Book cover - Title reads 'Summertime Reflections on a vanishing future, Danielle Celermajer'. A Kookaburra sitting on a burnt out tree branch looking across burnt trees. In the background is the sun setting behind the smoke of a bushfire. The sky is a bushfire red.

How Changemakers can Walk with Crisis and Harness the Power of Storytelling

Danielle (Dany) Celermajer’s latest book ‘Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future’ documents her experience inside the 2019 Bushfires in Australia. This podcasts talks about her journey and how she has learnt to speak about crisis. We also discuss the power she has drawn from bearing witness.

Dany identifies strategies for how change makers can walk with crisis, and harness the power of story-telling in how they make change.

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Publisher’s description – “A different kind of nature writing, for a different kind of landscape.

I went and sat alone where Jimmy has been lying. It is way down in the bush. The light is soft, the air and the earth are cool, and the smell is of leaves and the river. I cannot presume to know what he is doing when he lies here, but it seems that he is taking himself back to an ecology not wrought by the terror of the fires, not fuelled by our violence on the earth. He is letting another earth heal him.

Philosopher Danielle Celermajer’s story of Jimmy the pig caught the world’s attention during the Black Summer of 2019­­-20.

Gathered here is that story and others written in the shadow of the bushfires that ravaged Australia. In the midst of the death and grief of animals, humans, trees and ecologies Celermajer asks us to look around – really look around – to become present to all beings who are living and dying through the loss of our shared home.

At once a howl in the forest and an elegy for a country’s soul, these meditations are lyrical, tender and profound.” Source

About the Author

Danielle Celermajer is a Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney, and Deputy Director – Academic of the Sydney Environment Institute. Her books include Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apology (Cambridge University Press 2009), A Cultural Theory of Law in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Prevention of Torture: An Ecological Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Dany is Director of the Multispecies Justice Project and the Research Lead on Concepts and Practices of Multispecies Justice.

About ChangeMaker Chats

ChangeMaker Chats are ad hoc interviews with a single change maker that explore what kind of change they make, why they make it and how they go about it.

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