As part of our multi-year research and programming arc Blue Assembly, please join us to hear from leading voices on current water research in the humanities, arts and social sciences. This event celebrates the launch of two books; Groundwater Politics: An Ethnography of Advanced Extractivism and Slow Resistance (2025) by Sally Babidge and Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities (2024) edited by Maxine Newlands and Claire Hansen, as well as highlighting the special issue of Oceania: Water Futures in Australia (2023) edited by Sally Babidge, Ute Eickelkamp, Linda Connor.

Details:

12.30pm: Presentations by Sally Babidge, Maxine Newlands and Oceania contributor Torres Webb
1pm: Roundtable discussion with Sally Babidge, Maxine Newlands, Torres Webb, Ute Eickelcamp and Peta Rake. Facilitated by Jacqueline Chlanda
1.30pm Tea and cake in the foyer

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About the publications:

Edited by Maxine Newlands and Claire Hansen. Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities. Routledge; 2025.
This interdisciplinary edited collection explores and analyses the field of the blue humanities through an Australian lens. The blue humanities is a way of understanding humanity’s relationship with water and manifestations of what is referred to as the ‘blue’ – reefs, oceans, rivers, creeks, basins, and inland bodies of water.

Edited by Sally Babidge, Ute Eickelkamp, Linda Connor. “Water Futures in Australia.” Special Issue, Oceania, Volume 93, Issue 3 (2023).
This special issue is part of a shift in social science and humanities thinking and in public awareness towards planetary water concerns. As societal and scholarly attention to the wet element – and its political import and its cultural constitution – is growing, we ask, how can we rethink our relationships with water in Australia now and into the future? The collection of papers in this issue shows that water responds to human practices which in turn are grounded in cultural imaginaries. Water is thus real in diverse ways, and makes possible diverse material, political and cultural relationships.

Sally Babidge. Groundwater Politics: An Ethnography of Advanced Extractivism and Slow Resistance. Berghahn; 2025.
The mining industry is an expanding socio-ecological and political problem worldwide, not least in Atacameño-Likanantay (Indigenous) territories in the hyper-arid Salar de Atacama, Chile. Groundwater Politics addresses the social, technical and political conditions it calls ‘advanced extractivism’ to reveal how groundwater extraction – particularly by the world’s biggest copper mine operated by Australian mining giant BHP – has sustained mining economies and ongoing ecological damage. It richly describes copper and lithium industries in the area as historically linked with Indigenous communities and their ecological and economic futures. Based on over a decade of ethnographic research, the book casts community strategies to control water and territory as 'slow resistance’, the structural and multifaceted practices that generate a material future amid potential resource exhaustion.

Speakers:

Sally Babidge is a sociocultural anthropologist and Associate Professor of Anthropology in the School of Social Science at the University of Queensland. Her research is focussed on the social and cultural dimensions of ecological and economic change, especially that driven by the extractives industry and experienced by Indigenous Peoples.

Jacqueline Chlanda is a researcher, writer and arts professional and is currently Senior Education Manager at The University of Queensland Art Museum. With a PhD in Art History, English Literature and Philosophy, she previously worked at the National Gallery of Australia and has taught art history at UQ and the Queensland College of Art.

Ute Eickelkamp is a social anthropologist affiliated with the German Mining Museum-Bochum and the University of Technology Sydney. Her ethnographic research focuses on emergent images of nature in the face of climate change and ontological duress, in contexts of Indigenous survivance and postindustrial precarity in Central Australia and Germany respectively. She writes about water, slag heaps, the underground, art, imagination, care and temporality.

Maxine Newlands is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at UQ, and Adjunct Principal Research Fellow at The Cairns Institute, JCU. Maxine is a political scientist and policy analyst where she working to understand how and why environmental politics and networks of communication transform policymaking. Maxine combines her passion for research of blue ecosystems through restoration, adaptation, governance research to identified ways of advancing n governance, stronger community of practice and equity in social justice.

Peta Rake is currently Director and formerly Senior Curator of UQ Art Museum. Previously, she was Director of Creative Residencies, Visual + Digital Art Department, Banff International Curatorial Institute (BICI) and Curator of Walter Phillips Gallery, at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Minhrpa/Banff, Canada on Treaty 7 Territory. She has also held roles at CCA (Ohlone/San Francisco) and IMA (Magandjin/Brisbane).

Torres Webb is an environmental scientist, published author, and advocate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander wellbeing. He focuses on culture, education, sustainability, and economic development. Torres worked previously with the Australian Fisheries Management Authority as a Land and Sea Ranger in the Torres Strait and is currently an Indigenous Research Projects Advisor at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). His work specialises in community engagement, facilitation and partnerships delivering multi-stakeholder scientific projects – work for which he is globally renowned.

Image: Sancintya Mohini Simpson, “Tapu”, 2022, watercolour and gouache on handmade wasli papertriptych. Installation view, “Oceanic Thinking”, The University of Queensland Art Museum, 2022. Photo: Marc Pricop.