Gordon Waitt

University of Wollongong | UOW

The paper's aim is to augment understandings of mobility justice with reference to the sensations of the repetitive routines and rhythms that comprise everyday journeys, subjectivities, and places of powered assisted mobility device users. We build on arguments of mobility justice as access by extending understandings of the sensuous dimensions of...

The appearance and integration of e‐bikes in public space is a source of much debate worldwide. This paper offers insights to these debates by reflecting on how Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage as territory helps us to understand the uptake of e‐bike commuter cycling during the COVID 19 pandemic through empirical material from a study c...

Cyclists are understood as vulnerable road users, but when cyclists are killed by drivers, media reports shared to social media are often accompanied by comments that aggressively rearticulate hierarchies of automobility. This article explores the news reporting, public social media sharing, and public social media comments about the deaths of two...

This paper urges a return to the original formations of Deleuze and Guattari scholarship, to enable issues of sustainability, materiality, and governance to be productively thought together. Assemblage thinking is used to reconsider how roads, machines, bodies, policies, and concepts of sustainability come together in a working arrangement and what...

This paper seeks to better understand urban sustainability experimentation with reference to the bodily sensations of composting household food waste. Taking our lead from Deleuze and Guattari, we argue that experimentation is not just the result of the scientific knowledge of how to compost, but the sensations of bringing together materials, human...

The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent rollout of public health lockdown orders, social distancing measures, and general avoidance of crowded and enclosed places, like mass public transport, have disrupted everyday transport mobilities worldwide. This paper offers insights on the transformative potential of pandemic disruption on transport behavi...

This article focuses on what may be depleting people’s capacity to ride a bike in cities. ‘Capacity to cycle’ is here understood not as a behavioural trait or in terms of infrastructure provision, but, taking our lead from Deleuze and Guattari, as a desiring cycling-machine. We argue this offers a way to envisage depleting, or enhancing, capacities...

This paper is about relational becomings and opposing forces that may occur when white skin becomes tanned over the course of everyday life. In the Australian context of beach leisure culture and rising melanoma rates, the article draws on the only three participants with diverse ancestry from a larger qualitative research project conducted with 40...

Human geographers engage students in learning about a world characterized by environmental and social disarray. It follows that our students are exposed to deeply confronting topics: climate change, global inequality, food insecurity, and racism, to name a few. Prompted by scholarly debate on the effects of painful emotions elicited by public clima...

Slower speed limits and regulated passing distances between motor vehicles and bicycles are now taken-for-granted in policies aimed at increasing cycling participation rates by addressing safety concerns in societies dominated by cars. Rather than understanding distance as a measurement between two points, this paper addresses the sensibilities of...

Issues of fuel poverty and thermal discomfort have been identified in social housing internationally, and have been linked with possible health risks for tenants. Statistically, many of the known factors linking poor thermal performance of a dwelling and increased health risk are over-represented in Australian social housing compared with the gener...

In western societies, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic restrictions created a boom in cycling activity and business. This article reports findings from an Australia-wide survey that invited responses from those who changed their cycling behaviour during the pandemic lockdowns. The survey premise was that the pandemic lockdowns in each state presented the...

This paper seeks to better understand spatial mobility justice with reference to the bodily sensations of cycling, discerned here as different pedalling rhythms in emergent territories that our participants narrate as ‘love’. Differential or striated mobility is not just the result of gendered, classed and racialised social norms but is productive...

Migration from the Global South to Global North is a major feature of contemporary population movements, and provides a lived experiment of the implications of moving from less resource-intensive modes of living towards more resource-intensive ones. Pre-migration practices come together in complex ways post-migration with established norms and infr...

An important task of mobility scholars is to attend to how time and space are generated through mobilities. Building upon research inspired by Deleuze and Guattari that foregrounds experiential mobilities, we use the notion of the refrain to chart experiences of long-distance rail commuting with a particular focus on how these journeys are crafted...

This article builds on Butlers’ concept of a ‘liveable life’ that pays attention to social power as constitutive of the psyche. I offer the concept of driving retirement melancholia to better understand why the future loss of a driving licence is often spoken of as living death. The article draws on qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2019 with driv...

This report presents the findings of the Energy Efficiency Decision-Making in the NSW Social Housing Sector project which aimed to identify and understand the opportunities and barriers that shape decisions made by social housing providers on the implementation of energy efficiency upgrades. https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/research-and-publicat...

This paper seeks to understand the mutually affecting intensities in family households that occur through the use of energy for parenting, care and making home in the societal context of energy capitalism. Our work draws on sensual energy ethnographies with 13 families in regional New South Wales, Australia. We extend Deleuze and Guattarri’s relate...

To better understand walking practices and the power relations informing them, Mattias Kärrholm and colleagues argue for a relational methodology and metalanguage. In the process, they propose a threefold approach: (a) identify different walking assemblages; (b) investigate how diverse types of walking assemblage relate in series; and (c) study how...

Place and gender are key notions for interpreting gambling. Canvassing the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this article elaborates the concept of sports betting assemblages to better understand the everyday geographies of gambling. The account draws on a sensory ethnography with young men who use smartphone sports betting applications in the context...

Short Abstract: This paper draws on a spatial perspective informed by more-than-human ideas of assemblage thinking as an alternative way of knowing markets. The question of how markets are created, sustained and disrupted has been at the forefront of marketing research in recent years. Markets have been predominantly conceptualized as primordial ec...

This paper draws on a sensory ethnography conducted with migrant recreational fishermen of Asian ancestry in a context of heightened scientific concerns about over-fishing. We offer the concept of recreational fishing assemblage to consider the affective and emotional dimensions of recreational fishing experiences. Our conceptual framework builds o...

This article extends discussion of urban activism through paying attention to the emotional and embodied politics of a sports event. We draw on research of the ‘Proud to Play Games’, an inaugural regional multi-sports event held during the Auckland Pride Festival in Aotearoa New Zealand, 2016. Feminist and queer theories of emotion and affect – par...

What can feminist epistemology and methodology offer the study of regional issues? To answer this question, this chapter draws on a domestic energy project with older low-income households in the Illawarra, a region of New South Wales, Australia. The energy field is characterised by an unusual degree of transdisciplinary research. It is therefore h...

The paper considers what housing studies can learn from Indigenous understandings of the house-as-home. Explored through Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies of the house-as-home, the objective of the paper is to offer nuanced understandings of the social and material work of the house itself in the making and unmaking of home. We draw on an In...

This paper seeks to better understand the lively city with reference to recent analysis of sonic affects, bodily sensations and emotions. The notion of ‘hearing contacts’, as it is usually deployed in discussion of the lively city, emphasises the social interactions with other people in a rather narrow anthropocentric way. Yet, it overlooks the div...

Walking fosters self‐efficacy, empathy and connection, and large and small democratic actions. Such capacity seems especially the case when walking is attended by certain spatial qualities that engender, for instance, physical accessibility, a capacity to socialize, a sense of safety, or a pleasing aesthetic. Sometimes, adverse spatial alternatives...

Geography is fostering a diverse range of methodologies that engage the more‐than‐human dimensions of research. Debates surround the efficacy of both longstanding and emergent methodological approaches in grappling with how to do more‐than‐human geography. Much attention has been given to the methodological implications of theoretical debates that...

This paper contributes to geographical perspectives on energy justice by arguing for the concept of “spaces of energy well‐being.” We build on the concepts of capabilities, home, and emotional embodiment to offer an understanding of the spatiality of well‐being. The paper draws on empirical material from a study conducted with social housing tenant...

The Australian home is embedded within social norms that align the ideal dwelling with the large detached suburban house and mass-consumption. In this paper, we present a Foucauldian discourse analysis of Australian electronic media representations of the tiny house to better understand how this dwelling type might challenge the normalisation of th...

Self-tracking technologies are now a taken-for-granted part of the road cyclist’s kit. We are interested in the gendered dynamics of one particular self-tracking platform: Strava. This article offers the concept of the cycling assemblage to explore how gendered subjectivities are felt and gain legitimacy on-the-move through the ongoing negotiated r...

What can be learned from conversations about walkability per se and specific ideas about the embodied geographies of walking? In this article, we work with the idea of a walking assemblage and the related concept of territory to clarify how social and material entities might promote or impede journeys on foot. Our analysis is grounded in ethnograph...

Trails with a gastronomic theme present a popular tool for regional tourism development as they market destinations/products/experiences in a gastronomy-scape or touristic terroir. They represent networks or clusters of attractions/destinations unified under a distinct gastronomic theme such as beer, wine, or cheese. Most research addressing gastr...

This article develops ideas of hydro-geographies at the scale of everyday embodied experiences to better understand the relationships between migration, household sustainability and ethics. Framed within a feminist visceral approach, the article attends to the embodied dimensions of domesticated water. We draw on insights from the concepts of trans...

In this paper, we aim to better understand what mobilises people into being and becoming named as leaders in sustainability in the places where they live. Our premise is that action for sustainability originates with passionate individuals who lead action at the local level. We present our analysis of a walking sensory ethnography conducted in 2012...

In the industrialized West, cars are considered an essential part of everyday life. Their dominance is underpinned by the challenges of managing complex, geographically stretched daily routines. Drivers’ emotional and embodied relationships with automobiles also help to explain why car cultures are difficult to disrupt. This article foregrounds eth...

Despite calls for more socio-technical research on energy, there is little practical advice to how narratives collected through qualitative research may be melded with technical knowledge from the physical sciences such as engineering and then applied in energy efficiency social action strategies. This is despite established knowledge in the enviro...

Domestic refrigerators have become symbols of climate change in energy efficiency campaigns; they are equipment that both permits and prohibits the performance of environmental citizenship. However, little is known about how subjectivities and practices interact, particularly with regard to questions about refrigeration and domestic energy. What mi...

The child-friendly city advocates for children's ‘right to the city’. Much of this advocacy focuses on the independent child, with little attention paid to the accompanied experiences of younger children, such as those travelling in prams. This paper draws on a material feminist perspective to help address this gap. We offer the concept of mother–c...

This paper empirically tests the concept of value-in-behavior (consumer perceived value towards the performance of behaviors), considers how it influences consumer behavioral outcomes, and identifies implications for social marketing. Value-in-behavior was tested in the context of energy efficiency, an important area for pro-social marketing. A sur...

Urban parks are currently enshrined within liveable forms of sustainable urban planning for high-density city living. This article draws on Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s idea of territory to critically explore the embodied geographies of liveability. The concept of territory draws attention to the emplacement of subjectivities constituted not...

Purpose This paper aims to present a discursive and evaluative analysis of Energy + Illawarra, an Australian Government Low Income Energy Efficiency Program (LIEEP) funded interdisciplinary social marketing energy efficiency programme. Energy + Illawarra was a community programme working with low-income older people in Australia and involving soci...

Urban water scarcity in south-east Australia forces us to engage with how our present centralised public utilities are embedded in our everyday lives, amidst uncertain futures. In the last decades, socio-technical approaches have illustrated how the myth of endless main water supply is made possible by cultures of engineering and plumbing. To exten...

Purpose This paper aims to contribute to contemporary debates about interdisciplinarity and social marketing by presenting the critical reflections of a social marketer, a human geographer and an engineer on working across disciplines in an Australian community energy efficiency intervention – Energy + Illawarra. The paper also aims to identify cha...

This article presents a material feminist perspective into motherhood and walking. Our aim is to explore the process of women ‘becoming mothers’ through journeying on-foot somewhere with children in car-dependent cities. To do so we utilise empirical material gathered as part of a walking sensory ethnography with families living in Wollongong, New...

The energy field is characterised by an unusual degree of transdisciplinary research. At a moment when transdisciplinary work is valued within certain policy realms for its more apparent relevance and problem-solving attributes to global challenges, it is therefore helpful to consider frameworks that may facilitate such research. To do so, this pap...

There has been a recent expansion of interest in cultural approaches to rural communities and to the economic and social situation of rurality more broadly. This interest has been particularly prominent in Australia in recent years, spurring the emergence of an interdisciplinary field called 'rural cultural studies'. This collection is framed by a...

This paper offers a contribution to cultures of urban water research through household ethnographies conducted with 16 participants who migrated from Burma to Sydney, Australia. We draw on a strand of corppreal feminism and offer the concept of bathing assemlbages to interpet how watery skin encounters provide clues to how participants washed thems...

We summarise and take issue with Adam Cooper's analysis of the relationship between social scientific research and the formulation of energy policy. Cooper's case for 'socio-technical' energy research contains several empirical and logical flaws. We identify five points of weakness in what is intended to be a constructive critique. Though we share...

This essay examines the recent controversy surrounding ‘Safe Schools', a federally-funded education program designed to reduce anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) bullying in Australian schools. Although LGBTI students are known to experience homophobic, biphobic and transphobic verbal and physical abuse at school, opponen...

In this paper, we offer an embodied and material exploration of food waste arising from practices of food refrigeration and disposal. Inspired by geographers working with a visceral approach and calls within the discipline to evaluate the productive agency of materials, our framing brings materiality and embodiment to the fore in accounting for ref...

This chapter investigates narratives about men who manage wildfire in Australia. It builds on the growing body of work that presents firefighting as a gendered and spatially Eriksen, 2014). This work argues that the privileged subject of the wildland firefighter is cast by discourses of (predominantly white) masculinities that position the bodies o...

This paper offers a contribution to ongoing discussions of the role of sound for producing geographical knowledge. It is argued that sound is an inherent component of critical research of emotions, society and space. Yet we note that there is a lack of practical advice as to how this might come about. In this paper we offer a methodological approac...

This article examines the gendered dynamics of wildland firefighting through analysis of employment statistics and in-depth interviews with employees of the National Parks and Wildlife Service in New South Wales, Australia. The statistics suggest increased gender equality for women following the affirmative gender politics of the 1990s in a previou...

Purpose Drawing on value theory, this study aims to explore the perceived value of using energy efficiently amongst a low-income older population group. It aims to provide an empirical exploration of the concept of value-in-behaviour, and, in doing so, identify that it is a logical addition to the extant concepts of value-in-exchange and value-in-u...

The automobile is acknowledged as an urgent environmental sustainability issue in cities where it remains pivotal to everyday life and society. We explore the potential of migrants – from societies where urban spaces and everyday life are not centred on the automobile – to elucidate pathways for reducing car dependence. This paper explores the sust...

Cultural change is critical to climate change responses, but the in-depth qualitative research that investigates culture is necessarily conducted at scales difficult to integrate with policy. A focus of climate change mitigation and adaptation is affluent developed world households. Adapting methods used elsewhere in social science, we report and a...

This paper draws on driving ethnographies conducted with heterosexual parents in a regional centre in New South Wales, Australia, to illustrate the doing of family care in the mobile space of the car. Our analysis employs a narrative ethnography used by geographers working in materialist more-than-human feminist perspectives. In doing so, we advanc...

Social scientists are arguing that energy policies should pay more attention to everyday life to address energy efficiency. Scholars are now positing that energy policy needs to move beyond essentialised understandings of people positioned as the problem and seek to involve household members as part of the solution. Joining this conversation, we ex...

This paper is an ethnography of how six Australian volunteers experience a house-build project in the Philippines. Contingencies of empathic pain arising from the living conditions of those they aimed to help were felt through their bodies. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s ideas on pain enabled us to explore the politics of volunteer tourism. We suggest the...

This article examines gay and lesbian tourism and its relationship with gay and lesbian cultures and identities. First, an explanation is provided for why travel for some people became an integral part of their sexuality from the Victorian era through to the present day. Second, a critical overview is given of the role of the gay and lesbian touris...

This paper examines household responses to sustainability issues and adoption of energy saving technologies. Our example of solar hot water systems highlights the complexity and variability of responses to low-carbon technologies. While SHW systems have the potential to provide the majority of household hot water and to lower carbon emissions, litt...

Netnography uses a mix of unobtrusive as well as interactive methods of research to study consumer behaviour online. The evolving technology has created greater avenues for researchers to apply different ethnographic methods online. However, it has also posed a number of ethical debates. This paper provides a reflective account of ethical dilemmas...

Gender is a key lens for interpreting meanings and practices of drinking. In response to the overwhelming amount of social and medical alcohol studies that focus on what extent people conform to norms of healthy drinking, this article extends critical feminist geographical engagement with assemblage thinking to explore how the technologies of biopo...

Calls for law reform in Australia reveal marriage as central to the notions of family and citizenship. Attention here is drawn to the recent lack of willingness to debate marriage equality in Australia—from either its advocates or opponents—following a cross-party marriage equality private members bill. Federal Liberal/National Coalition politician...

This paper draws on a visceral approach to explore the role of sound/music for people who drive cars. We examine the ways in which gendered subjectivities emerge from the pleasures associated with listening to sound/music during short car trips. The first part of the paper reviews the recent literature on ‘feelings for cars’. We highlight why gende...

This paper argues that those hoping to influence domestic heat management might engage more directly with the perceived cultural geography of seasonal adaptation. It draws on a study from a coastal city in southeast Australia where winters are mild and summers increasingly hot. We begin with recent qualitative studies of how households around the w...

This paper investigates sweat to deepen theoretical understandings of how gender is lived. To do so we adopt a visceral approach that opens possibilities of thinking geographically about the affective ties and emotional bonds of sweat to engage with feminist logics of embodiment. Our interest is in what sweaty bodies can ‘do’. Attention is given to...

Insights into the relations between men, masculinities, travel and the gay tourism industry are typically ethnocentric, privileging Western perspectives (Waitt and Markwell, 2006). Our chapter addresses this ethnocentric bias by focusing on the narratives of men who live their lives as Indonesians — particularly those who have migrated to Bali havi...

Football is an important site in the construction and performance of masculinity. In this paper we focus on rugby league and/or Australian Rules Football in the Bega Valley District, News South Wales, Australia. This paper investigates 17 football life narratives of men who play in the competitive rural sports leagues of the Bega Valley. Drawing on...

I argue that people's bodily sensations of sweat – smell, touch and sight – can provide insights to the relations between subjectivity and space. I draw on feminist ideas of the body as a physiological, psychological and sociological assemblage out of which spatially situated knowledge, ethics, subjectivities and social relations are forged. Empiri...

A growing body of work in social and cultural geography is concerned with examining food to explore ethical, civic and social concerns. I build on the critiques by engaging with the visceral. Drawing on the theoretical work of Elspeth Probyn, I argue that eating reveals the fundamental ambiguity of embodiment, allowing us to attend to visceralities...

Bird-watching is an increasingly popular leisure activity. Previous research has taken for granted the identity of people who watch birds, often categorised by their level of skilled practice as ‘dude’, ‘birder’ or ‘twitcher’. Feminist geographers encourage us to explore identity work as an outcome of the reciprocal relationships between practices...

San Francisco's Downtown Berkeley Arts District, Sheffield's Cultural Industries Quarter, Manchester's Northern Quarter, Dublin's Temple Bar, and Belfast's Cathedral Quarter are all examples of how the creative industry script resonates with municipal authorities across the globe. For many policy-makers economic regeneration is seemingly made possi...

This paper focuses on embodied geographies of alcohol to rethink the weekend. We explore the weekend as it is produced via the mutually constitutive relationships between time, space and bodies. Drawing on qualitative research undertaken in Bega, New South Wales, Australia with 23 young women, we offer a critical analysis of how alcohol shapes the...

This paper employs a visceral approach to explore the affective relations between kangaroo meat and home. We concentrate on eating kangaroo as a central political issue. In 2008, kangaroo meat gained prominence in Australia through the proposal in the Garnaut Climate Change Review to reduce carbon emissions by changing consumers' red meat diets in...

Questions of bodies and embodiment are a critical focus for geographers. In this paper we advance discussion of the mobilisation of bodies that investigates the interconnections between the visceral and discursive, through paying attention to the affordances of sound. We draw on our ethnographic research of the Climate Camp parade held during Octob...

This paper originates out of on-going research that explores the processes of listening, music and sound in place-making. When asking people to be attentive to the sounds that mean something to them about where they live, very intimate and personal sets of relationships were uncovered that were underpinned by values attached to both imagined and li...

Households are increasingly addressed as a focus of environmental policy, with varying degrees of success in achieving more sustainable outcomes at the domestic level. Part of the problem is black boxing, in which the inherent complexity of households tends to be taken for granted. Here we draw on cultural environmental research to put forward a mo...

We argue that a closer attention to the everyday visceral experiences of hearing and listening offers new insights into geographies of home and practices of sustainability. We suggest that this approach is significant to understanding how sound helps to assemble and reassemble the relationships that comprise home. We concentrate on a group of 10 am...

The authors engage critically, and constructively, with the proposition that households are a key scale of action on climate change. They confront dilemmas of practice and circumstance, and cultural norms of lifestyle and consumerism that are linked to troublesome environmental problems - and question whether they can be easily unsettled. The work...

Personal transport choices are under increased government scrutiny as private cars are attributed with exacerbating carbon emissions. This paper appraises the value of mobile methodologies for researching transport choices through paying closer attention to life-on-the-move. Drawing on key debates within geography regarding the 'new' mobilities par...

This paper seeks to explore creative practice in an Australian country town, and in so doing, to unsettle market-orientated interpretations of creativity that privilege the urban. Instead of focusing on creative practice as a means to develop industries, we focus on how creativity is a means to establish a cooperative gallery space that helps to su...