- Title
- “I Guess You Could Call it Plant Racism” – Making Kin in Australian Environmental Workfare
- Creator
- Cooper, Jai
- Relation
- Journal of Australian Studies Vol. 47, Issue 4, p. 688-705
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2023.2236639
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2023
- Description
- Some scholars have drawn associations between Australian environmentalism and racism. Others have argued that natural resource management policies go beyond the science in justifying policies that have their real foundation in Australian nationalism. Yet applying semiotic analyses to focus upon such associations can risk obscuring efforts to actively loosen the nature-culture binary. Australia has a unique history of three decades of national environmental youth training programs such as Green Corps and Green Army. Such environmental workfare engages a diverse range of actors: from university-qualified scientists to unemployed urban and rural youth. If any workplace culture is likely to generate a naïve environmentalist eco-nationalism, then the pseudo-military setting of national environmental workfare programs would be worthy of close examination. Based upon data collected from participants in Australian environmental workfare programs, this article explores how young workers displayed critical reflexivity, engaging creatively and ironically, embracing the more obscure Others. While attempting to generate cultural capital, particularly in the field of environmental science, they actively spurned naïve environmentalism. From the midst of the Australian bush, young people answered Haraway’s call to “make kin in the Chthulucene”.
- Subject
- workfare; eco-nationalism; making kin; Green Army; reflexivity; envrionment; SDG 1; SDG 8; SDG 12; Sustainable Development Goals
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1493276
- Identifier
- uon:53529
- Identifier
- ISSN:1444-3058
- Rights
- © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properlycited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s)or with their consent.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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Goal 1: No Poverty
Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production
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