Juan Francisco SalazarWestern Sydney University · Institute for Culture and Society (ICS)
Juan Francisco Salazar
PhD Communication - BA Anthropology
About
84
Publications
33,312
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
676
Citations
Introduction
I am an environmental anthropologist and documentary filmmaker.
Additional affiliations
March 2020 - present
March 2015 - December 2019
January 2010 - January 2015
University of Western Sydney
Position
- Professor (Associate)
Publications
Publications (84)
Framing the futures of Australia in space: Insights from key stakeholders (2022)
This report is a core output of the project Australia a Space-faring Nation: Imaginaries and Practices of Space Futures, funded under the Australian Research Council’s Future Fellowship scheme (FT190100729) and led by Juan Francisco Salazar at Western Sydney Universit...
The cities of Cape Town, Christchurch, Hobart, Punta Arenas, and Ushuaia are formally recognized international gateway cities through which flows most travel to the Antarctic region. All significant engagement with the South Polar region is co-ordinated through them.
By geographical placement and historical contingency, these cities have a special...
Antarctic “gateway” cities have been characterised primarily as portals through which goods and services from around the world can be transported to the frozen continent. However, recent research suggests that this concept should be expanded to address other forms of connectivity, including those felt by people living in these cities rather than si...
Acknowledged as urgent and complex, the communication of environmental science is at once an outcome and a subject of academic research. In this article, we detail the results of workshops with young residents of five “Antarctic gateway cities” (Hobart, Christchurch, Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, and Cape Town) who helped design and evaluate an online gam...
Recent literature on Antarctic futures includes sobering scenarios for the Southern Polar region in the era of Anthropogenic climate change. Contrasting current trajectories with what might be accomplished through appropriate policies and stewardship, such studies acknowledge that change involves more than exhortation through scholarly venues of co...
Antarctica Day celebrates the icy continent and its unique governance system. It’s the anniversary of the Antarctic Treaty’s adoption on December 1 1959. Framed in a spirit of global co-operation, the treaty acknowledges Antarctica does not belong to any one country. Article IV states:
No acts or activities taking place while the present Treaty is...
Future Earth Australia at the Australian Academy of Science is leading a process to consolidate and extend a broader agenda of proactive and productive reform of climate adaptation, alongside accepting the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. After the devastating bushfires, droughts, floods and hailstorms of the past year, an evidence-b...
This book presents a novel and systematic social theory of soil, and is representative of the rising interest in 'the material' in social sciences. Bringing together new modes of 'critical description' with speculative practices and methods of inquiry, it contributes to the exploration of current transformations in socioecologies, as well as in pol...
Ce chapitre questionne l'invisibilité du sol dans les travaux de sciences humaines et sociales et présente l'approche théorique de l'ouvrage Thinking-with-Soils.
Kon Kam King and Céline Granjou document the evolution of soil mapping since the 1960s at the French National Institute of Research on Agriculture (INRA). They account for the shift from soil surveying initiatives to the rise of soil digital mapping projects, including monitoring, modeling, and predicting soil quantitative properties, such as carbo...
This book presents a novel and systematic social theory of soil, and is representative of the rising interest in ‘the material’ in social sciences. Bringing together new modes of ‘critical description’ with speculative practices and methods of inquiry, it contributes to the exploration of current transformations in socioecologies, as well as in pol...
This book presents a novel and systematic social theory of soil, and is representative of the rising interest in ‘the material’ in social sciences. Bringing together new modes of ‘critical description’ with speculative practices and methods of inquiry, it contributes to the exploration of current transformations in socioecologies, as well as in pol...
This book presents a novel and systematic social theory of soil, and is representative of the rising interest in ‘the material’ in social sciences. Bringing together new modes of ‘critical description’ with speculative practices and methods of inquiry, it contributes to the exploration of current transformations in socioecologies, as well as in pol...
Media Cultures in Latin America updates and expands contemporary global understandings of the region’s media and cultural research. Drawing on forty years of contributions made by Latin American cultural studies to the global media research, the book connects this history to newly developing work that has yet to be given deep consideration in anglo...
This article seeks to contribute to the conceptualization of everyday repair with a focus on banknotes, a ubiquitous and mundane technology in constant need of maintenance and repair. Through a design anthropology approach, we examine how practices of repairing banknotes are entangled with discourses of innovation that manifest in everyday life. Th...
In its impure forms, silicon (Si) is the eighth most common element in the universe by mass and makes up more than a quarter of the Earth’s crust by mass; it is the second most abundant chemical element on Earth after oxygen. Our earliest human ancestors used silica flints for tools and this startling element remains to date among the most expedien...
Despite soil’s vital ecological importance, its significance as a belowground tridimensional living world remains under-theorized in social and cultural research. Drawing on the reading of scientific literature and a series of interviews with scientists working at the juncture of soil and climate research, this article pursues a picture that highli...
The Future Earth Australia Urban Systems Transformation Consultation Report for Greater Western Sydney 2018-2019
This article develops a speculative approach to thinking about the temporalities of ice. Examining the politics of ice cores as temporal probes, it argues that ice comes to matter in political and ecological terms and as the very "stuff of time". As cylinders of ice that are extracted through drilling into the deep time of extreme cryogenic environ...
A growing number of researchers in the social sciences and the environmental humanities have begun to focus on the wider universe and how it is apprehended by modern cosmology. Today the extraterrestrial has become part of the remit of anthropologists, philosophers , historians, geographers, scholars in science and technology studies, and artistic...
This article explores world-making processes through which extreme frontiers of life are made habitable. Examining how notions of life are enlarged, incorporated, and appropriated in complex geopolitical contexts, the article argues that microbial worlds are becoming part of worlding processes and projects that further these frontiers. The emphasis...
This chapter draws from recent anthropological literature on the politics and poetics of infrastructure (Larkin 2013) and my ongoing ethnographic research in the Antarctic Peninsula, to argue that both infrastructures‒as built networks that facilitate circulation of goods, people and data, and logistics; as the coordination and control of movement...
In recent years, the Antarctic has become a fitting space for anthropological analysis and ethnographic research as human activities intensify and populations increasingly make themselves at home in Antarctica. The processes demand a deepening of inquiry into what kinds of socialities, subjectivities, material cultures, intangible heritage and cult...
Anthropology has a critical, practical role to play in contemporary debates about futures. This game-changing new book presents new ways of conceptualising how to engage with a future-oriented research agenda, demonstrating how anthropologists can approach futures both theoretically and practically, and introducing a set of innovative research meth...
Anthropologies and Futures calls for a renewed, open and future-focused approach to understanding the present, anticipating the unknown, and intervening in the world. It is aligned with the movement toward a critical anthropological ethnography whose practitioners are engaged with confronting and intervening in the challenges of contested and contr...
Antarctica has been imagined and fantasized for millennia, yet it has remained – until now – off-limits to the ethnographic imagination. In this chapter I reflect on a specific aspect of my on-going research and many years of short-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Antarctic Peninsula: the making of the documentary film Nightfall on Gaia1 (2015),...
In this article we describe how the historical emergence and rise of future studies, since the founding issue of Futures in 1968, has been intricately connected to the emergence and development of environmental anticipation as discourse and practice. We trace a dialectical and inter-twined relationship between technologies of environmental anticipa...
In this special issue of Futures we concentrate on a particular figure: the politics of environmental anticipation. Through a stimulating collection of nine original articles we aim to provide a critical assessment of a range of sites where varied and conflicting politics of environmental anticipation are constituted and resisted. In doing so we ar...
The point of departure chosen for this chapter is an epistemological one: Antarctica is arguably the most mediated place in the world, and as Elena Glasberg contends, ‘more than for any other place on Earth, visual mediation defines and has created the territory of Antarctica’. The geopolitics of knowledge of the Antarctic is, in other words, intim...
By showcasing recent research on ecotourism in Norway, Iceland and Greenland, this book presents novel perspectives about tourism ecologies in the European High North that challenge those stereotypical imaginings advertised and publicised in tourism programmes. The purpose of this concluding chapter is twofold: first, provide an afterword of sorts...
In December 2013, a replica of ‘Mawson’s Hut’ (a historic structure in Antarctica) joined a growing list of polar tourist attractions in the Australian city of Hobart, Tasmania. Initially promoted as the city’s ‘latest tourist hotspot,’ the ‘replica museum’ quickly took its place in Hobart’s newly redeveloped waterfront, reinforcing the city’s iden...
The future has long been viewed in terms of modernity’s human-centred categories of innovation, emancipation, progress and civilization while nature has been shoved to the realm of the ahistorical, understood as a fixed background for the development of society. These categories entail the subterfuge that the future is always “ours” to shape and bu...
Whilst nationalism is a recognised force globally, its framing is predicated on experience in conventionally occupied parts of the world. The familiar image of angry young men waving Kalashnikovs means that the idea that nationalism might be at play in Antarctica has to overcome much instinctive resistance, as well as the tactical opposition of the...
Over the past two decades, and not unlike other Southern Ocean rim countries, Chile has experienced a series of fundamental changes in its engagement with the Antarctic. This article provides an exploration into how these changes are shaping the formation of new local and national Antarctic social imaginaries. Through an account of a digital storyt...
The concept of wilderness in Antarctica is an intensely political construct. Drawing upon a nominally global framing of untrammelled nature and space, its roots are in a western reaction to the loss of domestic wild-ness consequential upon the industrial revolution. It also draws upon what was historically true in Antarctica: most of the place was...
The aim of this essay is to ask whether documentary cinema's main preoccupation with “representing the past” and “documenting the real” can be tested – or resisted – by speculating about documentary film's potential to act as a means of rendering an anticipatory future for socio-ecological change. The analysis is centered on three documentary films...
In the popular imagination, circumstances and the apparent internationalism of regional governance under the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) undercuts any basis for nationalism in Antarctica. The containment of critical underpinnings of nationalism – around positions on territorial sovereignty and Cold-War polarities – appears the ATS' greatest achie...
Esta obra, resultado del trabajo de un equipo de investigación en el marco de una alianza entre la Universidad Nacional Abierta y a Distancia (UNAD), la Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios (UNIMINUTO), la Universidad Santo Tomás (USTA) y la Universidad del Norte, está orientada a llenar el vacío que existe en Colombia en cuanto a estudios enfo...
The article implements an ethnographic perspective to explore new modes of engaging with the geopolitics of place in Antarctica. It does so by entertaining the idea that a youth science education initiative undertaken every year in Chile is exemplary of distinctive forms of soft power, where cultural diplomacy plays a significant role alongside sci...
Museums and science centers hold a unique position in the media and political landscape as trusted information sources and are emerging as key players in climate change debates. The modes of engagement with audiences, visitors, and publics allow museums to provide sensorial and affective experiences though the agency of objects and immersive enviro...
This article examines the ways in which one organisation and a number of citizens have begun to make use of new video translation and subtitling/captioning technologies to address local and regional social and environmental justice issues in the South East Asia region. We conceptualise these emerging practices as instances of ‘citizen translation’...
Social research underlines how the mass media frames and presents environmental change and risk in ways that become contested cultural constructs embedded in deep ideological structures. While significant attention has concentrated on the mass media, less consideration has been given to examining the role of museums and science centres in communica...
Citizens' media and communication are still poorly understood in the mainstream of development policy and practice – and are prone to simplistic forms of implementation, because of the lack of a coherent grasp of the social, cultural, and political processes that make them transformative. Introducing the articles in this guest issue, the authors fi...
The article examines the notion of development as self-determination in the context of current politicisation of indigenous peoples' affairs. It looks at the links between development studies, indigenous social movements, and community media practices; and more specifically between specific views on development, self-determination, and identity, an...
Indigenous media have become an intensely debated subject in discussions of cultural diversity and access to information and communication technologies (ICTs). In many circles, the question of the equitable and affordable access to communication and information has begun to be conceptualized as integral to human rights and as an essential element i...
Indigenous media have become an intensely debated subject in discussions of cultural diversity and access to information and communication technologies (ICTs). In many circles, the question of the equitable and affordable access to communication and information has begun to be conceptualized as integral to human rights and as an essential element i...
Indigenous media have become an intensely debated subject in discussions of cultural diversity and access to information and communication technologies (ICTs). In many circles, the question of the equitable and affordable access to communication and information has begun to be conceptualized as integral to human rights and as an essential element i...
Indigenous media have become an intensely debated subject in discussions of cultural diversity and access to information and communication technologies (ICTs). In many circles, the question of the equitable and affordable access to communication and information has begun to be conceptualized as integral to human rights and as an essential element i...
This article examines the subject of digitisation of cultural knowledge in light of the new intertextual possibilities within visual anthropology made possible by digital media. The article argues that new media present several challenges and opportunities for decolonising anthropological research through processes of documentation, visualisation a...
The article analyses the role of the internet in informing and shaping indigenous knowledge and offers a critical examination of the uses of internet by Mapuche indigenous activists in Chile. It describes the ways in which the internet has been appropriated as an efficient political tool to rearticulate a renewed Mapuche cultural imaginary, constru...
En este artículo me interesa mostrar a través de una serie de ejemplos, lamanera en que el renovado activismo indígena de la ultima década enAmérica Latina se ha manifestado en forma clave en la crecienteapropiación de medios de comunicación y tecnologías de información. Estefenómeno de apropiación es un proceso diverso y complejo, en don dediferen...
Projects
Projects (3)
Future Earth Australia, based at the Australian Academy of Science, is a peak initiative that convenes leaders across expertise, sectors, and the nation to advance the sustainability agenda and forge pathways to a thriving future.
Antarctica's future hangs in a delicate balance. This project is the first substantial comparative program to investigate how five"'gateway cities' might both re-imagine and intensify their relations to Antarctica and each other. The project is intended to revitalise these relations through assessment and research processes that include supporting citizens to frame future forms of engagement. It will develop a platform of tools to instigate a more robust Antarctic custodial network of partner organisations to support these cities in evaluating and valuing the
impact of their Antarctic connection in an integrated way.
