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Ground Up Inquiry is the name of a situated approach to researching used by the Contemporary Indigenous Knowledge and Governance (CIKG) team in CDU’s Northern Institute (Charles Darwin University, 2017a). The team partners with Indigenous researchers working under the authority of Elders in their home places. Many of our partner researchers offer research services through Indigenous Researchers Initiative (Charles Darwin University, 2017b). In the Northern Territory of Australia, Ground Up is often contract research and service delivery, but it is also increasingly recognised as an established research method where Indigenous and academic knowledge authorities work together as equals under the aegis of the modern university system. Composed as answers to questions, this paper revisits the origins of Ground Up, and gives an overview of this approach as situated research.

This paper focuses on a water management project in the remote Aboriginal community of Milingimbi, Northern Australia. Drawing on materials and experiences from two distinct stages of this project, we revisit a policy report and engage in ethnographic storytelling in order to highlight a series of sensing practices associated with water management. In the former, a working symmetry between Yolngu and Western water knowledges is actively sought through the practices of the project. However, in the latter, recurrent asymmetries in the research work continue to appear: a bilingual diagram of water usage is displayed but produces confusion; measuring a water hole for salinity, a member of the scientific team throws in a water meter, while a Yolngu elder prefers the telling of an ancestral story; a collaborative 3-D mapping exercise invites participation from community members but struggles to develop an outcome that differs from existing maps used by scientists and government staff. Focusing on these moments as subtle points of rupture, we suggest that attending to “seeing,” “telling,” and “mapping” in both stages of this water management project offers a way to explore the political work of crafting climate futures and beginning to interrogate differing means for “doing difference” within them.

In this paper, we explore possibilities for reconceptualizing cosmopolitics by focusing on sites and situations where the problem of un/commonality plays a central role. Stemming from ethnographic research carried out as part of an ongoing collaboration on ‘Landscapes of Democracy’, we outline a study of democratic politics that extends beyond the politics of a single world and attends to landscapes of political practice that embed, and sometimes deny multiplicity. We follow the chronological unfolding of our fieldwork in Germany and Australia, and trace politics across worlds by telling alternating stories about how commonality and uncommonality are achieved in specific parliamentary settings in Frankfurt, Berlin, Darwin and Miliŋimbi – a Yolŋu community in the Northern Territory. We interrogate the relationship between commonality and uncommonality, not as an opposition, but as a series of situated efforts to find out and articulate what needs to be made un/common, for what purposes, and on what terms. Bringing into focus such explicit and implicit framings of cosmopolitics suggests that there is potential for partial and situated practices on the ground to rework un/common futures through the continual reimagining of pasts and the configurations of people and places to which these futures are tied.

Effective natural resource management (NRM) often depends on collaboration through formal and informal relationships. Social network analysis (SNA) provides a framework for studying social relationships; however, a deeper understanding of the nature of these relationships is often missing. By integrating multiple analytical methods (including SNA, evidence ratings, and perception matrices), we were able to investigate the nature of relationships in NRM social networks across five service types (e.g., technical advice, on-ground support) in our case study region, Daly catchment Australia. Only one service type was rated as highly associated with free choice in establishing relationships: technical advice/knowledge. Beneficial characteristics of NRM organizations, such as collaborative and transparent, were associated with the presence of freely chosen relationships between organizations. Our results suggest a need to improve our understanding of organizational roles and characteristics, in particular for use in applied NRM contexts, such as network weaving or disseminating information.

In this panel we consider how social actors situate uses of technologies within systems of moral norms and values while at the same time compelling the creation of new ones. Popular discourse tends to present dualistic thinking of the positive and negative impacts of technologies. Scholars have engaged with the internet and digital media, emphasising emancipatory subcultures (Coleman 2014; Gehl 2016, 2018) or presenting a critical view of the constraining aspects of networked technologies (Fish & Follis 2019; Fuchs 2014; Lovink 2016). These approaches are complimented by scholarship that considers technological practices and how they are embedded in social and cultural cosmologies (Burrell 2012; Horst & Foster 2018; Miller et. al. 2016). We argue for a closer integration of these bodies of scholarship through an examination of the contentious moral economies operating in emergent social spaces. The panel interrogates the relationship that social, political and economic actors have between their own ideas about what is good, appropriate and right and the diversity of orientations towards trust in techno-bureaucratic systems. We draw attention to immaterial systems and consider the social relationships and individual and collective imaginations that shape the production and experience of networked technologies. Through the papers, we articulate the forms of negotiation, resistance and refusal that occur when diverse moral universes, techno-regulating systems, and the conditions in which people find themselves collide.

This paper presents an effort to think about ‘heat stress’ as multiple objects of governance. In seeking to analyse this ‘object’ we draw on Foucault’s account of ‘problematization’ (1985, 2009). Accordingly, heat stress is not understood as a mere description of an aspect of reality, but instead emerges as an object of knowledge from particular practices in particular times and places which draw together certain elements (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001; Oppermann, 2013) such as concepts, measures and rules: Problematization doesn’t mean the representation of a pre-existent object, nor the creation through discourse of an object that doesn’t exist. It denotes the set of discursive or non-discursive practices that makes something enter the play of the true and false and constitutes it as an object for thought. (Foucault, as cited in Flynn, 2005, pp.26-7). Problematized in a particular way, the object becomes ‘governable’. In analysing problematizations as producing a particular objects of governance, we consider four analytical questions: what is made visible, how is it known, how is it intervened in, and what subject(ivities) are produced (Dean, 2010)? That is, why are certain elements considered to be significant and problematic, how are these things understood and communicated, and what techniques and practices seek to manage these things to produce an idealised outcome, population or subjectivity? Because problematizations thus produce the social world as well as ‘represent’ it, problematizations are inherently political. To trace the problematization heat stress as an object of knowledge and governance, we present extracts from a conversation between the authors, which explored the investigations and interventions of Dr Matt Brearley, an exercise scientist addressing heat stress. Re-telling some of Matt’s experiences in trying to ‘understand’ heat stress brings into focus the contingency through which problematizations emerge. These stories also highlight how objects of governance are not necessarily singular, but can change over time and can be multiple (Mol, 2002). We notice in our conversation the ruptures of a singular heat stress that prompt its emergence as multiple objects, and the work that Matt finds himself doing to (re) problematize heat stress as a local object of knowledge and governance in different places and times. Having journeyed through these multiple objects produced by different problematizations of ‘heat stress’, we then raise questions about how these objects of governance may come to relate as they participate in an emerging northern Australian governmentality centred on labour-intensive development.