Mothers’ Agency and Responsibility in the Australian Bushfires: A Feminist New Materialist Account

ABSTRACT

This article employs new materialist theory to the accounts of women who were pregnant, giving birth or parenting new-borns during the Australian bushfires of 2019/2020. As feminist scholars we are concerned with the inequitable responsibility accorded to women during this time to limit their (un)born children’s exposure to smoke. Drawing on Barad’s (2007) relational ontology we trace how (non)human phenomena like ‘smoke’, ‘public health advice’ and discourses of ‘the good mother’ work intra-actively to establish conditions of possibility in relation to mother’s agency and responsibility in this crisis. Via in-depth interviews with 25 women, we discovered these coagulating forces meant many experienced feelings of ‘powerlessness’ and subsequent ‘guilt’ at their inability to prevent smoke inhalation for their (un)born children. To challenge this burden of responsibility, we (re)configure conventional notions of ‘agency’ and ‘responsibility’ within a new materialist frame. When agency is understood as an intra-active becoming and response-ability as preceding the subject, responsibility for the air shifts to a recognition that everyone/thing is complicit in the world’s differential becoming. We extend this thinking to consider human response-ability and agency in relation to the climate change that has been attributed to causing the fires.

KEYWORDS:

• Bushfires
• mothers
• agency
• responsibility
• response-ability
• feminist new materialism

In the summer of 2019–2020 Australia experienced bushfires that were catastrophic in their intensity and scale (Jalaludin and Morgan 2021). An estimated 24–40 million hectares of land were burned, 3 billion animals were killed or displaced, at least 33 humans died and over 3000 homes were destroyed (Commonwealth of Australia 2020). The fires have been attributed to a warming climate, decreased rainfall and increasing drought which have lengthened the fire season and risk of more extensive and intense bushfires in Southern and Eastern Australia (Van Oldenborgh et al. 2021). Dense smoke from these fires smothered some towns and cities for weeks, leaving many feeling deprived of a summer usually spent enjoying the outdoors (see Figure 1¹).

Figure 1. Participant photograph of the Namadgi National Park fire on the outskirts of Canberra. Reproduced with permission.

Our discussion draws from a study that explores women’s experiences of pregnancy, birth and new-born parenting during this period. This work is connected to a larger project entitled, ‘Mother and Child 2020’ (MC2020) where an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, nurses, psychologists, anthropologists and epidemiologists are investigating the short and long-term health effects of the fires and smoke on women and children in Canberra and the NSW Southern Eastern coast. Our contribution to MC2020’s predominately biomedical and psychological study, was to consider how complex entanglements of bodies and the world (re)makes reproduction during this time. Initially this interest was guided by two questions; how did parents make sense of pregnancy, birth and new-born parenting during this time? And, more expansively, what can these experiences tell us about the meaning of reproduction in an era of climate change, crisis or even emergency? While these questions are addressed in a book entitled, Reproduction, Kin and Climate Crisis (Roberts et al. in press) in this article we narrow our scope to explore what a feminist new materialist analysis might offer our understandings of mother’s feelings of responsibility and agency for their children during the bushfires. Our discussion is structured around three key questions; ‘How do mothers come into being during the bushfires?’ ‘How do we understand the agency of mothers in the context of bushfires?’ and ‘How can women’s responsibility for their (un)born children during this time be (re)configured’?

This article concentrates on how new materialist understandings of agency and response-ability (Barad 2007; Verlie 2020) might help us rethink women’s experiences, rather than systematically documenting the study findings (Roberts et al. in press). As such, participants’ narratives of how they understood being a mother serve as a launching point for our theoretically conceived ideas rather than conventional empirical ‘evidence’ of our argument. The need to rethink women’s responsibility and agency during the bushfires arose out of our conversations with mothers, in which we found many were worried about the effects of smoke on their (un)born children. These feelings of anxiety were accompanied by public health advice which firmly placed responsibility for reducing (un)born children’s smoke exposure on women, by suggesting those who were pregnant wear masks and remain indoors. As a consequence, mothers in our study vigilantly checked air quality apps to measure smoke toxicity and adapted daily activities accordingly. What became clear however, was the smoke was inescapable even when inside, and despite participants’ very best efforts, inhaling it could not be avoided. This led many to feel what one participant characterised as ‘Mum-guilt’ at their failure to protect their (un)born children, from the potential negative effects of smoke exposure. Such a feeling was exacerbated for participants in the absence of clear existing evidence from medical and media sources about what effects the smoke might have on their (un)born children (Abdo et al. 2019; Black et al. 2017).

The article begins by explicating the new materialist theoretical underpinnings of our argument and key conceptual ideas we employ such as ‘intra-action’, ‘agential-cut’, ‘agency’ and ‘response-ability’. This section also reveals the facility of a feminist new materialist approach for acknowledging the unfair burden of responsibility placed on women to keep their (un)born children safe during the fires. Next, we offer details about the research methodology to provide contextual information that underpins our theoretical argument. This description is followed by an exploration of how by employing a new materialist theoretical lens ‘mothers’ can be seen to come into being during the bushfires, intra-relation with phenomena such as ‘public health advice’, ‘smoke’ and discourses of ‘the good mother’. To decipher how much agency women actually had to keep their (un)born children safe during the bushfires, the next section examines participants’ experience of agency during this time. It draws on a new materialist understanding of human-non-human agency to argue that women had minimal control despite their significant efforts to prevent their (un)born children’s smoke exposure. Finally, we extend this notion of agency into the realms of environmental sustainability and feminist thinking about women’s empowerment more generally. In doing so we consider new materialism’s radically dispersed and contingent notion of response-ability in relation to who-what is responsible for the bushfires and the climate change understood to have caused them.

Feminist New Materialist Theoretical Underpinnings

Our argument for a (re)configuration of who is responsible for keeping (un)born children safe from smoke inhalation is drawn from understandings of agency and responsibility within a relational ontology (Barad 2007; Christie 2020; Verlie 2020). We mobilise this paradigm in recognition of the material world’s importance in shaping who we are and what we can do. Feminist new materialism is only one way of attending to this position however, and certainly not the first materialist perspective. In Australia, First Nation materialism has adopted a more-than-human perspective for millennia (Todd 2016). In this regard, important indigenous materialist work around the concept of country and response-ability has already been undertaken by the Bawaka Country Collective (Country et al. 2013, 2019, 2022) along with examinations of the devastation wrought by fires (Pascoe, Gammage, and Neale 2021).

We make a humble attempt to add to this scholarship by mobilising a relational ontology which recognises humans form part of an assemblage that contains (non)humans that intra-actively coinhabit the world. Subsequently, humans do not constitute the planet’s central agents. Such coinhabitation does not occur between pre-existing and distinct entities that ‘intertwine’ as per a conventional understanding of interaction. Rather, a relational ontology calls into question the very nature of being as separate states/entities/events, suggesting instead that nothing exists outside of, or prior to relations or entanglements with others (Verlie 2020, 1270). In this way, all relations have a different ontological premise and can be understood as intra-actions. Intra-action recognises that mothers come into being within a ‘ … larger and longer ecology and economy, teeming with various (non)human forces … ’ (Christie 2020, 143). Within the context of bushfires, these phenomena include land management practices, environmental health, common sense fire management and prevention strategies, individual and state resources and funding, along with co-ordination between different levels of government, and government-nongovernment relations. Participants referenced all of these phenomena in our conversations, however for the purposes of our argument around women’s unfair burden of responsibility we concentrate on three which consistently surfaced in their talk about keeping (un)born children safe. These phenomena are ‘smoke’, ‘public health advice’ and discourses of the ‘good mother’ which we conceive in accordance with a new materialist approach, as (non)human forces which comprise an intra-active entanglement of human and non-human matter.

All research is itself an intra-action that enacts agential cuts which are, ‘specific intra-actions and therefore boundary-making practices’ (Barad 2007, 183). Our research performs its own agential cut, or boundary-making practice, via our focus on ‘smoke’, ‘public health advice’ and discourses of the ‘good mother’. These cuts are ‘performed’ because they enable a recognition of how participants become ‘guilt-filled’ mothers, while also recognising the indeterminacy of this experience and the way it is open to change with/in the presence of different phenomena. It is this ontological position that enables our (re)configuration of ‘Mum-guilt’ and responsibility explored below.

Women’s agency is a key feminist concern and within a new materialist framing is understood as ‘congealing’ through relationships (Barad 2007, 151) rather than possessed by individual women. That is, agency and entities co-emerge through their intra-actions (Verlie 2020, 1272). From this perspective, we argue the powerlessness mothers told us they felt in trying to improve air quality can be understood as produced through the intra-action of (non)human forces of ‘smoke’, ‘public health advice’ and discourses of ‘the good mother’.

Christie (2020) argues, ‘because we (humans) have understood matter as inert or dead and ourselves as transcendent and lively, we have misunderstood not just our own materiality, but also the way materiality conditions the possibility of (our) humanity’ (122). New materialism reframes agency, ‘not beyond the human, but in excess of and not wholly bound up with(in) the human body’ (Christie 2020, 122). This means that humans can act, but this agency is not theirs alone and only comes into being within specific material conditions which delimit what is possible. As we discuss below, this idea has implications for who is seen to have responsibility for keeping (un)born² children safe from the effects of smoke during bushfires. It recognises that although women have been charged with this responsibility, it was never theirs alone, nor within an intra-active understanding of agency a task they could succeed at.

Another new materialist concept we employ in our argument is that of ‘response-ability’. When humans are ontologically inseparable from the material world and agency is not possessed by individuals but a congealing that occurs in the moment of intra-action, then responsibility can be reconceptualised as ‘response-ability’. That is, an anti-individualistic and impersonal force, stretching across intra-active relations rather than the preserve of individual (non)humans. This notion of response-ability involves, ‘the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond [response-ability] … to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly’ (Barad 2007, x). What this means is that responsibility is not an individual endeavour for mothers in our study and instead an inextricable part of their iterative becoming with/in the bushfire assemblage.

This situation exists because response-ability has a different ontology that diverges from the idea of discrete entities (e.g. humans) whom might engage in ethical relations. Instead, it is not an entirely face-to-face or human affair and exists in an aethereal pre-conscious space. As such response-ability ‘ … is not something humans choose to be a part of but it is ‘intimately imbricated in their material ontology – the ‘ethical call’ is inaugurated in our very becoming and intra-acting with(in) the world(ing) (non)humans co(in)habit’ (Christie 2020, 132). This means that response-ability for (un)born children’s exposure to smoke cannot be assigned to particular humans or non-humans, but is always already part of our intra-acting with(in) the world.

Christie’s (2020) work helps explain this idea further by building on Barad’s (2007) concept of response-ability ‘as an incarnate relation that precedes the intentionality of consciousness’ (392), with reference to Levinas' (1998) notion of a responsibility for the other that precedes us.

The responsibility for the other cannot have begun in my commitment, in my decision. The unlimited responsibility in which I find myself, comes from the hither side of my freedom, from a ‘prior to every memory’, an ‘ulterior to every accomplishment’, from the non-present par excellence, the non-original, the anarchical, prior to or beyond essence. (Levinas 1998, 10)

Here Levinas traces a responsibility that cannot be chosen, as it exists prior to consciousness and is an inescapable part of all relationships. When we understand agency as an intra-active becoming and response-ability as preceding the subject, then the burden of responsibility for mothers of (un)born children shifts to a recognition that everyone/thing is complicit in the world’s differential becoming (Barad 2007) as well as the air (un)born children breathe.

About the Method

The methodology for this project was not conceived within a feminist new materialist frame partly because it was nested within a larger biomedical study which had other investments. We do not feel this precludes the benefits of engagement with new materialist thought following data collection. Like other post-qualitative researchers (MacLure 2013; St. Pierre 2015) who assert that new materialism is not incommensurate with conventional qualitative methods, we believe it has utility in opening up new ways of engaging with our findings. In this instance, by furthering a feminist politics of women’s agency to rethink what we consider an unfair burden of responsibility placed on women for their (un)born children.

Interviews with 25 mothers about their experiences of the bushfires were conducted during 2020 and 2021. We also interviewed 6 professionals working in medicine, architecture, air quality monitoring and public health and bushfire management. Some were instrumental in preparing public information, others were treating pregnant women and/or babies, and some were involved in monitoring air quality and/or considering how homes could be designed to prevent smoke infiltration. These interviews provided additional insight into perceived risk of bushfire smoke to pregnant women and new-borns, and public measures undertaken to manage smoke and fire-risk. We draw on some of these narratives below to initiate our argument around how mothers come into being during the bushfires.

In terms of participants who were mothers, a third had already given birth or gave birth when the fires and smoke were at their worst. Three gave birth before the fires commenced, 5 during the fires and 6 directly following them but before COVID-19. Another 10 gave birth during the pandemic. Half of the participants were first-time parents and half had two or more children. The majority (18) were living in Canberra during the bushfires, while 4 were residing on the New South Wales Southeast Coast. Two participants had moved from Canberra because of the bushfires or the pandemic and were in Melbourne or Brisbane when interviewed. Another participant who usually lived overseas was visiting family in a rural town in the Snowy Mountains and was eventually evacuated to Canberra.

Canberra is a predominately white city with 67% Anglo residents, with those from Chinese and Indian backgrounds constituting the largest ethnic minority groups. Only 2% of Canberrans are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. This ethnic composition is reflective of our participants with all identifying as Anglo-Australian. The larger MC2020 study also struggled to reach ethnic minority communities despite undertaking interviews for community radio, television and magazines as well as posting on Facebook and approaching local churches. To address this ethnocentricity the MC2020 project has initiated several supplementary studies, one led by indigenous public health scholar Stewart Sutherland on short and long-term fire effects on local First Nation’s communities. Another subsidiary project headed by The Australia National University Professor Christine Phillips will concentrate on migrant families’ experiences. Canberra’s population also has a higher-than-average socio-economic demographic compared to the rest of Australia. According to the 2016 Census, almost 35% of the population have a Bachelor Degree or above, compared to 22% in the general population (ABS Australian Bureau of Statistics 2017). These statistics are evidenced in that most participants were highly educated with 69% holding a Bachelor degree or above, and similarly 69% owning their own homes. As indicated below, these characteristics shaped participants’ experiences and made certain avenues of action possible, such as buying air purifiers.

Almost all interviews were undertaken by Rebecca in participants’ homes or in a local café or park and lasted 1–2 h. While for most talking about the bushfires came easily, it sometimes evoked vivid memories and strong emotions. This was especially apparent for participants who lived in areas where the fires had come within metres of their homes or, those forced to evacuate due to fire threat. Others described their worry about giving birth in smoke-filled delivery rooms as hospitals struggled to prevent smoke entering through automatic doors. It is to these experiences and anxieties around giving birth and caring for (un)born children that we turn to next.

How do Mothers Come into Being as ‘Responsible’ for Their (un)Born Children?

In this section we explore how participants intra-actively come into being as ‘mothers’ primarily responsible for their (un)born children’s welfare with/in the bushfire assemblage. Participants often recounted that public health advice was instrumental in influencing their daily activities during the bushfires. Anita, who had a new-born, described how ABC news was a trusted source of information along with her town Mayor who undertook hourly press conferences to keep citizens informed. While public health advice was communicated via diverse mediums such as community radio stations, national news channels and even locally produced leaflets, its overarching message was to stay out of the smoke as much as possible (Australian Medical Association 2020). One example of this directive was a leaflet produced by the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at Australia National University.³ Amidst other advice, it encouraged people to ‘stay indoors’, ‘reduce physical activity outdoors’ (e.g. strenuous exercise like running) and ‘follow air quality information’. Such prescribed courses of action implied smoke inhalation was detrimental to health, but what the negative effects might be were generally omitted due to lack of existing evidence about what these were. As Matilda who was heavily pregnant during the fires explained,

I don’t think there was enough information at all … what I did understand from reading the ABC [news] [was] … that this was unprecedented levels of air pollution in Australia, and that there were no studies on the long-term impact this would have for all of us, including unborn children, that they didn’t know, they simply didn’t have the research to draw upon … 

This lack of knowledge about effects of bushfire smoke for pregnant women was confirmed by Professor Christopher Nolan, one of the professionals interviewed for this study. Professor Nolan specialises in maternal diabetes and has a specific interest in the effects of bushfire smoke. He recalled that during the fires, while most of his patients were worried about smoke, there was a small number who were extremely concerned. At the Canberra Hospital where he worked, he describes how the corridors were so filled with smoke that it was impossible to see from one end to the other. Celia, who interviewed him, asked what advice he gave to patients who expressed worry about their baby. He replied:

… So at the time I was actually looking at literature about effects of bushfires, wildfires, really, most of the information was from the US, and it’s pretty scanty information. There's a little bit from fires, the coal-mine fire in the Latrobe Valley. There were studies done on that. And from those studies, it seems that there potentially is a risk of slightly early birth, but it's not a big effect. And … from the coal mine fires, there appeared to be increased incidents of gestational diabetes, and hypertensive disorders in pregnancy, but not consistent across the studies. And the data is not strong. So, what I was saying to women is that … ‘We really don't know the extent of the risk to your baby’. That advice would be to sort of ‘try and avoid smoke as best you can, such as … staying inside when the smoke is bad outside’. But a lot of the houses in Canberra would collect smoke through the day, and then it was actually better outside at different times. So being aware of smoke levels was important, and to try and keep smoke out as best you can, trying to mitigate the risks of exposure … 

Even without exposure to bushfire smoke, pregnancy is typically viewed as a condition that makes women and unborn babies ‘ … vulnerable and susceptible to a range of ills and risks’ (Lupton 1999, 63). This notion has a long and well-documented history in feminist literature on pregnant embodiment (Duden 1993; Lupton 2014; Salmon 2011). Detrimental effects can potentially occur for the foetus if pregnant women are exposed to a range of elements including drugs, vaccinations, alcohol, toxic chemicals and fumes, prescribed medications, listeria-carrying food, and diseases, along with under-exertion and over-exertion. Given this sense that pregnant women are ‘doubly vulnerable’ to risk compared with the average person, it is unsurprising that participants expressed considerable concern for their unborn babies as seen in the following narratives.

… It was really constantly on my mind, and I tried to kind of not get too anxious about it, but it was really difficult because … I mean, you just think about it all the time. You’re just constantly worrying when you’re pregnant what’s going to affect the baby. Like everything you do. (Alice, pregnant during fires)

… it was just always kind of lingering, like we were just unsure about what kind of effects it would have on the development of his organs and whatever else. I was obviously more stressed than my husband, just because, you know, the mother is carrying the baby and there’s more stress just naturally on the Mum. So yeah, I was pretty stressed about it (Gina, pregnant during fires)

… I was really worried about lung damage for my kids upstairs, but I was also worried, like, brain development at that point, as you get into the end of the pregnancy, like, all the brain development and things. … I kept having conversations with myself going, ‘I’m not in my first 12 weeks, surely that’s riskier. I’m in this safer zone’. (Renee, pregnant during fires, 2 other small children)

Coupled with this worry for the health of their babies, participants recognised that responsibility for keeping them ‘safe’ from smoke exposure fell primarily to them. As Gina indicates, ‘I was obviously more stressed than my husband, just because, you know, the mother is carrying the baby and there’s more stress just naturally on the Mum’. Gina’s words draw upon discourses of ‘reproductive citizenship’ (Salmon 2011) which constitute pregnant women as autonomous, self-regulated subjects primarily responsible for caring for their children’s health. Feminist accounts of motherhood observe that ‘good’ mothers are devoted to caring for their children, steadfastly meeting their needs and abiding by expert advice about their welfare, even before they are born (Lupton 2012). Such practices are infused with moral meanings and judgements about women’s mothering abilities producing ‘good’ or ‘bad’ mothers contingent upon the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ choices they make for their children (Lupton 2008).

In accordance with public health advice to stay out of the smoke, participants were aware that the ‘right’ action was to keep children indoors when smoke density was high. However, for those with small children who had been confined indoors for days on end, this was often untenable. Matilda explained her son was an ‘outside boy’ which meant he needed to play outdoors for his own ‘mental’ and ‘emotional wellbeing’. In explaining her decision to let him play outside she notes, ‘ … we didn’t put a mask on him, I never remember him wearing a mask, which is bad, bad form’. Anita, who had a new-born baby and small child, lived in an area where the fires were especially intense coming within 700 m of her home (Figure 2). She described how the fires were burning,

… so close for so long, we sort of just adjusted to it and relaxed a bit. And I look back at the photos of that time, and it’s like, the girls are outside, and I can see the smoke and I’m like, ‘What was I thinking’? [Laughs] But obviously I was just partly, like, my …  one-year-old at the time, she just had to go outside, like, she lives outside usually. And I think also I just got used to it, so I didn’t realise how bad it was.

Other participants, like Sarah, who were pregnant during the fires described how they felt ‘completely responsible’ for their unborn child’s air. Sarah experienced gestational diabetes and used swimming at a local open-air pool to manage it. She described the constant fear that doing what was good for diabetes – physical exertion – meant breathing more heavily and inhaling more smoke particles which might be detrimental to her baby.

Figure 2. Participant photo: Bush burning 700 m from a participant’s house in rural New South Wales. Reproduced with permission.

… when I’m exerting myself, am I putting more of the particles in? … because that did seem to be what the studies kept saying over and over is that if you exert, you’re going to bring in more, but I just thought I have to balance up the risk of the gestational diabetes … So that was kind of how I … thought through the balance, the constant balance. And the days where I got it wrong … [I was] really upset with myself, really devasted and then just had to move on.

Participants’ who perceived their actions as deviating from public health advice like Matilda, Anita and Sarah typically experienced as another participant Gina characterised it, ‘Mum-guilt’. This guilt surfaces above when Matilda comments that letting her son outside without a mask was ‘bad, bad form’, and when Anita remarks, ‘What was I thinking’? upon seeing photos of her children playing in smoke. Similarly, Sarah describes being ‘really upset’ and ‘devastated’ when she thought she had exposed her unborn child to unsafe levels of smoke while undertaking activities for her own health and mental well-being.

Feeling ‘completely responsible’ as Sarah puts it, for the air their children breathe, is produced through a set of bushfire intra-relations that saddle women with responsibility for the health of their (un)born children. Within a relational ontology, mothers who feel guilty are not understood as individuals who can be separated through neat boundaries from smoke or the material world. Instead, they are ‘ … unbounded quantum entanglements constituted by concepts and material forces, where the social, the political, the biological, and their observing, measuring and controlling machines are interwoven and entwined’ (Murris and Bozalek 2019, 876).

In this conceptual framework, the responsibility and subsequent guilt mothers feel are not the effect of socially constructed meanings which shape their actions and feelings. Rather, these mothers intra-actively come into being with/in the (non)human bushfire assemblage which within the boundary-making agential-cut of this research comprises, ‘smoke’, ‘public health advice’ and discourses of the ‘good mother’. The social, political and biological here, do not precede such mother subjectivities but instead emerge simultaneously with, and of, them.

How Do We Understand the Agency of Mothers in the Context of Bushfires?

In adhering to public health advice, participants undertook a plethora of strategies to prevent smoke inhalation. These included sealing their homes with tape or wet towels, wearing masks outdoors and in the car, making fire-plans and pre-planning hospital routes for when they went into labour. One popular strategy (recommended in the ANU leaflet above) was to check air quality apps such as ‘Air Rater’ for data on smoke density. Many participants used these apps to plan their daily activities, only leaving the house to grocery shop or taking children to the park when air quality was high. Connie who was pregnant and had a small child, explains how she navigated daily activities based on these air quality readings.

… so we would look at it and we might think … oh, it looks like there’s going to be a, I don’t know green, whatever the signal was, later in the day, and when we saw it there … we would, like, run around the house opening the windows and turning the air-conditioning on to cool the house down. … and … if I needed to go out in the day, we would try and time it for a time when it was clear, even just … going out for a short walk or having a play in the backyard if it was not too bad. So, we weren’t stuck inside all the time.

Many participants became adept at triangulating air quality data from multiple apps and sources, such as looking outside to see how dense the smoke was and using smell to judge toxicity when visual cues were ambiguous. The participants became as Delilah coins it below, ‘weird experts’ in assessing air quality to persevere with daily routines.

… you know, monitoring the numbers … measuring the smoke particles in the air and we all became weird experts on what was, like, an appropriate amount of air pollution, and if it was under a certain amount, then I’d be like, ‘That’s it, that means I can go to the pool today or I can sit out in the backyard’.

Another popular strategy enabled by participants’ middle-class status, was purchasing air purifiers. As air purifiers sold out everywhere, they became highly prized commodities and subsequently necessitated considerable logistical co-ordination to source and deliver. Several participants indicated air purifiers had been purchased out-of-state by friends and family who either couriered them at considerable cost or delivered them by hand. Renee who gave birth during the fires describes how, ‘We’ve got three of them, so we had one in each of the kid’s rooms, and we had one for me in the living room in the evenings and then we’d take that upstairs to our bedroom because we didn’t have double-glazed windows, and that was a concern for the baby obviously’.

Despite doing everything they could to prevent smoke from penetrating their homes and lungs many participants felt their efforts had minimal effect (Williamson et al. 2022). This was especially apparent in relation to the use of air purifiers where there was some scepticism about their effectiveness. When asked if she found the air purifier’s blue flashing light indicating ‘good air quality’ reassuring, Naomi responded, ‘I think so, yeah. It kind of felt like I was being more proactive and trying to clear the smoke out. So, I don’t even know if it actually helps [Laughs]. But it kind of felt like a placebo sort of thing’. Expressing similar sentiments about whether the air purifier made a difference to air quality Anita replied,

Maybe a little. I don’t know how much of it was making a difference and how much was just in our head. [Laugh] It made a difference because obviously it was like a fan, so the heat was more manageable. I don’t know, maybe a little bit but, like, it certainly still wasn’t clean air that we were breathing.

As the bushfires stretched across weeks and months it became evident the smoke was inescapable, and no amount of human effort could contain it. This realisation surfaced in discussions with several of the participants who described feeling ‘powerless’, ‘scared’, ‘trapped’ and ‘end of world-ish’. Sarah captures these reactions when she says,

This was just so beyond our control that the government couldn’t do anything. What’s it going to do, put a big bubble up over Canberra? They couldn’t do anything. And I happened to be pregnant at this time … [and] I couldn’t control the safety of my baby and my, all my children, particularly the one with … asthma and breathing difficulties. That was, I think what made it … which took it from being a bit of a worry to … I feel powerless.

A conventional understanding of mother’s agency here renders the natural force of the bushfires as superior to human action which by comparison was ineffectual. This explanation is however disempowering for our participants and fails to accommodate our commitment to a feminist politics of women’s agency. Such an account positions participants’ solely as victims and their actions as meaningless and largely futile. It also implies the only reason mothers continued to engage in practices they recognised as inadequate was a (misplaced) sense of ‘hope’. This thinking undermines mother’s capacity to act, while refusing the complexity of how non-human entities such as smoke and fire shape human action. Such a conceptualisation enables an understanding of how mothers’ strategies for reducing smoke inhalation are indeed agentic, but do not achieve the results they desire. This is not because smoke is essentially a more powerful force than human mothers (although in this moment of worlding it appears to be), but because mother’s agency is intra-actively produced with/of smoke rather than being located in the human body. When ‘everything is always acting-with … [an] entanglement of human and more-than-human forces, intensities, entities and processes’ (Verlie 2020, 1272), human ‘will’ to control situations like bushfires can be intra-actively thwarted by the material conditions of possibility present. As the next section suggests, this conceptualisation of the dispersal of agency has implications for (re)configuring women’s responsibility for the air their children breathe and subsequently, the guilt they feel when they ‘fail’ to prevent smoke inhalation.

How Can Women’s Responsibility for Their (un)Born Children During the Bushfires be (re)Configured?

The agential cut this research performs, traces how a particular entanglement of bushfire (non)human forces, intra-acts so that mothers believe they are responsible for the impossible task of controlling the air their children breathe. Given the intensity and longevity of the fires, this idea is absurd as the only way to prevent inhaling smoke would have been to stop breathing. Instead, we propose a shift in our ontological frame of reference that recognises this responsibility is not mothers’ alone. This is possible by embracing a ‘ … notion of agentic capacity that posits agency well beyond the wilful agency exercised by human consciousness’ (Daigle and Santoemma 2022, 87).

In the context of bushfires, this means that mothers cannot control the amount of smoke their (un)born children inhale as this is not within human power alone. A relational ontology recognises the intra-active capacity of (non)human entities such as smoke, to infiltrate and (re)make us in ways that challenge the notion of discrete and stable human actors. Response-ability (Barad 2007) emerges within intra-actions when agential cuts enact separation, coagulating together-apart entangled subjects that might individuate ‘responsible subjects’ (Christie 2020) such as ‘mothers’ within the material conditions of bushfires. When agency is understood as a congealing, it is ‘ … dislocated, smeared across a multiplicity of intra-activities, [so that] ethics is not performed by a single, let alone human subject’ (Christie 2020, 126–127). This is not about taking away ‘ … the highly inequitable and fragile agency many humans … seek to possess … ’ (Christie 2020, 132), but rather recognising that human agency is not inherent to subjectivity anyway. This approach rethinks subjectivity instead as ‘collective’ and ‘impersonal’ and foregrounds responsibility as imbricated (with)in materiality (Christie 2020).

It also means that the responsibility for the air their children breathe, has never been, and never is, primarily mothers’. This recognition of ethics as radically dispersed and contingent imagines ‘ … a collective participation among human and nonhuman forces that brings something new into existence (and will take myriad forms)’ (Christie 2020, 143). This thinking does not inaugurate new prescriptions of ethics and response-able conduct for humans and the (non)human world. For instance, it does not propose that fathers make a conscious decision to take equal responsibility for (un)born children’s smoke inhalation, or that we all pledge to care for the planet more diligently to attend to a warming climate which significantly contributed to the bushfires. Simultaneously, such response-ability does not negate that these might be meaningful actions within a specific set of material conditions. Response-ability, subsequently becomes ‘ … less about agency than a recognition that humans are collaborators with(in) materiality and the world’s differential becomings’ (Christie 2020, 121). The brevity of this sentence obscures its ontological complexity (as captured by the notion of intra-activity) and the mind-shift it demands of humans to no longer consider themselves the centre of the world.

Extending This Argument About Response-ability to Climate Action

We suggest the Australian 2019/2020 bushfires are an event that has allowed us to see more clearly what entanglements constitute the inequitable burden of responsibility attributed to mothers for their (un)born children. This unanticipated effect enables the re-configuration of these fires as not only destructive of (non)human life but also productive of new ways of thinking about agency and responsibility within the fields of environmental sustainability and feminist research more broadly. As we allude to above, the idea of agency as anti-individualistic and dispersed has implications beyond conceptualising mothers and their responsibility to their children. We propose it extends to understandings of human agency and response-ability in relation to climate change and how the fires came into being in the first place. If everyone/thing is complicit in the world’s differential becoming (Barad 2007) then the response to the question of who is responsible for the air children breathe becomes – everyone/thing. We want to argue that this is not a relativist position that absolves humans of responsibility for climate change, but instead provokes a different ontological conceptualisation of this issue. In this last section, we perform another agential cut by tracing responsibility for the air children breathe beyond mothers, to response-ability for a warming climate which produced the fires and subsequent smoke pollution.

There is a burgeoning literature which takes a new materialist approach to climate change (Knox 2015, Neimanis and Loewen Sasser 2016; Neimanis and Walker 2013; Walker 2013). This work posits that climate is a set of worldly relationships (Knox 2015) and that climate change is not simply caused by (unethical) human action on the world but is a ‘ … radically disrupted sequence of lively, more-than-human repertoires of responsiveness, emerging out of intra-actions between some (not all!) humans, fossil fuels, industrialisation, animal metabolisms, technologies, extractivist cultures, and the climate’s own patterned dynamics’ (Verlie 2020, 1272). This view of climate change questions the anthropocentric belief that humans are predominately responsible for, and best able to halt global warming. Instead, a new materialist framing of climate change recognises this as an intra-action where neither climate nor humans pre-exist each other, but come into being together to enact climate knowledges-and-responses (Verlie 2020, 1270). Such a conceptualisation does not release humans from responsibility for climate change because as explained earlier, it is not something we chose because it exists prior to consciousness and is an inextricable element of all relationships. Instead, this understanding of response-ability decentres the human to acknowledge the planet’s more-than-human forces and entities that intra-actively produce climate change.

Verlie (2020) identifies a tension in new materialist approaches to climate change in that while theoretically less anthropocentric, they offer ‘little guidance on how to proceed practically at cultivating conditions in which others – human and more-than-human – can flourish’ (1268). Instead, while climate change is recognised as a set of worldly intra-actions, the autonomous human subject is reinstated as the central actor of climate action, responsible for the environment in which they are entangled (Christie 2020, 122). In addition, a new materialist understanding of climate that is founded on the blurring of borders or erasure of binaries could be seen to surrender claims for political action premised on the articulation of boundaries that enable the location of responsibility and attribution of causality (Verlie 2020, 1269). As Verlie (2020) highlights, this approach potentially leads to ‘ … us celebrating climate change as an example of our mutual, entangled, co-becoming and as evidence of humanity’s lack of agency to control the climate’ (p.1269). Drawing on Barad’s (2007) relational ontology, Verlie (2020) instead suggests a notion of climate intra-action in accounting for (non)human agency in climate change while continuing to hold humans responsible for climate-changing actions. What Verlie (2020) proposes is a view of climate intra-action which, ‘understands climate action as a series of unpredictable, experimental, collaborative reconfigurations of worldly relationships’ that acknowledge humans can ‘ … work with the world, rather than upon the world, to foster the capacity to respond to climate change in previously unthought ways … that may reconfigure, complement, or amplify more standard climate actions’ (1276). Such an approach to the world is already expressed in First Nation’s materialism in relation to the concept of Country and fire management (Pascoe, Gammage, and Neale 2021). The current article mobilises a Baradian notion of response-ability to climate that decentres humans while being open and attending to, who and what we are becoming-with to grow our climate capacities.

The notion of climate intra-action does not mean however ‘ … that individual action, or action that is recognised and valorized as individual, is somehow rendered unmeaningful’ (Christie 2020, 140). For instance, there is no value or meaning in recycling plastics, attending climate change marches and reducing your carbon-footprint. However, when we recognise agency is not our own but radically dispersed and contingent across (non)human intra-actions, it means acknowledging that these actions are unlikely in themselves, to achieve the aims we humans desire, i.e. achieving climate justice, or if we return to the bushfires that using an air purifier will prevent smoke inhalation (Yu et al. 2020). While individually we might want to engage in these activities, we also need to concede the ability to ‘save’ the planet is not within human power. In fact, the planet may have other plans which we have ignored, misrecognised or, are unable to comprehend. To suggest we know what is ‘right’ for the planet and what climate justice looks like, entails a separation from the world which is ontologically impossible within new materialist thought. This is because we are in, of, and the world. These aims also involve a notion of human exceptionalism whereby the authority to know is humans’ alone and not the material world’s. What we are suggesting here is not a loss of hope for humans (or mothers), but a relinquishing of our sense of entitlement over the universe to seek more expansive ways of being response-able for/of/with it.

Ethics approval

Ethics Approval for the interviews undertaken in this article was granted by the Human Research Ethics Committee at Australian National University.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The research in this article was funded by a Cross-College grant provided by the Australia National University Research School of Social Sciences [Grant number R4452009CR].

Notes

1 This image and Figure 2 are photographs taken by participants during the bushfires which they gave their permission to reproduce in this research.

2 (Un)born is the term we adopt to recognise children who are in utero, as well as those already born.

3 This can be viewed at: https://nceph.anu.edu.au/phxchange/communicating-science/how-protect-yourself-and-others-bushfire-smoke