Instituttseminar: Hedda Askland

Om foredraget (på engelsk)

During the 1970s and 1980s, state-driven pursuits for coal and revenue transformed rural landscapes and sociality in New South Wales, Australia. The region, which has a long history of coal mining, moved from being run by locally-based enterprises that contributed to the sustainability of local communities to large-scale, global corporations relying on a translocal workforce. As coal operations emerged from the underground, a radical restructuring of spatial relations took place. This restructuring was also underpinned by the privatisation of coal and power supplies, with transnational extraction corporations becoming landholders in agricultural regions.

The rapid expansion of the extractive industry has challenged the viability of rural communities, depopulated townships and even led to the disappearance of whole villages. Through the movement of people-including (semi-)permanent in- and out-migration, DIDOs and FIFOs-mining activities have changed social dynamics and social structures, and bestowed a new notion of productivity on previously agricultural farmland and natural landscapes. In this process, notions and experiences of place have been altered and the inscription of past histories and imagined futures in contemporary landscapes have been challenged. In this seminar, I will explore how local residents in the small village of Wollar at the edge of the Great Dividing Range in New South Wales, Australia, perceive and experience "place" as it relates to energy development and resource extraction. The seminar is based on a work-in-progress paper that I am writing together with Dr Matthew Bunn, in which we investigate how intensification of mining alter local perceptions of place and how lived experiences of such change may underpin a sense of displacement and homelessness.

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