2020

Our 2020 content highlights

Articles

Corona and climate: virus time

As lockdowns and a desperately uncertain future keep us oscillating between the poles of urgency and stasis, Killian Quigley considers how crisis impels our relationship to language and temporality to evolve.

Coming together to address (another) global crisis

Director David Schlosberg on the importance of the Institute’s work and the fight for justice in a time of unprecedented intersecting crises.

Grieving with plants, dancing in the leaves

Working with plants for the entirety of her career, Rosanne Quinnell from the School of Life and Environmental Sciences reflects on the power of the plant world to soothe, connect and regenerate the human spirit in troubled times, despite our modern culture’s botanical blindness.

Confronting crises: corona and climate series

We’re curating a new series of opinion pieces from the Institute’s community that explores the intersections between ecological and epidemiological crises and the fight for a different future.

Swinging the pendulum towards the politics of production

A longform essay adapted from Dinesh Wadiwel's presentation at the 2020 Iain McCalman lecture addressing the institutional or structural drivers of growing per capita meat and dairy consumption.

Cooling bodies, cooling communities: building holistic resilience to heat stress

“Heat is such a difficult threat to grapple with because it engages with and exacerbates multiple forms of pre-existing vulnerability in Australian society – the physical, the systemic, and the material.” Hannah Della Bosca reflects on our SEI Amplified event Reducing The Impact of Heatwaves earlier this month.

Food as a tool for change in troubled times

We sit down with the FoodLab Sydney community to talk about connection, collaboration and how “the simple act of eating together at the same table can be one of the most profound ways to establish common ground while celebrating cultural and culinary diversity”.

Re-inventing the social: eco-design, care and climate justice

At our SEI Amplified event last week on Reducing the Impact of Heatwaves, Associate Professor Tess Lea explored the intersections between climate change, housing and social justice and the ways we can prepare for uncertain futures; ultimately, with “tremendous acts of care” and “a complete reinvention of the social”.

Climate change and the new work order

"We cannot achieve a sustainable society, one that exists within safe planetary limits, without reconfiguring the way we organise and value work."

Introducing new postdoctoral research fellow June Rubis

We sit down with our new postdoc June Rubis, to talk about her work on native relations and the environment with a focus on environmental change in Malaysian Borneo.