Sarah Keenan

Three years ago last Sat­urday, an oil rig around 50 kilo­metres off the coast of Louisi­ana exploded. The explo­sion killed eleven work­ers instant­an­eously, and marked the begin­ning of an 87-​day period of uncon­trol­lable crude oil spillage into the Gulf of Mex­ico, the sea-​floor well spew­ing out around 4.9 mil­lion bar­rels of oil before it was finally capped ...
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Just over five years ago, on 21 June 2007, Australia’s then prime min­is­ter John Howard announced that rates of child sex abuse in the country’s North­ern Ter­rit­ory abori­ginal com­munit­ies were so high that they con­sti­tuted a national emer­gency. Draw­ing on the fed­eral government’s con­sti­tu­tional power to over­ride Ter­rit­ory legis­la­tion, and sus­pend­ing Australia’s Racial Dis­crim­in­a­tion Act 1975, ...
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I’ve been a little taken aback this week at the level of racism against China in the Brit­ish and US media, and on longer-​than-​usual com­ment threads on vari­ous friends’ face­book walls. I mean, I know that racism in sport and in the media is noth­ing new, and I know that being mixed race white-​Chinese, I’m tak­ing the vari­ous swipes ...
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This week­end was an event­ful one for the Tate Mod­ern. Late Sat­urday morn­ing, pur­su­ant to sec­tion 7 of the Museums and Gal­ler­ies Act 1992, art col­lect­ive Lib­er­ate Tate presen­ted the gal­lery with an unex­pec­ted ‘gift to the nation’. That gift was a 1.5 tonne, 16.5 metre wind tur­bine blade, recovered from a field in Wales, trans­por­ted, cleaned and lov­ingly ...
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At least 28 Ira­nian and Iraqi asylum-​seekers drowned yes­ter­day within sight of the Aus­tralian ter­rit­ory they were aim­ing for. The media keeps emphas­iz­ing that there were “women and chil­dren” on board. If they were all men, would we not need to feel bad about it? is there a uni­ver­sal inno­cence about women and chil­dren that ...
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Early in open­ing dis­cus­sion at the ‘Spa­tial Justice’ work­shop, Mas­sey said that those who had come for a punch-​up were going to be dis­ap­poin­ted, and she was right. While I wasn’t blood-​thirsty for a Mas­sey Har­vey heavy-​weight match, along with many oth­ers I was look­ing for­ward to what a dir­ect dia­logue between these two hugely influ­en­tial rad­ical geo­graph­ers might ...
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