Emily Potter - Böcker

A not-so-quiet revolution seems to be occurring in wealthy capitalist societies - supermarkets selling ‘guilt free’ Fairtrade products; lifestyle TV gurus exhorting us to eat less, buy local and go green; neighbourhood action groups bent on ‘swopping not shopping’. And this is happening not at the margins of society but at its heart, in the shopping centres and homes of ordinary people. Today we are seeing a mainstreaming of ethical concerns around consumption that reflects an increasing anxiety with - and accompanying sense of responsibility for - the risks and excesses of contemporary lifestyles in the ‘global north’. This collection of essays provides a range of critical tools for understanding the turn towards responsible or conscience consumption and, in the process, interrogates the notion that we can shop our way to a more ethical, sustainable future. Written by leading international scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds - and drawing upon examples from across the globe - Ethical Consumption makes a major contribution to the still fledgling field of ethical consumption studies. This collection is a must-read for anyone interested in the relationship between consumer culture and contemporary social life.

A not-so-quiet revolution seems to be occurring in wealthy capitalist societies - supermarkets selling ‘guilt free’ Fairtrade products; lifestyle TV gurus exhorting us to eat less, buy local and go green; neighbourhood action groups bent on ‘swopping not shopping’. And this is happening not at the margins of society but at its heart, in the shopping centres and homes of ordinary people. Today we are seeing a mainstreaming of ethical concerns around consumption that reflects an increasing anxiety with - and accompanying sense of responsibility for - the risks and excesses of contemporary lifestyles in the ‘global north’. This collection of essays provides a range of critical tools for understanding the turn towards responsible or conscience consumption and, in the process, interrogates the notion that we can shop our way to a more ethical, sustainable future. Written by leading international scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds - and drawing upon examples from across the globe - Ethical Consumption makes a major contribution to the still fledgling field of ethical consumption studies. This collection is a must-read for anyone interested in the relationship between consumer culture and contemporary social life.

Is water a resource or is it the source? Is it something to be consumed or does it have a life of its own? Recent histories of environmental misunderstanding and exploitation shadow our current regime of water management and use. While governments grapple with how to respond to widespread drought, the situation worsens. There is something amiss in current approaches to water. This timely collection of essays addresses the critical and contentious issue of water in Australia today and suggests a need to radically rethink our relationship with this fundamental substance. Contributors from a range of fields, from anthropology to visual arts, discuss the various ways in which we are caught up with water, and challenge us to take up the cultural transformations that underpin a sustainable ecological future.

This book explores a series of Australian 'shadow places' that manifest complex stories of colonised Australia in the throes of environmental crisis. These are places—from nuclear testing grounds, to extractivist landscapes, to the frontiers of colonial violence—that bear the heaviest burdens of capitalist colonial culture, but are routinely considered out of sight and out of mind. Engaging with a range of shadow places across southern Australia via literary, cultural, and critical sources, Shadow Country argues that these places are with us all the time, threaded into the imaginative and material worlds that compose our homes. Through localised stories of environmental disaster, colonial violence, and profound injustice, shadow places connect to the most pressing issues facing human society—environmental futures, social justice, and the imperative of decolonisation. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars with an interest in the intersection of environmental crisis and colonial legacies, and the complexity of living in a time of reckoning with these.

In Writing Belonging at the Millennium, Emily Potter critically considers the long-standing settler-colonial pursuit of belonging manifested through an obsession with firm and stable ground. This pursuit continues across the field of the postcolonial nation today; the recognition of colonization’s destructive impacts on humans and environments troublingly generates a renewed desire to secure non-indigenous belonging. Focusing on the crucial role that Australia’s contemporary literature plays in shaping ideas of place and its inhabitation, Potter tracks non-indigenous belonging claims through a range of fiction and non-fiction texts to examine how settler-colonial anxieties about belonging intersect with intensifying environmental challenges. Significantly, she proposes that new understandings of unsettled and uncertain non-indigenous belonging may actually be fruitful context for decolonizing relations with place – something that is imperative in a time of heightened global environmental crisis.