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Embedded in built environment discourse, this chapter examines the traditional knowledge and resilience of the Ngadjuri Nation Peoples through an Elder’s narrative of reconciliation as well as resistance in their subsisting colonial settlement. Removed from ‘Country’ in the 1840s, Ngadjuri Aboriginal community endured colonial industries of open-cut copper mining and large-scale pastoralism as irreparable destruction to their cultural landscapes. European processes in the resources sectors reshaped natural topographies, deconstructing Ngadjuri Songlines and Ancestral Dreaming stories. Burra’s colonial stone buildings of settlement, painstakingly cut and composed from materials of the surrounding ecological terrain, prompted new narratives from Ngadjuri as a way of alleviating scars. Broadly speaking, this chapter aims to show how cultural heritage of two communities is provocatively and conceptually unpacked through the vernacular buildings’ cross-cultural foundations. That is, an under-reported narrative was unwittingly bestowed on the colonial-built forms with hidden meanings that deserve further investigation. This chapter offers a counternarrative to colonial histories revealing Ngadjuri’s methods for reconnecting to Country and culture after generations of disempowerment. It explores how within the materiality of colonial structures, the Ngadjuri entwined their remediated storylines – revealing a data curation that had avoided popular discourse in the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums [GLAM] sector representation. This example implies there are bodies of knowledge in built cultural heritage hidden elsewhere on our Aboriginal Nations and the challenges it presents GLAM in their Indigenisation processes.

In the years following the publication of A Theory of Consumption (1923), Hazel Kyrk’s book became the flagship of the field that would later be known as the economics of consumption. It stimulated theoretical and empirical work on consumption. Some of the existing literature on Kyrk (e.g., Kiss & Beller, 2000; Le Tollec, 2020; Tadajewski, 2013) depicted her theory as the starting point of the economics of consumption. Nevertheless, how and why it emerged the way it did remain largely unexplored. This chapter examines Kyrk’s intellectual background, which, we argue, can be traced back to two main movements in the United States: the home economics and the institutionalist. Both movements conveyed specific endeavors as responses to the US material and social transformations that occurred at the turn of the 20th century, notably the perceived changing role of consumption and that of women in US society. On the one hand, Kyrk pursued first-generation home economists’ efforts to make sense of and put into action the shifting of women’s role from domestic producer to consumer. On the other hand, she reinterpreted Veblen’s (1899) account of consumption in order to reveal its operational value for a normative agenda focused on “wise” and “rational” consumption. This chapter studies how Kyrk carried on first-generation home economists’ progressive agenda and how she adapted Veblen’s fin-de-siècle critical account of consumption to the context of the household goods developed in 1900–1920. Our account of Kyrk’s intellectual roots offers a novel narrative to better understand the role of gender and epistemological questions in her theory.

Implementing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) unarguably demands huge financial investments. However, the United Nations has acknowledged the huge financial gap militating against the implementation of the SDGs worldwide, leading experts to question the possibility of complete implementation of the goals by their terminal dateline of 2030. While the bulk of the finance currently outlaid on the SDGs comes from traditional sources including foreign direct investments (FDIs), there is the need to focus more attention on developing and exploiting impact investments that are more suitable for financing development programmes and projects. In this chapter, the SDG implementation profiles of the 12 Arab West Asia countries concerning the five most targeted SDGs were evaluated and sustainable finance issues were discussed. Secondary data were retrieved from World Bank's DataBank. The data were descriptively analyzed. Based on the profiles generated, debt relief is put forward as a possible impact investment mechanism suitable for funding the SDGs. Specifically, this chapter recommends that outright cancellation of debts based on the debt-for-SGD swap could serve as some of the impact investments needed to boost the global drive for a developed, peaceful, and just world.