John Carr

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Senior Lecturer at UNSW Sydney

As places that disrupt “business as usual,” community food gardens carry the potential to experientially, critically, and restoratively recenter food systems and interconnected sustainability knowledges. Using interdisciplinary theory and practice-based observation, we zero in on the environmental planning and management space of the university cam...

This study shows how legal evidentiary rules intended to make trials fair also enable biodiversity loss, even in courts charged with environmental protection. The common law is premised on two types of rules. The first, substantive laws, set rules for how society should function—obstructing and punishing some behaviours while enabling and rewarding...

This research focuses on how city-makers can work to expand the potential of ruins to manifest diverse histories and geographies. We argue that nuanced and ethical approaches to integrating ruins in cities can enhance communities connections, combatting the creeping placelessness of neoliberal urbanism, and promoting overall wellbeing. This study o...

Community forestry praxis has a long history in Nepal. The country is often considered an exemplar in promoting community forestry for environment and development. In this paper, we provide a critical review of Nepali community forestry scholarship to offer internationally relevant lessons and to identify areas of future research. Our review shows...

As a relatively new field of learning, the pedagogy of environmental communication is quickly evolving. Untethered to a single academic tradition of research or teaching, the field can dynamically respond to current tumultuous local and global environmental, social, and political conditions. The sociocultural and ecological focus of the field and i...

The Florida Tampa Electric Company’s Manatee Viewing Center (MVC) and its fossil-fuelled Big Bend power plant are separated by a narrow ship channel that serves as state and federal sanctuary for threatened Florida Manatees. As humans have destroyed much of their warm spring habitat, many manatees are forced to rely on power plant hot water effluen...

OPEN ACCESS The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity is a timely book, as across the globe more and more of us awake to our always interconnected selves. The Handbook brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self and group identities, introducing an interdisciplinary, insightful assembly of original theory and research on...

As ever expanding accretions of human industrial and residential development pave over endangered Florida manatees’ warm water springs winter habitat, more than half of the manatees have come to depend upon fossil fuel-burning power plant hot water effluent channels for survival. In an effort to save these manatees, environmental activists have lev...

This study aims to address how, to what extent, and under what conditions may those who are not cisgendered as male do the work of negotiating access to male sporting space. In doing so, it brings together critical geographies of masculinity and the critical literature on skateboarding to address the role of particular kinds of skateboarding spaces...

While microcredit has been widely praised as a new, powerful tool for enabling development and empowering the poor, this form of ‘development from below’ does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, microcredit programs are inseperable from a host of neoliberal political, cultural, and economic practices and projects. These contexts are, however, systematic...

While established ethical norms and core legal principles concerning the protection of privacy may be easily identified, applying these standards to rapidly evolving digital information technologies, markets for digital information and convulsive changes in social understandings of privacy is increasingly challenging. This challenge has been furthe...

Emerging groups such as Kiva International are using the Internet to make person-to-person microlending available by matching mostly First World lenders with Third World borrowers. This study analyzes 635 lender profile Web pages on Kiva.org to identify how Kiva International and its lenders imagine this intercultural, financial exchange through an...

This article begins to address why cities continue to use public participation-based planning processes to shape their public spaces, notwithstanding three decades of criticisms of such approaches. Based on ethnographic, activist participant research into Seattle Washington's planning for public skateboard parks, I argue that the mobilization of tw...

This article offers observations from an ongoing action research project involving advocacy for public skateboarding facilities in Seattle, Washington to demonstrate both the need for, and the inherent limits to an ethical framework for action rooted in the Kantian moral imperative of treating all people as ‘ends and not means'. By tracing the ethi...

This article uses Jon Stewart's October 15, 2004, appearance on the U. S. program Crossfire and Stephen Colbert's April 29, 2006, speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner to illustrate how the diffused nature of cyberspace enables Internet users to promulgate news stories. This allows users to drive mainstream media gatekeepers to engage in...

This article argues that urban skateboarding and the laws by which the city is governed must be understood as intertwined. The transformation of skateboarding's most popular practices from the 1970s onward are a product of an ongoing dialectical engagement between young people and the law. When faced with shifting landscapes of property and liabili...

We use this paper to argue that the contemporary tendency of urban governments to exclude a host of ‘undesirables’ from the city—such as the homeless, teens of color, and prostitutes—must be seen as part of a broader process by which the law includes, weighs, and assesses all urban denizens. We use three case studies from Seattle to demonstrate how...

Recently, the city of Portland, Oregon, found itself willing to just say no to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). After eight years of participation with the FBI in a joint task force to investigate residents suspected of plotting terrorist acts, the city decided to withdraw. The task force was an example of a federal-local law-enforcement...

Many new media technologies, such as the internet, serve both as a tool for organizing public commo ns and as a tool for surveilling private lives. This paper addresses the manner in which such technological innovations have enabled a dramatically expanded market for public policy opinion data, and explores the potential role of that market in faci...