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Cultural Studies of Natures, Landscapes and Environments
Founding Editors: Rod Giblett, Deakin University, Emily Potter, Deakin University, Warwick Mules, University of Queensland
Developing a better relationship between humans and the earth, people and place, culture and nature is vital for trying to achieve environmental sustainability in the age of climate change. This new series considers each of these terms and the political, economic, semiotic, philosophical and psychological dimensions of our relationship with the earth. Firmly placed in the tradition of cultural studies of nature and landscape begun by Raymond Williams and continued by Alexander Wilson and others, it will publish interdisciplinary work that draws on established approaches within Cultural Studies and develops new ones. It will make a unique and vital contribution not only to academic enquiry but also to new ways of thinking, being and living with the earth. The series will be of interest to a wide range of theorists and practitioners who are seeking directions out of, and solutions to, our environmental and cultural malaise.
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Modern Melbourne
City and Site of Nature and Culture
Melbourne founded in 1835 among marshes and beside a sluggish stream grew from wetlands into a world-class modern city. Drawing on a wide range of historical literary and artistic sources this book explores the cultural and environmental history of the city and its site. Tracing the city from its swampy beginnings in a squatter’s settlement nestled in the marshy delta of the Yarra and Maribyrnong Rivers Rod Giblett illuminates Melbourne through its visible structures and the invisible history of its site.
The book places Melbourne within an international context by comparing and contrasting it to other cities built on or beside wetlands including London New York Paris Los Angeles and Toronto. Further it is the first book to apply the work of European thinkers and writers on modernity and the modern city – such as Walter Benjamin and Peter Sloterdijk – to an analysis of Melbourne. Giblett considers the intertwining of nature and culture people and place and cities and wetlands in this bioregional and ecocultural analysis. Placing the city in its proper bioregional and international contexts Modern Melbourne provides a rich historical analysis of the cultural capital of Australia.

Writing Belonging at the Millennium
Notes from the Field on Settler-Colonial Place
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.

Canadian Wetlands
Places and People

With Nature
Nature Philosophy as Poetics through Schelling, Heidegger, Benjamin and Nancy
With Nature provides new ways to think about our relationship with nature in today’s technologically mediated culture. Warwick Mules makes original connections with German critical philosophy and French poststructuralism in order to examine the effects of technology on our interactions with the natural world. In so doing the author proposes a new way of thinking about the eco-self in terms of a careful sharing of the world with both human and non-human beings. With Nature ultimately argues for a poetics of everyday life that affirms the place of the human-nature relation as a creative and productive site for ecological self-renewal and redirection.

Black Swan Lake
Life of a Wetland
