Speaker: Catherine Ayres  PhD Pre-Submission Seminar 

Location: Larry Saha Room (HA2175)

National parks are central to contemporary environmental debates in Australia. These debates can often be distilled to a disagreement between those who prioritise the role of national parks in ecological conservation, and those who prioritise what national parks can offer in terms of natural resources and economic gain.
Despite regular discussion about the roles of national parks, surprisingly little has been said on what, precisely, national parks are. Through empirical explorations involving three protected areas in the Australian Capital Territory, I turn to this more ontological problem of national parks in three ways: First, I offer an understanding of national parks as processual places, continually constituted and reconstituted through the practices of all kinds of bodies (whether human, nonhuman, organic or inorganic); Second, I problematise the increasing dominance of scientific evaluation of the ecologies of national parks (and nature more broadly), arguing that the arts, humanities, and social sciences produce knowledge that can help move us beyond reductive and calculative logics of environmental sciences; Third, I argue that these reconceptualisations of place and ecologies can give rise to new and productive terrains of environmental politics.
Influenced by nonrepresentational theoretical and methodological approaches, I attend to issues of affect, materiality, transformation and representation - both in the subject matter, and the production and presentation of my research.