems, particularly as the long-term effects of the pandemic emerge. In this article we draw on interviews with food rescue groups, urban farms, community organisations, supermarket management, and local and central government staff to highlight the diverse, rapid, community-based responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings reveal shifts at both the local scale, where existing relationships and short supply chains have been leveraged quickly, and national scale, where funding has been mobilised towards a different food strategy. We use these findings to re-imagine where and how responsibility might be taken up differently to enhance resilience and care in diverse food systems in New Zealand.
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    From absences to emergences: Foregrounding traditional and Indigenous climate change adaptation knowledges and practices from Fiji, Vietnam and the Philippines
    (Elsevier B.V., 2024-04-01) See J; Cuaton GP; Placino P; Vunibola S; Thi HD; Dombroski K; McKinnon K
    The differential impacts of climate change have highlighted the need to implement fit-for-purpose interventions that are reflective of the needs of vulnerable communities. However, adaptation projects tend to favour technocratic, market-driven, and Eurocentric approaches that inadvertently disregard the place-based and contextual adaptation strategies of many communities in the Global South. The paper aims to decolonise climate change adaptation guided by the critical tenets of ‘Decolonising Climate Adaptation Scholarship’ (DCAS). It presents empirical case studies from Fiji, Vietnam, and the Philippines and reveals the different ways that Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) and strategies are devalued and suppressed by modernist and developmentalist approaches to climate adaptation. The paper then foregrounds some of the adaptive techniques that resist and remain, or have been re-worked in hybrid ways with ILK. Ultimately, this paper combats the delegitimisation of ILK by mainstream climate change adaptation scholarship and highlights the need for awareness and openness to other forms of knowing and being.
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    Journeying from “I” to “we”: assembling hybrid caring collectives of geography doctoral scholars
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2018-02) Dombroski K; Watkins AF; Fitt H; Frater J; Banwell K; Mackenzie K; Mutambo L; Hawke K; Persendt F; Turković J; Ko SY; Hart D
    Completing a PhD is difficult. Add a major earthquake sequence and general stress levels become much higher. Caring for some of the nonacademic needs of doctoral scholars in this environment becomes critical to their scholarly success. Yet academic supervisors, who are in the same challenging environment, may already be stretched to capacity. How then do we increase care for doctoral scholars? While it has been shown elsewhere that supportive and interactive department cultures reduce attrition rates, little work has been done on how exactly departments might create these supportive environments: the focus is generally on the individual actions of supervisors, or the individual quality of students admitted. We suggest that a range of actors and contingencies are involved in journeying toward a more caring collective culture. We direct attention to the hybridity of an emerging ‘caring collective’, in which the assembled actors are not only ‘students’ and ‘staff’, but also bodies, technologies, objects, institutions, and other nonhuman actors including tectonic plates and earthquakes. The concept of the hybrid caring collective is useful, we argue, as a way of understanding the distributed responsibility for the care of doctoral scholars, and as a way of stepping beyond the student/supervisor blame game.
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    Pluriversal bodies: Researching care through embodied ethnography
    (Wiley, 2024) Dombroski K
    In this research note, I outline an approach to embodied experiences of care and caregiving in ethnographic scholarship on care. I describe how ethnographers of care and caregiving can use embodied methodologies, particularly through attending also to the cross-cultural differences in embodied experiences. In this research note, I bring together care research and cross-cultural embodied ethnography with my own work in Asia Pacific to outline an approach to researching care in the pluriverse – the multiple, overlapping realities of ontology, culture and experience that underpin all our lives. I draw on Annemarie Mol's conceptualisation of the body multiple (2002), Anna Tsing's understanding of awkward engagement (2005), Gibson-Graham's reading for difference (2020) and Sean Hsiang-lin Lei's research on hygiene (2014) to consider how researcher bodies might be useful in detecting pluriversal encounters in caregiving.
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    Returning water data to communities in Ndola, Zambia: A case study in decolonising environmental science
    (31/12/2019) Chitondo M; Dombroski K
    Many scientific research projects carried out in developing countries gather data and fail to return any summary of the findings to the community that provided the data. Residents from communities experiencing water issues are therefore deprived of effective participation in the use of findings, since communities might be seen as only a source of data. Indigenous writers have revealed the injustice of this reality and have suggested that this is typical of colonial or 'colonising' research methods. It is concerning because accessing research knowledge encourages communities to examine their issues and empowers them to formulate solutions. Inspired by decolonising methodologies, we explored different 'decolonising' approaches to returning research findings to participant communities using the results of a recent water research project conducted in Ndola, Copperbelt Province, Zambia. In this case study, we describe participant communities experience regarding access to research findings and conclude that face-to-face discussion is the preferred approach to returning water research findings in Ndola.
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    Surviving well together: post development, maternity care and the politics of ontological pluralism
    (Routledge, 2019) McKinnon K; Healy S; Dombroski K; Klein, E; Morreo, CE
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    Surviving well: From diverse economies to community economies in Asia-Pacific
    (John Wiley and Sons Inc, 2022-04) Dombroski K; Duojie C; McKinnon K
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    Testing practices for testing times: Exploring Indigenous-led governance
    (SAGE Publications, 2023-07-12) Dionisio R; Dombroski K; Yates A
    In this author response, we further reflect on pluriversal and prefigurative approaches to research, centred on Indigenous Māori knowledge, while opening space for cross-cultural perspectives and co-creation methods. We address the responses authored by Meg Parsons, Wendy Steele and Wendy Harcourt, starting by summarising what we took from each contribution. We discuss key questions raised by each of the authors in the context of the evolving research programme and broader developments on wellbeing governance in Aotearoa. Pluriversal and prefigurative experimental approaches are key to testing and iteratively advancing the research agenda in disruptive times.