ORCID Profile
0000-0002-5654-3464
Current Organisations
University of Technology Sydney
,
University of Tasmania
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Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 04-11-2019
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-07-2017
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 08-02-2022
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-07-2020
Publisher: Radical Housing Journal
Date: 04-04-2019
DOI: 10.54825/SWAE1331
Abstract: This paper traces our scholar-activist work with resident groups that arose in response to the redevelopment of a public housing estate in Sydney, Australia. Over the two-year period of our involvement, the groups’ capacities to contest the redevelopment were gradually destabilised and neutralised by pressure from state actors and through intra-group tensions. In other words, the activism imploded and we were imbricated in that process. In this paper, we apply an autoethnographic method of ‘writing-as-inquiry’, which draws upon our correspondence with one another as data, to chart the challenges and possibilities for academics working within urban activism. Firstly, we are critical of ourselves for treading (too) carefully, which meant that we failed to challenge gendered, racialized and classed group hierarchies, and failed to support more radical and resistant positions to state authorities. Secondly, we highlight the power that in idual actors can have to derail an activist group. Place-based activism necessarily means that people of varied political leanings and ideological dispositions will come together. It also means that people of erse, and sometimes antagonistic personalities, will encounter one another. Thirdly, we point to the hostile and destructive context provided by the neoliberal city and, increasingly, the neoliberal university. We propose that when engaging in activism, academics should determinedly de-centre the self and centralise activist aims as they work to balance the objectives on both sides of the scholar-activist hyphen. We deliberate the role academics can play in mediating the conflicts that arise in activism, and the repercussions of such a direction, which inevitably means accepting the messiness of activism, and as Haraway has put it, ‘staying with the trouble’.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 07-07-2021
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 25-03-2019
Abstract: Waterloo, in Sydney, Australia, is a neighbourhood currently dominated by a large public housing estate. The estate is to be redeveloped to be a ‘socially mixed’ community largely comprised of private residents. Many current residents of Waterloo have organised in opposition to the redevelopment. At the same time, government and community development agencies have implemented a number of capacity building and consultation programmes for residents, including a theatre performance. Programmes of empowerment are increasingly used by the state and the third sector to encourage disadvantaged or marginalised citizens to ‘take responsibility’ for their own lives. In this article, I examine a performance coordinated by a community theatre group that uses the ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ format, intended to allow participants to identify ways to overthrow the forces that oppress them. I use a Foucauldian conception of power, subjectivity and resistance to critically examine the performance in its context. I explore ways in which the Theatre of the Oppressed format was applied (perhaps unintentionally) in such a way that it reinforced a vision of the situation as immutable and unchangeable, placing the onus on residents to transform their own actions to deliver change. Such framing makes any effort at resistance appear absurd, and is anything but empowering for residents.
Publisher: Radical Housing Journal
Date: 04-04-2019
DOI: 10.54825/RJBW6624
Abstract: The first issue of the Radical Housing Journal focuses on practices and theories of organizing as connected to post-2008 housing struggles. As 2008 was the dawn of the subprime mortgage and financial crisis, and as the RHJ coalesced ten years later in its aftermath, we found this framing apropos. The 2008 crisis was, after all, a global event, constitutive of new routes and formations of global capital that in turn impacted cities, suburbs, and rural spaces alike in highly uneven, though often detrimental, ways. Attentive to this, we hoped to think through its globality and translocality by foregrounding “post-2008” as field of inquiry. What new modes of knowledge pertinent to the task of housing justice organizing could be gained by thinking 2008 through an array of geographies, producing new geographies of theory?
No related grants have been discovered for Laura Wynne.