A half-day academic workshop at the University of Melbourne

1-4pm ❋ Friday 22 May 2026

From environmental degradation and sea-level rise to the impacts of advanced AI on manufacturing and knowledge production, livelihoods around the world are under threat. What geographers have made clear is that the vertiginous social, economic, environmental and technological circumstances of our time are forcing adaptation to new ways of living. Yet these new ways of living don’t just happen automatically: they require the development of new skills.

For policymakers and governments, new skills are usually taken to be the cultivation of prescribed, task-oriented competencies that can be taught through programs and initiatives to improve people’s employability or technical know-how so that they don’t get left behind in transitioning economies. But our contention is that this conventional understanding of reskilling misses so much of what is taking place existentially for people as they navigate and are buffeted by the headwinds of change. What if the remit of ‘skill’ could be opened up to recognise a wider range of capacities and dispositions that people are mobilising in response to their changing conditions? How might geographical apprehensions of ‘skill’ need to shift in these weird times, acknowledging that extant ways of living and working no longer yield the same effects?

In this workshop, we want to open up the concept of reskilling to properly interrogate this existential realm: a realm that we suspect is much more surprising, destabilising - and possibly even terrifying - than the more benign realm of conventional reskilling policy implies. Of course we are not denying that the development of technical competencies isn’t an important part of the story. But in moving from acquired skill to the process of skilling, we want to better appreciate that in the shadowy penumbra of formal and informal training, education, capacity-building, know-how-acquiring, knowledge-finding, upskilling and other practices of empowerment lurks myriad existential skills that are being put to work. What if reskilling was also about the development of a suite of more existential competencies involving subtle but powerful changes in disposition and orientation? Beginning in the midst of turbulent transitions, what if we took all acts of living as skillful, recognising the diverse experimentations, adjustments, trials and errors of the present as involving all kinds of embodiments that may not be considered ‘skills’ from the perspective of a conventional evaluative regime, but nonetheless demand intensive bodily adaptations and capacitations. How might different ways of living through the present - even if tense, tenuous, flailing, precarious - be understood as requiring immense inputs of skill, even as those lives fail to cohere into the ‘successes’ of consummated achievement? And how might we discern these more existential processes as geographers?

In understanding the geography of skill - the ‘what’ and ‘where’ of skill - we are guided by Patchett and Mann’s (2018) identification of five spatialities for apprehending skill: that is, that skill is practical, processual, technical, ecological and political. Skill takes place through the body of the practitioner, as “a form of practical or embodied knowledge” (p. 23). But it shouldn’t be imagined as being located ‘in’ the contained body, but rather as performed across relations, histories, conditions, environments, objects, communities. We are also guided by a desire to rethink the normativity of bodily acts and evaluations, which, we contend, are vital to opening up the evaluative vision that shapes recognition of a life worth living. In transitioning spacetimes, practices, habits, routines, attachments, anticipations, expectations, desires shift - often reluctantly, unwillingly, and warily. The familiar feeling of being in one’s body, in one’s place, and in one’s life can be plunged into turmoil. Even if people might not attach to the turbulent positions they have been placed into, they are nonetheless performing them (through skillful nous and acts) and, in this bodily performance, new economies of value, identification and understanding might begin to emerge. As such, we are seeking to be attentive to how people are scrambling for ways to catch a stunted self up to the impositions of a runaway world, in which life outside of once-normative frames might be emerging in spite - not because - of oneself.

So how does an existential reframing of skill scramble more conventional ways of thinking about the ‘success’ of transitions for people? Rather than bluntly positive or negative, what are some of the more complex modes of evaluation taking place? It might be politically expedient to imagine the subjects caught up in transitions to be the same people who persist in spite of all the changes they sustain. But from the perspective of changing capacities and dispositions, might it be more ethically beneficial to think of these as potentially different people, who evaluate these transitions from a rather different angle, turning with the tides, bringing some parts of themselves and leaving other parts behind? In which case, what persists and remains of that old self, talking forward to that new persona? ❋