ORCID Profile
0000-0001-9350-1282
Current Organisations
University of Tasmania
,
Charles Sturt University
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Research Topics
In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Top 5 Research Topics
ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)
Sociology | Fisheries Sciences | Fish Physiology and Genetics | Rural Sociology | Aquaculture | Sociology Not Elsewhere Classified | Agricultural Marine Biotechnology | Sustainable Development | Human Geography Not Elsewhere Classified
ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)
Institutional Arrangements for Environmental Protection | Control of Animal Pests, Diseases and Exotic Species in Farmland, Arable Cropland and Permanent Cropland Environments | Control of Plant Pests, Diseases and Exotic Species in Farmland, Arable Cropland and Permanent Cropland Environments | Aquaculture Rock Lobster | Environmentally Sustainable Animal Production not elsewhere classified | Land and water management | Environmental policy, legislation and standards not elsewhere classified |
Related Links
Publications
Frame alignment processes for locally useful agricultural soil research and extension: The role of farm advisors
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 30-08-2023
DOI: 10.1111/SORU.12449
Abstract: Farm advisors are recognised as playing an increasingly central role in facilitating interactions between scientists and farmers to improve local implementation of sustainable soil management practices and agricultural innovations more broadly. However, there has been limited scrutiny of what farm advisors do when faced with conflicting interpretations among actors over techniques or approaches for facilitating agricultural innovation. This article advances knowledge in this area by investigating the role of farm advisors in aligning different frames on agricultural soil research and extension across seven Australian mixed farming regions. Drawing upon theoretical work on frame alignment, we argue that farm advisors use three types of strategies to align conflicting frames— frame bridging , frame lification and frame transformation . These strategies seek to frame local soil research and extension priorities in ways that are assumed to resonate more closely with the frames of multiple constituents, such as farmers and soil scientists. Through our analysis, we argue that the application of a frame alignment approach enables greater precision in identifying which (a) interactive and social learning processes, (b) key local influencers and communities of practice and (c) resourcing and governance arrangements are most likely to be effective in facilitating soil research and extension that is locally useful and useable.
“A Place of Pain and Gain”: Exploring the Dynamics of Resistance in the Creation of Sengwe Tshipise Wilderness Corridor, Southeast Zimbabwe
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 19-01-2017
Biosecurity, trade liberalisation, and the (anti)politics of risk analysis: The Australia-New Zealand apples dispute
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-2011
DOI: 10.1068/A43289
Abstract: Biosecurity represents a rapidly growing area of social science inquiry. At the global scale, biosecurity measures adopted by national governments have often been represented as nontariff trade barriers, yet social scientists have paid little attention to the ways in which biosecurity concerns are rendered (at least ostensibly) compatible with trade liberalisation. We use Barry's notion of the ‘antipolitical economy’ to explore how techniques used to frame biosecurity risk are linked to the politics of trade liberalisation. Drawing upon a case study of the long-running dispute concerning access by New Zealand apples to the Australian market, we highlight the significance of the import risk-analysis process used by Biosecurity Australia in framing potential outbreaks of fire-blight disease as a technical issue of risk management—an antipolitical activity. This attempt to shift disease-risk concerns away from the political was contested by Australian and New Zealand growers, who variously viewed the risk-assessment process as insufficiently scientific or as protectionist. We conclude that focusing on risk assessment as a political but putatively antipolitical activity provides crucial insights into the nuanced and complex relationship between biosecurity and trade liberalisation.
Government as a failing operation: Regulating administrative conduct 'at a distance' in Australia
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-2004
Abstract: This article argues that the failure of policies and programmes to achieve their desired effects is a constitutive part of projects of regulation, and is evident particularly in attempts to govern conduct ‘at a distance’. Drawing upon concepts from the Foucaultian-inspired literature on governmentality, a Federal programme in Australia - the Rural Adjustment Scheme (RAS) - is examined and attention given to how its administration at a sub-national (State) level called into question, or ‘problematized’, the effectiveness of the programme from the outset. Using public documents and interviews by the author with 16 public servants, the article explores the rationalities and technologies through which these problematizations of governing were assembled. It focuses particularly on how the administrative ‘freedom’ of State authorities assumed political prominence as both a problem andas a necessary part of responding effectively to the erse needs of clients/farmers.
From risky to responsible: Expert knowledge and the governing of community-led rural development
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 07-2004
Online university education: Liberating the student?
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-2003
Calculating climate: “Advanced liberalism’ and the governing of risk in Australian drought policy
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 09-2001
DOI: 10.1177/144078301128756355
Abstract: For most of last century, governments in Australia treated drought as a ‘natural disaster’, an event that could best be dealt with through public forms of financial assistance. However, following a Review of Natural Disaster Relief Arrangements in 1990, the official definition of drought was changed to a ‘manageable risk’ that farmers were seen to be able to predict and control through formal business planning techniques. Through the use of the literature on governmentality, this article argues that such a shift was of crucial significance in changing the rationalities and technologies of drought management. Farmers were, from this point, constituted as key agents in the management of risk. However, the article argues also that drought as a natural disaster was not completely abandoned and continues to remain important in defining the limits of drought as a managed risk, and in calling into question the capacities of farmers to plan for so-called exceptional events. This contestation of managed risk shows one of the ways in which advanced liberal forms of rule can be shaped in a ‘social’ manner.
Mapping the dynamics of new forms of technological governance in agriculture: Methodological considerations
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 08-2004
DOI: 10.1068/A36196
Abstract: This paper reflects on the conceptual issues involved in developing a methodology to study the role of computer-based technologies, and particularly farm planning and management software, in governing the practices of farmers. It represents the first stage of a larger project that explores how farm planning and management practices are governed through, and reconfigured by, such technology. In recent years, computer software has been encouraged by a range of government and nongovernment agencies and organisations as a useful technical means of supporting farm decisionmaking and improving farmers' managerial capacities, thereby improving their competitive position. The key question of this paper is how to conceptualise and study this link. Existing literature in the area tends to draw on either rationalist – technological determinist or social constructionist accounts which, we suggest, are limited in understanding such software as a type of governmental technology that has productive effects. We argue that a methodology drawing upon insights from governmentality and actor-network theory enables the role of software in programmes of agricultural governance to be more robustly explored as a sociotechnical process. Specifically, a ‘sociology of translation’ is outlined to demonstrate how computer software can be analysed as a material technology of government that constitutes and shapes the capacities of ‘users’ as calculable agents. In order to demonstrate how such a methodology might work in practice, we apply a translation methodology to decision-support software designed to improve the planning practices of dairy farmers in the State of Victoria, Australia.
Re-figuring the problem of farmer agency in agri-food studies: A translation approach
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 03-2006
Guest editorial rural governance in Australia: Changing forms and emerging actors
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 2006
Securitising uncertainty: Ontological security and cultural scripts in smart farming technology implementation
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2021
Remittance income and social resilience among migrant households in Rural Bangladesh
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
Date: 2017
Working around ERPs in technological universities
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-02-2010
Abstract: This article explores the work-arounds through which an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software system is implemented within an Australian University. We argue that while resistance is significant, the process of working around a technology can have ambiguous effects in terms of how users—in this case academics—are governed and govern themselves. Drawing upon Andrew Barry’s Foucauldian-inspired work on ‘‘technological zones,’’ we show how attempts to work-around the ERP contributed to the creation of an alternative technological zone based on cultural discourses of academic freedom aimed at resisting the standardized programs of action inscribed within the university-wide ERP. However, we demonstrate also that these work-arounds resulted in a partial convergence with the university’s advanced liberal objectives of going online to become a globally competitive university. We conclude that more research needs to be conducted into the multiple and ambiguous effects of work-arounds in the practice of governing.
Assembling restructuring: Governmentality, economic regulation and the historical emergence of the ‘enterprising farmer’ in Australian agricultural policy
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 2001
Final word: Australia's food security challenges
Publisher: Springer US
Date: 11-09-2013
Re-discovering the social: Neo-liberalism and hybrid practices of governing in rural natural resource management
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 10-2002
Governing biosecurity in a neoliberal world: Comparative perspectives from Australia and the United Kingdom
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 2012
DOI: 10.1068/A4426
Abstract: International trade poses a serious and growing threat to biosecurity through the introduction of invasive pests and disease: these have adverse impacts on plant and animal health and public goods such as bio ersity, as well as food production capacity. While international governmental bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) recognise such threats, and permit governments to protect human, animal, and plant life or health, such measures must not be applied in a way that is restrictive to trade. This raises a fundamental (but little-examined) tension between effective biosecurity governance and the neoliberal priorities of international trade. In this paper we examine how such tensions play out in the different political and geographical contexts of Australia and the United Kingdom. A comparative approach enables close scrutiny of how trade liberalisation and biosecurity are coconstituted as compatible objectives as well as the tensions and contradictions involved in making these domains a single governable problem. The comparative analysis draws attention to the policy challenges facing Australia and the UK in governing national biosecurity in a neoliberal world. These challenges reveal a complex geopolitics in the ways in which biosecurity is practised, institutionalised, and debated in each country, with implications for which pests and diseases are defined as threats and, therefore, which commodities are permitted to move across national borders. Despite efforts by the WTO to govern biosecurity as a technical matter of risk assessment and management, and to harmonise national practices, we contend that actual biosecurity practices continue to erge between states depending on perceptions of risk and hazard, both to agricultural production and to rural environments as a whole, as well as unresolved tensions between internationalised neoliberalism and domestic concerns.
Adoption; a relevant concept for agricultural land management in the 21 century?
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 16-09-2022
DOI: 10.1177/00307270221126540
Abstract: This review seeks to understand the implications of using “adoption” to evaluate agricultural soil management outreach in the twenty-first century. The act of changing from one practice to another practice is referred to as “adoption”. The concept of adoption is closely associated with the design and evaluation of agricultural extension programs. Although focusing on adoption is deeply entrenched in agricultural extension, some scholars question the usefulness of the concept in light of the complexity and uncertainty that characterises farming in the twenty-first century. We present a purposeful review of literature that considers adoption in relation to three general approaches to agricultural extension top-down, bottom-up and co-constructionist, with an emphasis on land management in Australia. The conceptual fit of adoption as a measure of success for each extension approach is explored. We conclude that the usefulness of adoption of in idual practices or tools as a measure of success needs to be considered in context. Failing to reflect on what adoption means in any particular program or activity risks ignoring or misunderstanding real change and impacts and /or shaping activities to fit a simple, linear adoption expectation. We suggest that adoption remains a useful concept, but could be best considered as a gateway to increased reflection and reflexivity when projects and activities are being developed.
Australia's developmental trajectory: Neoliberal or not?
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 25-06-2014
Abstract: General support is given for Weller and O’Neill’s (2014) aim to question the influence of neoliberalism on political and economic change in Australia. However, their key proposition that Australia’s developmental trajectory has never been neoliberal in intent or outcome is challenged. Critiqued also is Weller and O’Neill’s use of a working definition of neoliberalism that fails to engage explicitly or sufficiently with theoretical perspectives on neoliberal governance. A governmentality approach is argued to offer a way forward in exploring how neoliberal and non-neoliberal rationalities and techniques articulate with one another as part of attempts to address specific problematizations of rule.
Conclusion: Awkward Assemblages
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
Date: 2017
Assembling neoliberalism: Expertise, practices, subjects
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
Date: 2017
Framing sustainability: Alternative standards schemes for sustainable palm oil and South-South trade
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2019
Managing the grand challenge of biological threats to food production: The importance of institutional logics for managing Australian biosecurity
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 23-08-2019
Abstract: This article argues that an institutional logics framework is critical for developing a shared responsibility approach to managing the grand challenge of biosecurity in Australian agriculture. We identify the dominant logics evident in the Australian biosecurity context. In doing so, we draw attention to how a shared responsibility approach is compromised by tensions created by multiple logics, such as varying interpretations of biosecurity roles and responsibilities that different actors hold. However, in reframing such tensions from an institutional ambidexterity framework, we argue that a shared responsibility approach is achievable and, through ex les from the Australian context, highlight the sites and spaces through which it may be fostered. We argue that identifying these sites and spaces requires that scholars conceptualise logics as blended rather than as discrete modes of operation. JEL Classification: M19
Governing environmental harms in a risk society
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date: 14-07-2004
Framing Agri‐Digital Governance: Industry Stakeholders, Technological Frames and Smart Farming Implementation
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 11-03-2020
DOI: 10.1111/SORU.12297
Introduction: The food security problem in Australia
Publisher: Springer US
Date: 11-09-2013
Editorial: A call to expand disciplinary boundaries so that social scientific imagination and practice are central to quests for ‘responsible’ digital agri-food innovation
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 04-2022
DOI: 10.1111/SORU.12376
Abstract: This editorial introduces a special issue (SI) concerning quests for responsible digital agri‐food innovation. We present our interpretations of the concepts of responsible innovation and digital agri‐food innovation and show why they can and have been productively interrelated with social science theories and methods. First, each of the articles in this SI is briefly introduced and synthesised around three themes: (1) the need for a critique of digital ‘solutionism’ in current interdisciplinary research, development and innovation settings (2) that social science contributes value via the ideas it brings to life to challenge dominant power dynamics and (3) that social scientific imagination and practice is a valuable long‐term investment to both mitigate risk but also embrace socioenvironmental opportunities as we face ongoing sustainability crises into the future. Second, we identify future research considerations arising within the field, sitting at the intersection of social science and agricultural sociotechnical transitions. Our insights relate to challenges and opportunities to ‘do’ social science within the context of contemporary and nascent transitions such as increasing digitalisation. Researchers trained in social science theory and practice can make distinctive contributions to agri‐food innovation processes by making social stakes visible and by advancing inclusive processes of research policy and technology design.
Roll-out neoliberalism and hybrid practices of regulation in Australian agri-environmental governance
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2007
Performing users: The case of a computer-based dairy decision-support system
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-2007
Abstract: This article draws on the concept of “performance” to argue for greater recognition of preexisting practices in the configuration of users. Through an Australian case study of a computer-based dairy decision-support system introduced via a two-day workshop to participating farmers, the article examines the assembling of imputed farmer users in the design of the software. It then explores how the designer and trainers attempt, through the decision-support system, to mobilize their network and align the imputed user with farmers' preexisting performances. The case study highlights that attempts to make workable on-farm the “new” performances of users inscribed in the software are highly contingent on farmers' preexisting knowledge practices. These “old” performances problematize the designer's and trainers' version of imputed users and contribute to partial translation of the decision-support system. A focus on performance is argued to provide a useful starting point in mapping the effects of preexisting knowledge practices on attempts to enroll users in technosocial programs.
Flexible adoption of conservation agriculture principles: practices of care and the management of crop residue in Australian mixed farming systems
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 20-12-2019
Mapping neoliberalism: Animal health and the spatial practices of disease management
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
Date: 2017
Introduction: Assembling neoliberalism
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
Date: 2017
Related Organisations
Related Funding Activities
Farm Biosecurity Practices And The Management Of Emergency Animal Disease
Start Date: 2013
End Date: 2014
Funder: Department of Agriculture, Australian Government
View Funded ActivityImproving Adoption Of Management Strategies For Summer Perennial Weeds Through Effective Engagement Processes
Start Date: 2013
End Date: 2017
Funder: Meat and Livestock Australia
View Funded ActivitySustainable Farming In Australia: Market Instruments For Improved Land Management
Start Date: 2010
End Date: 2012
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivitySocial Factors Influencing Technology Adoption In The Rice Industry
Start Date: 2014
End Date: 2016
Funder: Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation
View Funded ActivityProtecting Australia’s Food Future: Shared Responsibility For Biosecurity
Start Date: 2019
End Date: 2021
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityARC Research Hub For Sustainable Onshore Lobster Aquaculture
Start Date: 2019
End Date: 2023
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityDiscovery Projects - Grant ID: DP190102517
Start Date: 03-2019
End Date: 12-2024
Amount: $303,763.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityIndustrial Transformation Research Hubs - Grant ID: IH190100014
Start Date: 2020
End Date: 12-2024
Amount: $5,000,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityDiscovery Projects - Grant ID: DP1092534
Start Date: 2010
End Date: 01-2013
Amount: $230,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity