Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I will explore how technology featured as salvation versus damnation in the debate around the social impacts of the Rocky Hill Coal Mine in Gloucester.

Paper long abstract:

Earlier this year, Judge Brian Preston of the NSW Land and Environment Court rejected a proposal to mine in the Gloucester Valley, arguing that the proposed Rocky Hill coal mine 'would be in the wrong place, at the wrong time.' The implications of the decision are forecasted to be significant for the fossil fuel industry, with climate change and social impacts being central to the rejection of the mine.

Drawing on insights from an ongoing multi-sited ethnographic project with mining affected communities in NSW, I will explore some of the dynamics around mining, place, technology and temporality. I will focus specifically on the case study of the Rocky Hill Coal Mine. In 2018, I acted as an expert witness on the social impacts of the mine in the Land and Environment Court. Through my work on the case, as well as my ethnographic work in Gloucester, I became attuned to how the proposal, the court case and the local narratives surrounding the proposed mine at large centred on questions of how to manage and mitigate impacts through technological regimes. Core elements of the debate were, firstly, the type of impact that technology would have on ecological and social landscapes and, secondly, how technology could offer solutions to these impacts. In this paper, I will explore how technology and ecology intersected in the calls to both support and reject the mine and analyse how these speak to deeper ontological notions of place (Askland and Bunn 2018).

Paper short abstract:

A current anthropological study required the development of a valid methodology for a phenomenographically-oriented, multi-sited, distance, comparative ethnography. Using a case study example and support from existing literature, this paper presents ontological and epistemological perspectives.

Paper long abstract:

21st century telecommunications phenomena have spawned new developments in social science research methodologies. Researchers now utilise online tools to investigate virtual and real-world social phenomena. New methodologies designed to include these are a valuable tool for contemporary anthropologists. A current research study at the University of Tasmania required the development of tailored methodology to investigate real-world social activities across multiple sites and associated on-line communities. The case study employed a blend of traditional and contemporary approaches assembled from a variety of established methodologies. The considerations influencing the development of the methodology are presented in this paper with the intention of informing future researchers of potential valid methodological design.

Ontological and epistemological concerns are addressed to establish a framework for discussion on 21st century ethnographic and phenomenographic methodologies as applied to the case study. Multi-sited, distance, and comparative ethnographies are presented followed by relevant data collection and analysis tools. Categorisation of research informs the reader where each study fits in the current body of research and from what perspectives the knowledge may be viewed, providing a framework for the type of knowledge being examined and how we know it is relevant. When innovative strategies are developed the value of the outcomes, and practicalities of future employment of theoretical platforms, must be both challenged and addressed. This paper presents defence for contemporary anthropological methodologies with support from existing literature.

Paper short abstract:

Digitalisation is reshaping the sociocultural, ecological and economic relationships in and with the agricultural sectors. Drawing on research within a larger interdisciplinary project, we reflect on the opportunities and challenges of a digital transformation of New Zealand’s bioeconomy, focusing on the vision to move from volume to value.

Paper long abstract:

Digital technologies such as Big Data are reshaping large parts of the global agri-food system, particularly in highly industrialised countries. For some, the sector’s digital transformation promises increased productivity, sustainability and new opportunities for rural agricultural communities. Others emphasise the challenges for achieving those goals by noting the potential sociocultural, ecological and economic disruptions associated with the transition toward ‘Farming 4.0’. Like other sectors, the profound changes of the fourth industrial revolution in agriculture are likely to prompt diverse hopes, fears and envisioned futures. In New Zealand, one recurring theme in policy and industry visions is to move from ‘volume to value’, inter alia by harnessing the potential of digital innovation. Such sociotechnical imaginaries do, Jasanoff (2015: 29) notes, “operate as both glue and solvent, able … to preserve continuity across the sharpest ruptures of innovation or, in reverse, to upend firm worlds and make them anew”.

In this paper, we unpack some of the visions and on-the-ground changes associated with the digital transformation of New Zealand’s bioeconomy. We focus on how digitalisation affects understandings of value across networks of suppliers, distributers and consumers— along the so-called value chain—by drawing on qualitative research that includes interviews with key actors and selected document analysis. New digital technologies, like those directly connecting consumers and producers, reshape agricultural relationships, with trust and transparency becoming increasingly valued in addition to the products themselves. We critically reflect on whether such technological changes are sufficient to systematically realise New Zealand’s ‘volume to value’ agricultural future.

Paper short abstract:

In colonised Australia's "carbon oligarchy" climate change poses an existential challenge to life, values and political action which makes a change into the use of renewable energy difficult and disruptive, and easy to suppress, through the unintended consequences of regulation and action.

Paper long abstract:

Climate change represents an existential crisis for colonised Australia and its carbon oligarchy. Climate change operates as a psychological, sociological and ecological phenomena/threat, running against a collective psychology which is expressed in values, both conscious and unconscious, ecological exploitation, and modes of communal sense and imagining. Current values lead to imaginings of technological solutions that minimally disturb conventional behaviour, while current modes of social organisation lead to the destruction of that organisation and its values, through unacknowledged ecological feedback.

In this complex milieu, even likely solutions act as displacements from challenges to social values, especially when solutions express a desire to maintain order free from unintended or disruptive consequences arising from that organisation. Regulations which have grown in the carbon oligarchy, constantly disrupt processes of change, while largely remaining invisible or unconscious.

This paper examines reactions to climate change in three NSW country towns. In one, a history of activism against mining and a program to become self-supporting on renewables has run into problems of cost, regulation and the maintenance of economic values. In another, local people have embraced a form of generosity which presses against economic 'common sense'. In a third, debate is shut down by a mining company's exploitation of historical rivalry between town and country.

In all cases the patterns of social and psychological process appear to limit what is possible, and call for a new mode of narrative and analysis, and new social aims.