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The more-than-real is remade in particular places and with specific human-technology relations. McLean draws on her experience at a conference on ‘Human Rights and Technology’ (2018) run by the Australian Human Rights Commission in this chapter. This narrative of the Conference shows how there is an increasing awareness of human rights issues arising from digital technologies and that some parts of the Australian government are pushing back against unconscious adoption of digital technologies. At the same time, discussions of environmental sustainability and the nuances of digital geographies beyond Artificial Intelligence are marginal in this context. The more-than-real can obscure nuance and collapse differences in the production of grand narratives about the potential threats from digital technologies.

The conclusion summarises how McLean has shown how the more-than-real is worked with, and against, by a range of individuals and organisations. I was privileged to learn from Indigenous scholars, people with disabilities, feminists, bureaucrats, activists, environmentalists, lawyers, digital justice activists, human rights advocates, and technology innovators in this research. Future research could centre queer and LGBTQIA+ perspectives, and the experiences of migrants and refugees with respect to digital (in)justices and the more-than-real. In the style of Haraway (1998), this book is a partial perspective on digital geographies that does not attempt to be all-encompassing or universal in any way. The limitations of the arguments in this book also arise from McLean’s privileged positioning in the Global North. By bringing together stories from a broad range of digital justice areas, she hopes to have furthered our understanding of the possibilities and constraints of digital geographies in multiple contexts and, following Sedgwick, in a nondualistic way.

This chapter gives an overview to how digital rights are understood in Australia and investigates if these are in relationship to notions of environmental sustainability. More-than-real spaces can produce atomized framings of human-environmental connections and dissociate campaigns for digital rights from other struggles. By presenting perspectives from digital rights activists and narratives of social and cultural digital interventions, this chapter shows how environmental concerns are not always sidelined, and that more needs to be done to strengthen digital rights claims. The more-than-real is not a fixed, static space but full of possibilities and heterogeneities, similar to non-digital spaces (Massey 2005). McLean argues that if we perceive the ongoing expansion of digital technologies in our everyday lives as having space for conversations around digital rights, then there is also space for bringing environmental sustainability along for that troublesome ride.

This chapter offers a provocation of how emotions emerge, conflict and stay with us, in the digital Anthropocene. Emotion and affect in the digital Anthropocene are tricky agents of change that can concretise the abstractions that produce the weird worlds we co-produce. The digital Anthropocene is a way to think about the digital technologies that have enabled the naming of, and that are in part producing, the global environmental crises we live in and with. The more-than-real helps to read these mixed terrains and shows that sublime moments, of beauty and terror, are a part of these fraught digital geographies.

Purpose A recent mainstream intervention in Australia involved the creation of a climate change communication institution, the Climate Council, from crowdfunding and support in social media. Such digital action invites further examination of supporters’ motivations. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the reported intentions and interests of the Climate Council’s supporters to gain a better understanding of mainstream climate change action in digital spaces. Design/methodology/approach This paper reports on a survey that was undertaken by the Climate Council with their Founding Friends that sought to understand their motivations for supporting the institution. The survey received over 10,000 responses. From four selected questions, the paper considers all of the quantitative responses while a random sample of 100 responses was taken from the qualitative data. Findings The data show that most Climate Council supporters were motivated to maintain an institution that communicates the impacts of climate change while a minority desired more political engagement by the institution. The results capture an example of action with limited conscious activism. Originality/value Digital spaces fundamentally need the interconnections between people in order to function, in a similar way to physical spaces. Nonetheless, the power of online action, in all its contradictory forms, should not be overlooked in considering the range of possibilities available to those interested in effecting meaningful social change. Even mainstream interventions, as presented in this paper, that seem to disavow climate change activism on the whole, can nevertheless produce institutional changes that defy national governance shifts.

These are uncertain times in the Anthropocene, where the health and resilience of all urban inhabitants should be key themes for cities striving for sustainability. To this end, local councils in Australia are applying digital technologies with increasing complexity as components of their urban forest management. This paper applies a more-than-human lens to analyse Australian local council urban forest policies, documents and project information for their inclusion and application of digital technologies. In this scoping review, digital geographies informed data collection to answer questions about the type, use and ownerships of tree data, and more-than-real and ‘lively data’ concepts were employed to extend their discussion. Our analysis found that local government policies focused on general urban tree data and canopy percentages and utilised this data to justify and create policy and program parameters. There was a general lack of more-than-human considerations beyond the focus on trees in creating and designing smart urban forests, but it is unclear whether this was due to technical limitations, council desires or other factors. Challenges identified for successful outcomes included balancing priorities, access to resources and information, technological constraints, and community factors such as capacity to engage and cultural values. Digital technologies that facilitate smart urban forests tended to reinforce and re-solidify Western values. However, strengths of current applications are also evident, and we explore how they provide more-than-real possibilities for human-nature relationships to deepen and foster collaborations between disparate groups and entities in urban environments. Greater consideration and acknowledgment of the more-than-human and understanding of the more-than-real in co-creation and co-design of digital technologies and their applications may facilitate more positive outcomes for human and non-human urban inhabitants.

The Anthropocene, as a notion and a discursive field, is generating productive academic and broader debate. In this article, I analyse the creation of a crowdfunded climate change institution in Australia – the Climate Council – as an instance of everyday activism in the Anthropocene, and partly a function of the more-than-real. The more-than-real refers to the digital space that bore the Climate Council’s creation, and situates this spontaneous climate change activism. The broader context of this transformation included an abnormally hot spring season, a turn to conservative federal government, and already-active social media spaces. As an exploratory case study that introduces an example of activism steeped in desire, this research situates mainstream climate change activism squarely within the Anthropocene notion, where a large group of disaffected individuals transformed an organisation that they perceived as valuable. This type of climate change activism can be read as a productive possibility of the Anthropocene, and unsettles narratives of inevitable environmental devastation, while simultaneously raising questions of whether the Anthropocene concept can or should include digital spaces. The discourses working in, through and around the Climate Council transformation in the more-than-real are read as a disruption of the Anthropocene that may generate productive possibilities.

The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) is promoted as a useful way to centre development on the needs of those who are most vulnerable, but is critiqued for inflexibility and ignoring important power relations. In light of the rigidities in using a formulaic SLA, this conceptual paper suggests a practical suite of tools that are in use in livelihoods research and development practice, and refocuses them to include adaptive strategies of vulnerable peoples to resource management pressures. The Pentagon Prison of five capitals can overwhelm both the researcher and researched and while possibly useful in identifying livelihoods gaps, misses all-encompassing power relations, and reduces complexities to quantitative units. In arguing for a shift from the Pentagon Prison of SLA towards a flexible livelihoods trajectory approach, in particular for a research project on livelihood adaptations in Lao PDR, I identify a feasible research and development approach that more meaningfully reflects the lives of those participating in that research. I propose that the livelihood trajectories approach opens up the way data are gathered and can lead to holistic understandings of the complex realities of peoples' adaptive strategies, incorporating strategies from short to long term, and proactive, reactive and inactive techniques.

In the context of continuing pressures from managerialist and neoliberal drivers of university reform in Australia, Macquarie University’s recent undergraduate curriculum innovation, based on “People,” “Planet,” and “Participation,” has resulted in the embedding and integration of experiential learning in its curriculum and institutional framework. Such an approach challenges academic and administrative staff, students, and partners in industry, the community and public sector settings, to engage and collaborate across significant boundaries. This article outlines the scope and nature of the curriculum reform, then considers the way geographers have both shaped and responded to the opportunities it created. In so doing, it proposes a number of challenges and recommendations for geographers who might seek to extend their longstanding commitment to field-based learning through similar reforms. In this regard, the discipline of geography and its tendency to engage with the “field” can offer much in f...

The policy framework claiming to support Indigenous people in remote parts of Australia is in disarray with Commonwealth, state and territory governments proposing closure of remote communities on a range of economic and social policy grounds, but facing significant criticism on economic, environmental, social and cultural grounds. Western Australia's proposal to close 150 remote communities, announced in late-2014, is reviewed and found to reveal a profound failure of geographical literacy.

Hybrid geographies are well developed in studies of human–nature relations and environmental humanities, but less so in geographies of music and gender. In this article, we use hybrid geographies to frame our critical engagement with Australia's triple j's Unearthed, a publically funded website and radio station that presents new music. Hybrid approaches enable us to understand gendered power relations in music by deconstructing the ways power differences are built on cultural, social, spatial and technological relations. Engaging netnographic and mixed-method approaches we critique Unearthed as a democratic music cyberspace. We identify the limited constructions of gender and geographic location, some of which are unique to this online presence, while others are shared with broader musical spaces. We argue that the interactions between technology, artists, fans and the online spaces, as mediated by Unearthed, situate emerging artists in relation to gender, geography and genre, and thus constrain possibil...

The growing use of environmental flows in rivers and wetlands around the world, aimed at maintaining ecological health by allocating water to the environment, arguably also provides space for recognition of Indigenous water values. Theoretically, if environmental water values, which nominally determine what water is made available for restoring river health through environmental flows, do coincide with Indigenous water values, then this mutual benefit is conceivable. However, in contexts such as the Ord in northern Australia, where environmental water values are defined as post-dam construction, then further marginalisation of Indigenous interests likely ensues. This paper looks at the history of two key industries in the Ord, pastoralism and irrigation, to examine the origins of its current geography of environmental water values. A geography of water emerges that unpacks postcolonial relations as manifest in society–water relations. I examine how particular colonial values that reinforce the status quo of industry in the Ord also dominate water management, effectively sidelining Indigenous water values.

The recent digging of a new channel for water delivery to expand irrigation in the Ord provides a good opportunity for unearthing the native title agreement that allows for intensification of agriculture there. Initial irrigation development in this north-eastern Australian catchment did not include recognition of, consultation with, or distribution of benefits to Indigenous people impacted by dam creation and land flooding. Forming agreement between those affected by previous dispossessions, and associated accumulation of wealth via mining and irrigation, with those initiating such activities was an important and challenging process. The Ord Final Agreement (OFA), formalised in 2006, came from negotiations between Miriuwung and Gajerrong traditional owners and government and private interests. Through qualitative research, I dissect the context and content of the OFA to identify the strengths and weaknesses therein. While the agreement does allow for co-management of significant land- and waters...

Despite decades of research identifying the myriad causes and consequences, young women continue to be exposed to a variety of abuses in their dating relationships. Those who experience such violence often feel shame and isolation and hesitate to reach out for support for fear that their stories will not be heard, respected, or garner appropriate responses. Such abuse often results in grave consequences to well-being and quality of life, with the risk of exposure to one incident of abuse potentially leading to a cycle where young women may be repeatedly drawn to abusive relationships. Finding new ways to expose and disrupt this cycle of abuse in intimate relationships is critical. This article highlights the methods used, specifically an adapted version of digital storytelling as a potential empowerment research methodology with a small group of young women exposed to dating violence. Implementation of this methodology occurred in four phases: providing methodological context, preparing (setting the stage), implementing (constructing and sharing digital stories), and evaluating (experience and impact). Each phase of the methodology is described along with lessons learned to advance the innovative use of digital storytelling in anti-violence research.

Diverse feminist thought and practice is experiencing a revitalisation, partly stemming from social media activism and expanding in to multiple political, social and cultural spaces. It is timely, ...