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Papers by Susanne Ferwerda

RESEARCH MA THESIS: The main research question this thesis investigates is: "how is the ... more RESEARCH MA THESIS: The main research question this thesis investigates is: "how is the notion of the Anthropocene challenged, refined and reimagined in contemporary feminist theory and fiction and in what ways does an approach via narratives negate a binary and teleological reading of the Anthropocene?" A multiple and threaded approach of theory and fiction is explored in this thesis. How the story is told is always at least as important as what that story consists of. So, the questions this thesis is asking and after are: "what kinds of narratives, what kinds of metaphors in narratives are being deployed to talk about the Anthropocene?". In order to come to an understanding of what it might mean to live in the Anthropocene attention is drawn to storytelling and the notion of narrative. It is clear that Earth is in constant change. The idea of the Anthropocene frames this change into a narrative of human responsibility and consequences for the human inhabitants of Earth. Only through particular narratives and metaphors does a changing Earth become socially and culturally meaningful. The work of feminist theorists and fiction writers that is analysed (i.e. the work of Braidotti, Haraway, Zylinska, Colebrook, Atwood and Winterson) reflects this practice of knowledge production. In both the theoretical and literary approaches to the Anthropocene that are considered here, a meaningful engagement with a changing planet is key. Whether through coming up with alternatives, pushing the boundaries of what the Anthropocene has come to stand for, or engaging with it through a particular lens, contemporary feminist theory and fiction have taken the challenges the Anthropocene represents and faced them head on.

International Journal of Practice Based Humanities, 2019

When an image is erased, what is lost and what remains? On September 6, 2019, Australian graphic ... more When an image is erased, what is lost and what remains? On September 6, 2019, Australian graphic artist Lucienne Rickard started a twelve-month duration performance called Extinction Studies. Each day, with pencil on a single piece of paper, she draws a recently extinct species, only to erase it as soon as its image is complete. The performance takes place at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), a location saturated with histories of local mass extinction events. Two rooms away from Rickard’s performance, another exhibition shows the bones, skins and some of the last known images of the Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus). The juxtaposition of these two exhibitions draws out the relationship between extinction and the act of erasing. This paper examines the affective nature of erasure and extinction. Rickard’s care for each line she draws and erases, reinforces the physical and emotional investment that twenty-first-century extinction events compel. The difference between the two exhibitions is one of scale and time. Where the permanent thylacine exhibition performs the long durée of erasure and ‘extinction afterlives’ of a single species thought lost since 1936, Extinction Studies simultaneously shows the fast-paced acts of erasure of many species thought lost since the turn of the twenty-first-century.

Thesis Chapters by Susanne Ferwerda

Department of English, University of Tasmania, 2022

PhD DISSERTATION - This dissertation argues that critical and creative attention to contemporary ... more PhD DISSERTATION - This dissertation argues that critical and creative attention to contemporary stories from Oceania opens up new ways to address the past, present and future effects of colonialism on changing oceanic environments. Colonialism is connected to climate change through issues that include rising sea levels, biodiversity loss, changing weather patterns such as floods and prolonged droughts, and ecological devastation. By examining literature, visual art and performance that go against canonical Western ways of reading the ocean, I foreground how we can unsettle climate colonialism and its effects on oceanic multispecies environments. I address how scholars of contemporary feminist materialisms and the environmental humanities can extend their study of water and the ocean to centre anticolonial perspectives via art, literature, and theory. Analysing anticolonial narrative disruption from an Oceanic perspective, this dissertation engages with work from Aboriginal, Indigenous, migrant and settler colonial scholars, writers and artists to show that the future can be oceanic and anticolonial.
The increased precarity of human-ocean relationships has been particularly visible in Oceania. Rising waters and environmental degradation do not affect all equally, nor are their causes evenly distributed. How we think about the colonial pasts of Oceania informs our imagination of oceanic futures. The effects of the mining industry, of nuclear testing, tourism, aquaculture, species extinctions, and the formation of the nation state, have had lasting consequences on oceanic spaces and how they are experienced and thought of in the present. From an anticolonial feminist materialist perspective, I aim to not only expand our ocean views but also to interrogate the perspectives that guide our gaze. I draw on research from the fields of Pacific and Ocean Studies to argue against a simplistic, oppositional and colonial relationship between human and ocean. Increasingly, but building on long legacies of oceanic thought, writers and artists from Oceania hold Western colonial discourse to account. By communicating oceanic realities in text, visual art and performance that offer alternatives to Western ways of reading the ocean, Oceanic art and literature unsettles the colonial afterlives apparent in contemporary human-ocean environments. I listen to and analyse published and publicly performed work — short stories, poetry, visual and performance art, and memoir — that redefines how we should think about the ocean in the twenty-first century.
This dissertation comprises two contextual chapters followed by four in-depth readings of the work of several artists and writers from Oceania. The first chapter addresses recent ‘blue turns’ in environmental and feminist theories to show how the implications of colonialism have remained largely underexamined or only analysed from a Western and Northern hemispherical perspective. Blue is a colour with a distinct colonial history. It appeals to the Western colonial imaginary and drew European ships across the seas to mine blue pigment from Afghan rocks and raise indigo plantations on stolen land, with stolen labour. How has this oceanic coloniality resurfaced in climate change times? Following Sylvia Wynter, Ursula Le Guin, Donna Haraway, Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren, I articulate storytelling as a foundation method to disrupt racialised power structures in settled and colonised areas of Oceania. The work of Aboriginal, Indigenous, settler and migrant writers and authors across Oceania informs my critique of the lingering coloniality of Western engagement with the seas and its associated imaginations. Mining, nuclearisation, militarisation, extinction, erasure, borders, and migration shape my discussion in four thematic chapters, which focus respectively on short stories by Gina Cole and Ellen van Neerven; poetry by Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner and Craig Santos Perez; installation and performance art by Lucienne Rickard and Mandy Quadrio; and Behrouz Boochani’s memoir No Friend but the Mountains. The ‘Blue Ocean Stories’ in this dissertation respond to the intersection of climate change, colonialism and the ocean, and take aim at the continued and reiterated coloniality of some Western oceanic imaginaries.

RESEARCH MA THESIS: The main research question this thesis investigates is: "how is the notion of... more RESEARCH MA THESIS: The main research question this thesis investigates is: "how is the notion of the Anthropocene challenged, refined and reimagined in contemporary feminist theory and fiction and in what ways does an approach via narratives negate a binary and teleological reading of the Anthropocene?" A multiple and threaded approach of theory and fiction is explored in this thesis. How the story is told is always at least as important as what that story consists of. So, the questions this thesis is asking and after are: "what kinds of narratives, what kinds of metaphors in narratives are being deployed to talk about the Anthropocene?". In order to come to an understanding of what it might mean to live in the Anthropocene attention is drawn to storytelling and the notion of narrative. It is clear that Earth is in constant change. The idea of the Anthropocene frames this change into a narrative of human responsibility and consequences for the human inhabitants of Earth. Only through particular narratives and metaphors does a changing Earth become socially and culturally meaningful. The work of feminist theorists and fiction writers that is analysed (i.e. the work of Braidotti, Haraway, Zylinska, Colebrook, Atwood and Winterson) reflects this practice of knowledge production. In both the theoretical and literary approaches to the Anthropocene that are considered here, a meaningful engagement with a changing planet is key. Whether through coming up with alternatives, pushing the boundaries of what the Anthropocene has come to stand for, or engaging with it through a particular lens, contemporary feminist theory and fiction have taken the challenges the Anthropocene represents and faced them head on.

Book Reviews by Susanne Ferwerda

Island Studies Journal, 2019

Book Chapters by Susanne Ferwerda

Drafts by Susanne Ferwerda

We invite contributions to a Special Issue on "Radioactive Empires: The Nuclear Relations of Colo... more We invite contributions to a Special Issue on "Radioactive Empires: The Nuclear Relations of Coloniality." This issue draws its title from the landmark 1986 article, "Native America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism" by Winona LaDuke and Ward Churchill, in which the authors posit colonialism as having a radioactive quality: everything it does cannot be undone, and in its doing, it imperils "everyone alive and who will be alive." Over 30 years on, we seek to reflect on this work by mapping the cross-temporal and cross-cultural impacts of the nuclear relations of coloniality, attending to the place of nuclear weapons in colonial histories and contemporary realities, as well as the impacts of nuclear energy production, storage, and waste on Indigenous territories. This expansive focus allows us to bring together diverse contexts that might include (but are not limited to): uranium mining on Indigenous territories across the US, Canada, and Australia; the storage of US nuclear weapons in Europe; the legacies of US, British, and French nuclear testing in the Pacific; and nuclear waste radiation and contamination in Palestine. Putting these ostensibly distinct incidences of extraction, energy production, and militarization into relation allows us to map the significance of nuclearity in the dynamics of colonial projects. Please submit an abstract of 300 words outlining your proposed contribution, noting which type of submission it is (article, provocation, critical reflection), and a short bio.

RESEARCH MA THESIS: The main research question this thesis investigates is: "how is the ... more RESEARCH MA THESIS: The main research question this thesis investigates is: "how is the notion of the Anthropocene challenged, refined and reimagined in contemporary feminist theory and fiction and in what ways does an approach via narratives negate a binary and teleological reading of the Anthropocene?" A multiple and threaded approach of theory and fiction is explored in this thesis. How the story is told is always at least as important as what that story consists of. So, the questions this thesis is asking and after are: "what kinds of narratives, what kinds of metaphors in narratives are being deployed to talk about the Anthropocene?". In order to come to an understanding of what it might mean to live in the Anthropocene attention is drawn to storytelling and the notion of narrative. It is clear that Earth is in constant change. The idea of the Anthropocene frames this change into a narrative of human responsibility and consequences for the human inhabitants of Earth. Only through particular narratives and metaphors does a changing Earth become socially and culturally meaningful. The work of feminist theorists and fiction writers that is analysed (i.e. the work of Braidotti, Haraway, Zylinska, Colebrook, Atwood and Winterson) reflects this practice of knowledge production. In both the theoretical and literary approaches to the Anthropocene that are considered here, a meaningful engagement with a changing planet is key. Whether through coming up with alternatives, pushing the boundaries of what the Anthropocene has come to stand for, or engaging with it through a particular lens, contemporary feminist theory and fiction have taken the challenges the Anthropocene represents and faced them head on.

International Journal of Practice Based Humanities, 2019

When an image is erased, what is lost and what remains? On September 6, 2019, Australian graphic ... more When an image is erased, what is lost and what remains? On September 6, 2019, Australian graphic artist Lucienne Rickard started a twelve-month duration performance called Extinction Studies. Each day, with pencil on a single piece of paper, she draws a recently extinct species, only to erase it as soon as its image is complete. The performance takes place at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), a location saturated with histories of local mass extinction events. Two rooms away from Rickard’s performance, another exhibition shows the bones, skins and some of the last known images of the Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus). The juxtaposition of these two exhibitions draws out the relationship between extinction and the act of erasing. This paper examines the affective nature of erasure and extinction. Rickard’s care for each line she draws and erases, reinforces the physical and emotional investment that twenty-first-century extinction events compel. The difference between the two exhibitions is one of scale and time. Where the permanent thylacine exhibition performs the long durée of erasure and ‘extinction afterlives’ of a single species thought lost since 1936, Extinction Studies simultaneously shows the fast-paced acts of erasure of many species thought lost since the turn of the twenty-first-century.

Department of English, University of Tasmania, 2022

PhD DISSERTATION - This dissertation argues that critical and creative attention to contemporary ... more PhD DISSERTATION - This dissertation argues that critical and creative attention to contemporary stories from Oceania opens up new ways to address the past, present and future effects of colonialism on changing oceanic environments. Colonialism is connected to climate change through issues that include rising sea levels, biodiversity loss, changing weather patterns such as floods and prolonged droughts, and ecological devastation. By examining literature, visual art and performance that go against canonical Western ways of reading the ocean, I foreground how we can unsettle climate colonialism and its effects on oceanic multispecies environments. I address how scholars of contemporary feminist materialisms and the environmental humanities can extend their study of water and the ocean to centre anticolonial perspectives via art, literature, and theory. Analysing anticolonial narrative disruption from an Oceanic perspective, this dissertation engages with work from Aboriginal, Indigenous, migrant and settler colonial scholars, writers and artists to show that the future can be oceanic and anticolonial.
The increased precarity of human-ocean relationships has been particularly visible in Oceania. Rising waters and environmental degradation do not affect all equally, nor are their causes evenly distributed. How we think about the colonial pasts of Oceania informs our imagination of oceanic futures. The effects of the mining industry, of nuclear testing, tourism, aquaculture, species extinctions, and the formation of the nation state, have had lasting consequences on oceanic spaces and how they are experienced and thought of in the present. From an anticolonial feminist materialist perspective, I aim to not only expand our ocean views but also to interrogate the perspectives that guide our gaze. I draw on research from the fields of Pacific and Ocean Studies to argue against a simplistic, oppositional and colonial relationship between human and ocean. Increasingly, but building on long legacies of oceanic thought, writers and artists from Oceania hold Western colonial discourse to account. By communicating oceanic realities in text, visual art and performance that offer alternatives to Western ways of reading the ocean, Oceanic art and literature unsettles the colonial afterlives apparent in contemporary human-ocean environments. I listen to and analyse published and publicly performed work — short stories, poetry, visual and performance art, and memoir — that redefines how we should think about the ocean in the twenty-first century.
This dissertation comprises two contextual chapters followed by four in-depth readings of the work of several artists and writers from Oceania. The first chapter addresses recent ‘blue turns’ in environmental and feminist theories to show how the implications of colonialism have remained largely underexamined or only analysed from a Western and Northern hemispherical perspective. Blue is a colour with a distinct colonial history. It appeals to the Western colonial imaginary and drew European ships across the seas to mine blue pigment from Afghan rocks and raise indigo plantations on stolen land, with stolen labour. How has this oceanic coloniality resurfaced in climate change times? Following Sylvia Wynter, Ursula Le Guin, Donna Haraway, Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren, I articulate storytelling as a foundation method to disrupt racialised power structures in settled and colonised areas of Oceania. The work of Aboriginal, Indigenous, settler and migrant writers and authors across Oceania informs my critique of the lingering coloniality of Western engagement with the seas and its associated imaginations. Mining, nuclearisation, militarisation, extinction, erasure, borders, and migration shape my discussion in four thematic chapters, which focus respectively on short stories by Gina Cole and Ellen van Neerven; poetry by Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner and Craig Santos Perez; installation and performance art by Lucienne Rickard and Mandy Quadrio; and Behrouz Boochani’s memoir No Friend but the Mountains. The ‘Blue Ocean Stories’ in this dissertation respond to the intersection of climate change, colonialism and the ocean, and take aim at the continued and reiterated coloniality of some Western oceanic imaginaries.

RESEARCH MA THESIS: The main research question this thesis investigates is: "how is the notion of... more RESEARCH MA THESIS: The main research question this thesis investigates is: "how is the notion of the Anthropocene challenged, refined and reimagined in contemporary feminist theory and fiction and in what ways does an approach via narratives negate a binary and teleological reading of the Anthropocene?" A multiple and threaded approach of theory and fiction is explored in this thesis. How the story is told is always at least as important as what that story consists of. So, the questions this thesis is asking and after are: "what kinds of narratives, what kinds of metaphors in narratives are being deployed to talk about the Anthropocene?". In order to come to an understanding of what it might mean to live in the Anthropocene attention is drawn to storytelling and the notion of narrative. It is clear that Earth is in constant change. The idea of the Anthropocene frames this change into a narrative of human responsibility and consequences for the human inhabitants of Earth. Only through particular narratives and metaphors does a changing Earth become socially and culturally meaningful. The work of feminist theorists and fiction writers that is analysed (i.e. the work of Braidotti, Haraway, Zylinska, Colebrook, Atwood and Winterson) reflects this practice of knowledge production. In both the theoretical and literary approaches to the Anthropocene that are considered here, a meaningful engagement with a changing planet is key. Whether through coming up with alternatives, pushing the boundaries of what the Anthropocene has come to stand for, or engaging with it through a particular lens, contemporary feminist theory and fiction have taken the challenges the Anthropocene represents and faced them head on.

Island Studies Journal, 2019

We invite contributions to a Special Issue on "Radioactive Empires: The Nuclear Relations of Colo... more We invite contributions to a Special Issue on "Radioactive Empires: The Nuclear Relations of Coloniality." This issue draws its title from the landmark 1986 article, "Native America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism" by Winona LaDuke and Ward Churchill, in which the authors posit colonialism as having a radioactive quality: everything it does cannot be undone, and in its doing, it imperils "everyone alive and who will be alive." Over 30 years on, we seek to reflect on this work by mapping the cross-temporal and cross-cultural impacts of the nuclear relations of coloniality, attending to the place of nuclear weapons in colonial histories and contemporary realities, as well as the impacts of nuclear energy production, storage, and waste on Indigenous territories. This expansive focus allows us to bring together diverse contexts that might include (but are not limited to): uranium mining on Indigenous territories across the US, Canada, and Australia; the storage of US nuclear weapons in Europe; the legacies of US, British, and French nuclear testing in the Pacific; and nuclear waste radiation and contamination in Palestine. Putting these ostensibly distinct incidences of extraction, energy production, and militarization into relation allows us to map the significance of nuclearity in the dynamics of colonial projects. Please submit an abstract of 300 words outlining your proposed contribution, noting which type of submission it is (article, provocation, critical reflection), and a short bio.