Alys Daroy

The story of Sydney’s metropolitan food landscapes is one of dramatic transformations of First Nations land amidst jostles for power and wealth. This book unearths Sydney's lost commercial agriculture since colonisation in 1788 to assess its fragile food futures. Richly illustrated, 270 images are encapsulated within 110 figures, including an array of original metropolitan-scale mappings. Discussion traverses the city’s diverse cultural influences, from Indigenous land management to British pastoralism, Chinese cultivation of Sydney’s “backyard vegetable garden” and southern European farming spawning billion-dollar empires. The region has further been shaped by a vast array of cultural and ideological factors and material practices, with relevance to planning, policy, ethics, geography, heritage, art, design and technology. This book is the first to bring Sydney’s disparate post-colonial food histories together in one volume to explore the dynamics and tensions between urban growth and food production. The relevance of Sydney’s food landscapes therefore extends far wider than the city itself, with implications for countless regions worldwide in a time of increasing climate and resource precarity.

Industrial agriculture exerts significant ecological pressures, leading to biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, and biocapacity drawdown. Environmental impacts are often concealed due to physical (remoteness from city centers) and conceptual distancing (romanticized portrayals through advertising), hindering agricultural transparency. This article documents a creative digital methodology developed to communicate the scale and environmental impacts of industrial agriculture and to link consumers’ food choices with their sources. Research centers on the creation of “Food Landscapes Australia,” an interactive digital dissensus archive designed to expose the environmental consequences of the country’s agri-food system. The methodology integrates systematic spatial-statistical analysis, typological classification, continental-scale field research, a visual method for drone-image capture, and the immersive online dissemination archive. The archive includes 881 curated cinematographic drone videos, distilled from over 10,000 images captured across 38,000 kilometers of field research, systematically framing Australia’s agricultural activities and environmental impacts. Findings reveal the potential of these digital methodologies to produce high-resolution, incisive visual evidence that challenges dominant agri-food sustainability narratives, exposing often-concealed practices. The methodology, therefore, offers a contextually adaptable approach for sustainability researchers, educators, and policymakers to enhance environmental communication of agricultural impacts. Outcomes foster public awareness and critical reflection on sustainability issues and, by bridging the gap between production landscapes and food consumers, demonstrate the potential of digital tools for encouraging informed discourse and decision-making around sustainable food systems.

Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell’s Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature: Unsettling the Anthropocene (2023) offers a timely exploration of cosmology’s potential for addressing Anthropocenic challenges due to its “vast array of individual, cultural and more-than-human phenomena” (1). Drawing on six texts from Australian and Oceanic contexts, Bartha-Mitchell examines themes including colonization/exploitation, bioethics/technology and environmental justice/custodianship through the lens of cosmology. Her work enriches ecocriticism through interweaving essential First Nations’ and transcultural insights and effectively demonstrates literary cosmology’s capacity to offer “multi-scalar knowledge and perspectives, as well as an eco-systemic order that co-shapes cultural meaning” (81). 

This article explores Anthropoiesis, the authors’ eco-performance installation presented as part of the European Cultural Centre’s Time, Space, Existence  exhibition at the Venice Biennial during the Venice Biennale Architettura 2023. Drawing on David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics (2019), the project investigated how ecocritical texts might be reconceived as multisensory artworks, advancing the concept of slow listening to engage with the Anthropocene’s scalar extremes. By integrating spoken word performance, soundscapes and visual poetry, Anthropoiesis sought to disrupt anthropocentric narratives, compelling audiences to confront the disorienting temporal and spatial dynamics of ecological crises. Foregrounding the urgency of improving attunement to landscapes, the article situates Anthropoiesis within the broader challenge of anthropogenic planetary destabilisation. Its multidisciplinary design reimagines Farrier’s ecocritical text as a sonic and visual assemblage, layered with living, organic and technologically generated soundscapes. Positioned within a nested exhibition alongside Ainslie Murray’s Registry of Itinerant Architectures and Joshua Zeunert’s Shallow Roots, Deep Incisions, offered a multisensory exploration of fluctuating scales and temporal horizons, creating an immersive experience to transcend traditional narrative structures. The article argues that sonic ecologies can help to reorient audiences within fractured Anthropocenic landscapes. Through the lens of slow listening, it analyses how the installation provokes reflection, destabilises linear perceptions of time and space and facilitates poiesis as a threshold moment of ecological revelation. Discussion moves from the project’s interdisciplinary approach to examine the transformative possibilities of careful listening as a critical and creative intervention. In doing so, it seeks to foster heightened attentiveness to more-than-human presences and advance collaborative performance-making to address the sublime tensions of the Anthropocenic moment.

Konstantin Stanislavsky’s System of acting training emphasizes the interplay between experience, embodiment, and the actor’s connection to “nature,” which he considered a better guide to a living organism. Grounded in the laws of organic nature, Stanislavsky’s holistic approach integrates the actor’s mind, body, and environment in a complementary manner to that of ecological and postcognitive approaches. Alongside this interconnected vision, however, Stanislavsky demanded precision and actionable steps, rejecting emotional generalities. Without concrete tools, key Stanislavskian principles such as “nature,” “life,” and “dynamism” risk becoming abstract or unattainable. This article addresses this gap by introducing biophilic pattern analysis, a rehearsal room methodology inspired by E.O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, which identifies nature-derived patterns that foster cognitive and affective engagement. Using a process of “landscape mapping,” the article applies biophilic design principles to textual analysis to support actors’ connections to internal and external landscapes. Discussion situates biophilia within existing critical frameworks, introduces biophilic patterns with examples of ecological metaphors in Shakespeare’s Othello and Stanislavsky’s An Actor’s Work, and offers rehearsal room exercises. By linking ecological principles to actionable practices, this preliminary foray investigates how biophilic patterns might foster dynamic performances and forge deeper ecological connections. 

This chapter argues for the importance of holistic systems-thinking and collaborative interdisciplinarity when approaching the blue humanities. The co-authors propose an ecosystem approach for considering the emerging field of Australian Blue Shakespeare. Beginning with a discussion of the presence and absence of the blue in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the chapter moves to a brief examination of Shakespeare’s wider watery worlds through the lens of ecological cognition. This, they suggest, offers a pathway through which to examine the entanglements between mind, body, and environment within Shakespeare’s work. Discussion then turns to place-based potential for Australian blue interpretations, concluding with an interview with postcolonial critic Rahul K. Gairola in relation to Australian blue pedagogy and The Tempest.

How ‘woke’ is eco-Shakespeare? The dynamic field of ecological Shakespeare, or ‘eco-Shakespeare’, traverses environmental justice alongside ethical considerations of more-than-human agency and impact. The term’s origins are situated in Black culture and social justice and use outside of these contexts requires thoughtful consideration to avoid appropriation, virtue signalling and ‘woke-washing’. This chapter examines what and how Shakespearean ecocriticism and ecoperformance might learn from the woke movement’s mobilisation of a critical mass against systemic injustice. Beginning with defining what a ‘woke ecology’ might constitute, discussion turns to an overview of eco-Shakespearean performance and ecocriticism before suggesting a more ecosystemic reading of the texts’ material agents. We argue that a woke ecopoetic may further assist de-Westernising reading practices to allow for a more holistic capture of Shakespeare’s more-than-human textual agents. This, in turn, may point to our species’ embeddedness within complex ecosystems threatened by further degradation and mass extinction. A woke eco-Shakespearean perspective can therefore point us towards greater recognition of intra- and interspecies enmeshment within the plays and poems. This offers further opportunities to take greater personal and social environmental responsibility towards the more-than-human world so deeply embedded within Shakespeare’s textual landscapes.

The Latvian Song and Dance Celebration's 150th Anniversary (2023) offers a unique case study of community performance's capacity to express solidarity on a spectacular scale. This article argues that the choral concerts may be viewed as applied theatre given their historical and continuing expressions of political resistance, cultural resilience and community renewal. In 2023, the UNESCO listed Celebration incorporated 40,560 performers, around 500,000 in-person spectators and the world's largest choir of 16,500 singers. The mega-event invokes solidarity and spectacle's nested paradoxes amidst historic and continuing socio-political tensions and the Russo-Ukraine War (2014-) while simultaneously highlighting their powerfully affective impact.

How can we tune into the ecological dynamics of Shakespeare's plays? How can we adapt those plays to address current environmental crises?

This is the first book to fuse Shakespearean ecocriticism with adaptation studies. It is a single critical and contextual resource for students, teachers and practitioners embarking on an in-depth exploration of ecological approaches to Shakespeare and adaptation. The book provides critical insight into ecological performance practices and accessible contextual information for ecocriticism, early modern environmental cultures and theatre-making.