Critical artistic interventions into the geopolitical spaces of islands

Islands, the Anthropocene, and Decolonisation

“…Vast distances and pandemic conditions shaped the design. Somewhat after the fact, we realised our desire to talk with such people required we decolonise our own approach, so we asked an Indigenous scholar/activist from Tuvalu to join us as mentor and guide and he became a fourth originating co-author; that journey has been documented in Farbotko et al (2021) and Stratford et al (2021).…”

“…While this kind of migration will indeed be a profound trauma, it obscures the long history of Pacific migration, as well as the strength and resiliency of our diasporas …Islands, then, are not mere objects and islanders are not powerless victims (Larjosto 2020). Usefully, correlations exist across academic, activist, and artistic endeavours oriented to resistance, critique, and airing the mistrust that the Anthropocene engenders (see 350 Pacific 2022; DeLoughrey 2019; Hawkins and Kanngieser 2017; Stratford and Langridge 2012). One Métis scholar describes it thus: “I have an inherent distrust of this term, the Anthropocene, since terms and theories can act as gentrifiers in their own right, and I frequently have to force myself to engage in good faith with it as heuristic” (Todd 2015:244).…”

Emerging Dimensions in the Conceptualization of Gender, Sex and Sexuality: A Theoretical Review

“…Trans* (with an asterisk) is shorthand for numerous gender minorities, for example, transsexual, transvestite, cross-dresser, genderqueer, nonbinary, gender fluid, agender, non-gendered, third gender, trans woman, trans man, drag king and drag queen, to name a few. Non-western non-heteronormative gender categories, for example those in the Pacific, do not necessarily align with western understandings of transgender (Besnier and Alexeyeff, 2014;Hutchings and Aspin, 2007;Schmidt, 2010;Stratford and Langridge, 2012;Te Awekotuku, 2001).…”

Contemporary art and the geopolitics of extractivism in Turkey's Kurdistan

“…As mentioned in the introduction, one such purchase required by my empirical material concerns violence. Relevant instances in the literature commend art that approaches climate change in Australia as a legacy from colonialism's environmental violence (Jones, 2017;Stratford & Langridge, 2012), and criticise art whose production and communication of knowledge about species extinction -considered a violence in its own right -employs categories and hierarchies that originate from the violence of colonial racialisation and that dovetail with contemporary capitalism's logic of unbounded accumulation (Yusoff, 2012). While I follow these instances in adopting a notion of violence broader than the bodily violation of human beings to better grasp the link between colonialism and contemporary capitalism, my empirical context obliges me to also diverge from them.…”