This chapter explores the inherent complexity of fitness technology, presenting it as a potent tool for self-enhancement and a potential cause of psychological stress. Through an examination of the motivational aspects of fitness technology, as well as its ability to induce social anxiety through comparison tools, this chapter presents readers with the essential duality that will be investigated in-depth throughout the book.

The fitness sector has experienced significant changes recently, as technology has altered people's attitudes toward physical well-being (Woessner et al., 2021). Users can now access detailed information about their physical activity through fitness apps, wearables, and online platforms. This data enables them to track metrics such as calorie expenditure, distance traveled, steps taken, and progress in their workouts. The progress in technology has enhanced accessibility and measurability in the realm of fitness, empowering users to acquire insights into their well-being and establish informed objectives. This capacity for self-monitoring and measuring physical performance has become a crucial aspect of the fitness journey for numerous individuals, encouraging steadfastness and responsibility (Oginni et al., 2024).

Delegates worked for and from country during the Regional Dialogues that delivered the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Here, Mr Mervin Rubuntja engages at the Ross River Dialogue, Northern Territory, 2017. Photograph credit: Jimmy Widders Hunt.

Introduction

There are hundreds of Aboriginal Nations and peoples carrying the law, language and culture of their ancestors and of the lands and waters they belong and are related to across the continent now called Australia. The great ‘unfnished business’ in Australian public law is the relationship between the fedgling Commonwealth of Australia and the ancient sovereign nations and peoples across the continent and Torres Strait. The High Court of Australia has, in recent decades, earmarked the interface of these overlapping sovereignties as a political question for the Australian Parliament and people to address. In this chapter, I emphasise Country as the source of Indigenous sovereignty across Australia, discuss the relationship between Indigenous sovereignty and the proposal for a First Nations Voice, and argue that post-referendum, the unfnished business of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination remains.

love museums. They make me feel at once still and moving; they give me the impression of being closed in silent contemplation and at the same time surrounded by voices talking – sometimes shouting – over each other; they transport me into different stories while abstracting me from time and space.

Museums have a complex and problematic character, and for fifty years now anthropology has been debating their status, especially those that encouraged their creation: ethnographic museums. The social role of this institution is being questioned, but above all its colonial framework and the knowledge produced within it. Indeed, since their emergence in the midnineteenth century, ethnographic museums have been places where cultures are assembled and governed, and where the discourses produced through exhibitions and other activities help to construct and legitimise specific visions of society and the world at large. For most of their existence, they have been laboratories for defining who people were and how they behaved, and where difference was conceptualised in ways that naturalised the economic and political dominance of European empires over colonised countries. So-called exotic artefacts had fascinated Europeans since antiquity, with interest growing significantly after the conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth century. However, it was only with the rise of the scientific paradigm in the eighteenth century and the organisation of the first scientific expeditions that they were incorporated into a modern discourse that structured all phenomena according to an intrinsic and progressive order and was regarded as universal and truthful (Findlen 1994, Stocking 1985, Bennet 2018).

Australian Fashion Council (AFC) CEO Leila Naja-Hibri, AFC Board Member Yatu Widders-Hunt and Australian fashion industry leaders. Photo credit: Joseph Mayers.

The role of corporate Australia in the 2023 referendum on recognising Australia's First Peoples in the Australian Constitution through a First Nations Voice (the Voice) was hotly debated throughout the campaign. However, despite the copious commentary, there was limited research on which to rigorously analyse this involvement. In this chapter, we explain the foundation of that involvement and how it played out during the referendum in diferent ways. We then consider the future of corporate involvement in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander reforms and the extent to which corporate First Nations advocacy can ever really refect First Nations, rather than corporate, objectives.

Before examining the role of corporates in the lead up to and during the Voice referendum, it is necessary to note that research in this area is still evolving and that a robust body of evidence on the subject simply does not yet exist. As such, many of the themes and hypotheses explored in this chapter are based on observations of corporate behaviour and delivered through a high-level analysis of information that was and is available in the public domain. It provides an initial exploration, and it is expected that some of these insights may be challenged, revisited and built upon in the coming years.

I came to Concordia University in July 2002, and I have been there ever since. I was hired immediately from the University of Calgary (where I had completed my doctorate). I was initially brought here for International Political Economy (IPE) with a focus on global and regional integration in trade and finance. This has been my teaching focus ever since—despite the later arrival of colleagues with a similar teaching portfolio. However, a number of years later, I was asked by the then Department Chair, Csaba Nikolenyi, to take over the two undergraduate courses on European Politics and also develop a graduate seminar for our master's and doctoral students. (We were among the few departments in Canada, then, that did not have an European Union [EU] class for its own graduate students.)

Concomitant with this, my own research had moved with it away from IPE and to European integration. In this vein, this book in front of you is called Decisionmaking in an Enlarged European Union. My motivation had been that the initial six members in 1958 had gradually turned into today's EU with 27 countries, with other states already having applied for eventual EU membership.

Put differently, the EU has become a victim of its own success, because the received literature holds that the increased membership in a group tremendously slows down the decisionmaking process. The reason is that voting typically is based upon unanimity. Consequently, individual countries could and do take the others hostage by refusing to consent unless concessions are made.

Our journey through time, space and the meanings of the Kambeba bamboo board is far from over. On the contrary, we are now going to explore its density more deeply and see how the gaze it returns from the people who made it changes according to the perspective we look through and the relationships we choose to focus on. In other words, according to the ‘discourse’ in which it is embedded. By ‘discourse’ I refer to the Foucauldian notion that frames knowledge as arbitrarily constructed through a series of utterances that organise concepts into coherent associations according to specific rules (cf. Escobar 2012). Discursive practice as an epistemological category has been elaborated and adopted to support the idea that so-called scientific disciplines do not reveal intrinsic categories – and thus possess universal and time-linear knowledge about human life – but are the result of specific power relations in which certain subjects are recognised as more authoritative than others in the production of knowledge (Rabinow 1984, Foucault 2002). As a result, the narrative they offer about the things of the world is not the ‘only possible truth’.

In collecting and describing the natural and social resources available on Brazilian territory, Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira did not reveal the truth. He was constructing a reality that was useful for consolidating and legitimising colonial political and economic control over Brazil. By adopting the new scientific language and specific classification categories, he conceptually appropriated Brazilian space, inventing it and the populations living there as subjects embedded in a hegemonic, Eurocentric system of knowledge. Among them are the Kambeba, who are currently struggling to reappropriate their past and articulate their own narrative of their history and their involvement in the colonial process (we talked about this in Chapter 1).

Professor Megan Davis, June Oscar, Aunty Pat Anderson, Sally Scales and Irene Davey. Aunty Pat carrying the Uluru Statement in the piti that was given to Pat by Anangu elders to carry forward the work. At Mutitjulu community, 26 May 2017. Photograph credit: Jimmy Widders Hunt.

Introduction

A year after the referendum loss, I remain a staunch advocate for a constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice. I have always argued that the constitutional guarantee of rights is more likely to enable Aboriginal women to reach a minimum threshold of capabilities required to achieve self-determination. My commitment to the Voice rests on an understanding of self-determination as not solely concerned with what is best for the community, but also with how individuals within the group are faring based on capability and functioning: what is she actually able to do and to be?

The Voice proposal was an opportunity to return Aboriginal women's representation to the national stage. Women endorsed by their own communities through the ballot box, with authority and power to make a diference. That is not to say there is not already extraordinary Aboriginal female leadership across Australia. There is an abundance, in many manifestations.

Midnight Oil Frontman Peter Garrett performs at Uluru in 2019 to mark the ofcial closure of the Uluru climb. In October 2020, Midnight Oil would release The Makarrata Project donating their share of proceeds to support the Uluru Statement. Photo: Jimmy Widders-Hunt.

Introduction

[C]ivil society groups are increasingly divorced from the forces that drive deeper social change. […]

[E]pisodes of large-scale, joined-up action are quite rare. […] Other forms of participation have emerged in their stead [largely social media-based], but they haven't had the same efect in pulling large numbers of people into face-to-face, ongoing, and potentially transformative activities.

The traditional role of civil society in efecting social change is predominantly that of framing or reframing an issue or issues of sociopolitical or economic concern and setting an agenda for change; mobilising supporters across society; building networks; creating and disseminating knowledge (often utilising innovative modes of communication to ensure information is accessible); interpreting, clarifying, contesting or rectifying information and infuencing public opinion; building consensus; collaborating with the private and public sectors (including the media) to advance an issue or agenda; and holding government and other powerful institutions to account when they fail to advance, or actively undermine, an issue that serves the public interest.

The 2023 Voice Referendum was one of the most explicitly emotive moments in Australian political history. In the build-up to the referendum, the campaigns for and against the proposal deployed a range of arguments that drew directly from a repertoire of emotional techniques to sway the vote in their favour. For Yes campaigners, the focus was on a message of hope for a more progressive and more reconciled Australia that would lead to long overdue constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The Voice would be a mechanism that would fnally deliver a say to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples over matters that afected them. As such, based on the modest invitation issued in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, it would provide a new means to help address the inequalities experienced in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities that other state-driven initiatives had not been able to deliver. The No campaign was much more focused on what would be lost if the Yes campaign succeeded. It instilled fear that the fabric of Australian life would be torn asunder through an array of potential outcomes including creating unequal citizenship (as if the current Constitution did not enshrine inequality), giving Indigenous people the power to block legislation (which would not have been the case if Yes prevailed), and introducing race in the Constitution (as if that did not already exist). In an echo of the culture wars, some No supporters established the elites as bogeymen, including the centre and left political classes as well as corporate Australia, universities and sympathetic media.

The world is not drug-free. On the contrary, the scale and complexity of global drug use, production, and control mechanisms are greater than ever. As of the latest data, an estimated 292 million people worldwide are reported to use drugs, an increase of 20 percent over the past decade. Cannabis remains the most commonly used substance, accounting for 228 million users. The number of people sufering from drug use disorders has risen to 64 million, signaling deepening public health and policy challenges. On the supply side, drug cultivation and production remain highly dynamic. In 2022, global opium poppy cultivation covered approximately 94,000 hectares, a dramatic 70 percent decline largely attributed to the return of the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Conversely, coca bush cultivation rose by 12 percent to reach 355,000 hectares. Cocaine production hit an all-time high in the same year, with more than 2,700 tons manufactured globally, 20 percent more than the previous year and nearly triple the volumes reported in 2013 and 2014, refecting an expanding market, particularly in Europe. Meanwhile, the appearance of new psychoactive substances (NPS) continues unabated, with 44 new compounds, including synthetic stimulants and cannabinoids, identifed on the illegal market in 2022 alone. The criminalization of drugrelated behavior remains widespread, with an estimated 6.9 million individuals coming into formal contact with police for drug ofenses, with 2.7 million prosecuted and 1.7 million ultimately convicted.

Mualgau Lak Gubau Gizu dancers from Thursday Island performed the movement of the shark constellation at the First Nations Constitutional Convention opening ceremony at Mutitjulu, 23 May 2017. Photographer: Jimmy Widders-Hunt.

Introduction

With the defeat of the 2023 referendum to constitutionalise a Voice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to the Parliament and Executive of the Commonwealth, the political subjugation of Australia's First Peoples was confrmed as a contemporary condition rather than a mere historical legacy. This chapter revisits this moment with a particular focus on understanding the proposed Voice as a form of political representation. By understanding the proposed structural reform in representative terms, we seek to show that the proposal was neither as radical nor as toothless as its critics argued. Rather, it represented an attempt to address a fundamental democratic defcit in the Australian context: the lack of connection between First Peoples and the Commonwealth Parliament that makes laws that afect them.

Australia is a nation-state that makes laws specifcally about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples whose sovereignty precedes and exceeds the law-making authority of the Parliament. It does this without any direct representative mechanism that gives Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples a voice when Parliament makes laws about them. The Voice sought to remedy this.

Unexpected Encounters

It was 29 June 2021, when I first entered the Lisbon Academy of Sciences. Despite being one of Portugal's most important historical institutions, the Academy's entrance is not particularly eye-catching. Next to the red door of a rather ordinary building, a marble plaque simply reads ‘Academia das Ciências de Lisboa’. I was greeted by the curator of the Museu Maynense, which houses part of the Ferreira collection. After a brief introduction to the institution, we walked through the sumptuous corridors to a room where some of the objects had been suitably arranged for my visit – I had asked to analyse the wooden weapons collected by Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira during the Viagem Philosophica (1783–1792), since the documents produced by the naturalist during the voyage clearly indicated that they played an important role in the classification of the Indigenous populations inhabiting the Brazilian lands. We then moved on to the museum, a space divided into four rooms, arranged according to classical typological criteria and a strong evolutionary approach. The objects stood out against the black walls and horizontal supports of the display cases, sometimes hidden, sometimes revealed by the suggestive play of light and shadow. It was as if they wanted to intimate the submissive admiration reserved for treasures or relics. The explanatory text on one of the boxes containing some clubs stated that the materials used to make them were similar to those used by European populations more than 6000 years ago. More generally, provenance and ethnicity did not seem to be seen as particularly interesting and as useful information to share with the public to explain what and who they were dealing with.