Liam Grealy presented the talk “A Repairs and Maintenance-Led Recovery?” at the Our Jobs, Climate, and Community: Planning a Just Recovery for the Territory forum in Darwin.

Tess Lea and Liam Grealy presented the talk “Deep Impact Takes Dry Work” at the Festival of Urbanism, reporting on the impact of the Housing for Health Incubator since 2018.

Tess Lea joined Joanne Corcoran, Ollie Jay, Stephanie Macfarlane, and David Schosberg for the panel ‘Reducing the Impact of Heatwaves: Bodies, Housing, and Cool Suburbs’, hosted by the Sydney Environment Institute. A revised version of Lea’s talk is available here.

At the Climate Justice Summit in Alice Springs, led by Jesuit Social Services, NTCOSS, Environment Centre NT, Arid Lands Environment Centre, and the Central Land Council, Tess Lea presented the paper ‘Transformative Adaptation–Addressing the Injustices of Climate Vulnerability’ and Kirsty Howey presented the paper ‘Who is the Law For? Water Protections in the NT’.  A summary of the event’s discussions and outcomes is available at Protect Country Alliance, here.

Liam Grealy presented the paper ‘Disassembly: Governing Indigenous Housing Neglect at the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference at the University of Queensland.

This paper considers how housing governance accelerates the breakdown and dysfunction of regional and remote Indigenous housing. Drawing on anthropologies of bureaucracy and critical analyses of time, it’s structured in three parts, highlighting particular legal-bureaucratic instruments alongside related figures of temporal subjection: the lease as promise; the condition report and waiting; and the tender and repetition. This structure highlights differentiated unfurlings of generic policy instruments in various local assemblages. It analyses how such instruments undermine adequate Indigenous housing provision in the Territory – governing neglect – while grasping the utility, if not necessity, of those instruments for effective housing governance.

3:30-5:00pm, Charles Diamond Seminar Room (111)

Kirsty Howey and Liam Grealy will present the paper “Securing Supply: Governing Drinking Water in the Northern Territory” in the Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

 AAA/CASCA Conference, Vancouver, November 21, 2019, 4:15-6:00pm, CC EAST | Room 7  | East Meeting Level

Join us for a panel at the 2019 AAA/CASCA conference in Vancouver. Speakers include Tess Lea, Elizabeth Povinelli, Eve Vincent, Kirsty Howey, Benedict Scambary, Liam Grealy, Sarah E. Holcombe, and Dominic Boyer (discussant).

Panel abstract as follows:  Infrastructures – the roads, electrical cables, telecommunications networks, sewerage systems, and water pipes necessary for society’s functioning – have been foregrounded as an anthropological subject. Often framed as emancipatory and progressive, in a time of environmental crisis it is becoming more and more apparent that the sedimented networks through which goods, ideas, power, people and money circulate (Larkin, 2013) are also differentially distributed, variably thwarted or enabled, inhibiting the possibilities for existing well in the Anthropocene (Boyer, 2018 and Povinelli 2011). What appears for some as a future racing towards the earth as a final end is for others merely the ongoing ends of forms of infrastructure that have and continue to poison and dispossess them.
In this panel, we invite speakers to re-think the connective tissue of infrastructures anthropologically, exploring how they function to distribute goods, value, and health for some while dispossessing, poisoning, and deforming the worlds of others.
We ask what paying attention to the infrastructural surrounds and their invisible sustenance systems can reveal about the longstanding catastrophe of late liberalism and potentials within and alongside it for radical change. How would the question of toxic infrastructural leakage look if passing through and situated within late settler liberalisms? And can critical theory and ethnography grapple with the vexed issue of conditions of viability, beyond attempted disavowals by conjuring an abstract Otherwise?

Tess Lea ‘Housing, Health, Hardware: Rethinking Policy through Infrastructural Inequalities’

The Blue House, New Orleans, September 12, 2019

This talk draws on work relating to health, housing and climate change, as these map on to infrastructural inequalities in regional and remote Australia. It asks us to rethink what policy is, using case studies of the difficulties of attracting attention to effective interventions. Tess will consider why it is important that optimistic abstractions like ‘better policy’ do not weaken our analyses of current and emerging challenges once climate change is factored in.

Tess Lea is an anthropologist who specializes in the anthropology of policy, especially policy dysfunction. Tess is Chief Investigator in the Housing for Health Incubator, an alliance of practitioners, theorists and policy shapers which aims to understand the obstacles to improved living conditions for Indigenous and other disadvantaged householders.

Nick Shapiro, ‘The Afterlives of the FEMA Trailers’

 The Blue House, New Orleans,September 5, 2019

This talk tracks the quasi-legal resale of post-Katrina emergency housing units that were found to harbor high formaldehyde levels. Nick spent a decade tracking these grey markets that led from New Orleans to every corner of the continent, tying the experiences of those who survived the flood to those enduring capital and housing crises all over the continent. If you lived in a FEMA trailer and still have access to the VIN number of your unit, Nick can tell you where it ended up.

Nick Shapiro is a critic and practitioner of environmental monitoring and mitigation, and his research revolves around the complex figure of formaldehyde. Nick is assistant professor of biology and society at UCLA and a fellow at the Technoscience Research Unit at the University of Toronto. See: https://nickshapiro.wordpress.com/

‘Permeable Housing and Intersecting Infrastructures’ Panel at 4S

Sheraton Hotel, New Orleans, September 4, 2019

At their most elemental, houses regulate relations between internal and external environments, providing a carapace for soft tissue residents from water, atmospheres, and vermin. But houses not only shelter bodies, they mimic them, their exoskeletons best conceived less as a box and more as living membrane: permeable, porous, pervious, and absorbent. Arterial pipes, wires, and cable networks intersect with housing to distribute water, energy, and waste; while matter penetrates the house itself, searching out cracks, refusing expulsion, and exposing bodies to diseases and reactants. Repair and maintenance regimes stave off this entropy, both for housing and the municipal infrastructures that make houses functional, safe, and enduring. Such attention, as with the geographies of infrastructural provisioning, are matters of both bureaucratic banality and major public conflict.

This panel is a collaboration between the Housing for Health Incubator and the Blue House Civic Studio, comparing and contrasting examples from Australia, the Louisiana Gulf Coast, and like environments. It asks: what infrastructures are required, and what work is needed to maintain them, to make housing habitable? What can STS insights on past, present, and future housing and infrastructural challenges (such as water supply and management) offer? What innovations are required to face these challenges – in architecture, urban design, governance, and community-engagement – and what battles are being fought to implement proven methods against neglect, erratic attention, and abandonment?

Alison Kenner, ‘The Climate-Ready Home: Thinking Through Landscapes of Vulnerability and Care in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’

Paola Villegas, ‘Situated Bodies and Toxic Certainty: How Mothers think comparatively about risk(s)’

Moritz F Fürst and Alain Bovet, ‘Healthy climate needs a service: maintaining HVAC infrastructures in times of transition’

Liam Grealy, ‘Mold Cultures’

 Securing Supply: Governing Drinking Water in the Northern Territory

At this seminar, Incubator Researchers Dr Liam Grealy and Kirsty Howey will present on their current research into the supply and quality of drinking water in remote communities in the Northern Territory. Responding to water contamination incidents at Borroloola in April to June 2018, and elsewhere, the seminar outlines the available protections for drinking water supply in the NT. This research suggest first that the supply of drinking water in remote towns and communities is limited by the variations in water regulatory regimes across the NT which allow differential forms of responsibility, attention, procedure and intervention. Second, water governance is limited by how authorities are able to know the subterranean objects of governance themselves – including the underground bores and pipes which connect aquifers to houses and people.

‘Securing supply’ is the inaugural seminar of the Top End STS Dry Season Seminar Series.

Indigenous Housing in Remote Australia, The Blue House, New Orleans, 6 December, 2018

Postdoctoral researcher Liam Grealy will speak in The Blue House Fika series about the contemporary housing policies in remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, the work of Healthabitat and the Housing for Health Incubator, and his recent fieldwork in Borroloola with Kirsty Howey. The Blue House is a community where designers, writers, researchers, artists, activists, filmmakers, coders, teachers, entrepreneurs, developers, and others come together to share and shape a new kind of workspace. It runs a weekly Fika series which is currently focused on affordable housing.

Safe Water Summit: A safe, sustainable water supply for remote-living Indigenous Australians,     University of Queensland, 29-30 November, 2018

Paul Torzillo, Director of Healthabitat and Industry Partner of the Incubator, will present a paper on “Housing for Health and Safe Water: Revisiting history to land in the present”.

See the Safe Water Summit website for more information and draft program.

Feral: A Nearly Carbon-Neutral Conference, online, 26 November, 2018

Liam Grealy and Tess Lea will present the paper “Feral Policies for Housing Repair and Maintenance” at the Feral conference, hosted online by the Political Ecology Research Centre at Massey University. Presentations will be released across a period of three weeks in November.

On Monday 19 November 2018, the Office of Environment and Heritage (OEH) will host its annual climate adaptation forum, Adapt NSW, @ Doltone House Darling Island Wharf.

Tess Lea and Christen Cornell will present on recent fieldwork from the research project “Climate change, housing and health: A scoping study into vulnerability, housing tenure and potential adaptation responses.”

This project funded under the NSW Adaptation Research Hub’s Human Health and Social Impacts Node, and includes case studies from the Sydney metro area, the Northern Rivers Region (Lismore and Byron Bay), and Inner NSW (Walgett and Dubbo).

In October, Incubator Partner and Director of Healthabitat, Paul Torzillo, will present at the Annual Meeting of the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO) in Brisbane. He will discuss the history of Healthabitat’s work with Indigenous communities, and provide an update on contemporary work conducted by the not-for-profit’s Housing for Health methodology.

13 September 2018, University of Sydney

Tess Lea and Christen Cornell will give a guest lecture to students in the Climate Change and Public Health program, run by the School of Public Health.

Update on the Housing for Health Research Incubator

Associate Professor Tess Lea will present an update on the Housing for Health Incubator partnership with Healthabitat, at Redfern Community Centre.

See the Festival of Urbanism website for more details.