A review of Clouds by Glen Snyder

Over on Musings on the Dérive I have published a review of Glen Snyder's photobook 'Clouds'. Check it out here. An quote from the review:

Snyder’s photobook distills 3,000 shots taken over three years while standing at the same spot on the bank of the Tama River that divides Tokyo and Kanagawa prefectures. Pared down to a slim volume, the power of the work is not the beauty of each individual frame but the meditative motif of people passing by under the sky and the small everyday beauty of these moments. In one frame a set of people are approaching and have passed each other in the next. A cyclist gazes up into the clouds. Others look to see where they are going. A schoolboy’s white shirt is caught in the light, a woman holding an umbrella is cast in shadow, a group of runners evenly spaced as they traverse through the frame and in another scene others muddle about. People and clouds drifting along.

Spatial Injustice and the 2022 Victorian floods

A new report by the Victorian Council of Social Services has come out looking at spatial injustice around exposure to the 2022 Victorian floods and its ripple effects on affected communities. Here is the report: Ripple Effects: Spatial injustice and the 2022 Victorian floods. I am happy to have contributed to the quantitative analysis that underpins the report. Here is an article I wrote with Ang Li talking about some of the findings and their implications.

COVID-19 lockdowns and children's access to justice

This is a journal article that I published in 2024 with Ang Li and Natalia Maystorovich Chulio in Child Protection and Practice. Here is the abstract:

Morocco's national lockdown was enforced between March 21st and June 10th 2020 in response to the spread of coronavirus. Restriction of civil space was not fully extended to the judiciary which had to transition to virtual sessions. To prepare for future pandemics and disasters, it is crucial to understand how well court systems across jurisdictions especially in low- and middle-income countries managed to function and protect children's access to justice under the constraints of stay-at-home orders. To investigate the effect of the national lockdown on children's access to justice in Morocco, this study employed interrupted time series analysis of publicly available court filings (N = 77,335) pertaining to child protection from January 1st to December 31st 2020 spanning the pre-lockdown, lockdown, and post-lockdown periods. Results showed that lockdown measures hampered children's access to justice and is associated with statistically significant and substantial decreases in the number of cases heard by the courts across all filing types. The interrupted time series model estimates that average cases per week dropped by 199.5 for penal filings, 1180.3 for civil filings, 942.5 for complaint filings, and 358.1 for report fillings during the lockdown relative to the pre-lockdown period. While the percentage of cases with recorded delays mostly increased, the average case length decreased except for civil filings which saw a significant increase. The substantial susceptibility of civil cases to lockdowns might be precipitated by the need of individuals to petition the court for a hearing. Evidence suggests that the courts adjudicating child protection cases struggled to maintain operations during the national lockdown, and indicates the need for stronger disaster preparedness and an integrated child protection system to increase the judiciaries' resilience and children's access to justice in future emergency and disaster events.

Photography and Narrative

Newpost on my substack blog, What is the narrative potential of a photograph?. A quote from the post:

I am driven to click the shutter not out of some recognition of an idea in objective form, but from a gesture, movement, or a sense of visual rhythm. Photographs have narrative potential but do not offer narrative closure. Just resources that enable possible interpretations. The viewer is not compelled to find anything there.

Climate Change, Housing, and Health

New paper, with Ang Li and others, offering a framework for thinking how climate change, housing, and health intersect. The abstract:

Anthropogenic climate change is causing rapid shifts in temperature and weather patterns, both in location and intensity, making living conditions increasingly hazardous. This complicates housing's frontline role in protecting human health. When housing systems fail to provide universal access to secure, affordable, and suitable housing, social and health inequalities related to climate change are amplified. The location, construction, and operation of homes influence greenhouse gas emissions and must be improved to reduce their environmental impacts. This paper, the second in a Series on housing as a social determinant of health, builds a framework for conceptualising the interactions between housing, climate, and health. It identifies the pathways through which climate change affects housing and exacerbates health risks, and reflects on policy responses for climate resilience in housing and health.

Reference: Li, A., Toll, M., Chapman, R., Howden-Chapman, P., Hernández, D., Samuelson, H., Woodward, A. and Bentley, R., 2025. Housing at the intersection of health and climate change. The Lancet Public Health, 10(10), pp.e865-e873.

New Blog: Musings on the Dérive

I have started a new blog, the intention is to focus on street photography and more personal reflective pieces, here it is: Musings on the Dérive. 

From the first post: 

Initially, I intended this to be a street photography blog. The title playing on the idea of street photographers as modern flaneurs drifting through the city and recording a vision of how it feels to be alive and situated in a particular time and place. Yet, as I start to write, I think this is going to be a drift through myself and whatever occurs to me. Perhaps focused on candid photography of life in public spaces but not limited to it.

Climate Change and Energy Hardship

New paper out in Communications Earth & Envrionment with Ang Li and Rebecca Bentley that looks at climate change and energy hardship. Here is the abstract: 

Climate change is shifting the experience of energy hardship. Here we examine the effect of the intensity, frequency, and duration of temperature extremes on energy hardship, and how this risk is shaped by individual, housing and neighbourhood resiliencies across Australia, using nationally representative data (269,500 observations) on energy hardship linked to temperature records between 2005 and 2021. Findings suggest that the risk of energy hardship increases with more intense extreme heat and cold, with greater risks for older individuals, lone-person or single-parent households, and rental tenants. These vulnerabilities can be offset by quality housing and renewable energy installations. Energy hardship risks under moderate and high emissions global warming scenarios are projected to increase by 0.1%−2.6% and 0.6%−3.3% respectively in the long run. Energy hardship will remain a concern despite raising temperatures, especially for colder regions less prepared for heat and populations with individual vulnerabilities and lacking housing and neighbourhood adaptations.

Here is the full paper: open access.

Citation: Li, A., Toll, M. & Bentley, R. The risk of energy hardship increases with extreme heat and cold in Australia. Commun Earth Environ 5, 595 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01729-5