This book examines the diversity of practice in regional research and its contribution to local, national and global issues. Three themes are advanced here: Place and change, Transition and resilience, and Challenges for the future. Contributors embrace frameworks of co-design and transdisciplinary practice to build communities of practice in response to lived experience in regional contexts. Their work highlights the strategic importance of a regional focus at a time when global connectivity and mobility is increasing and the complexity of wicked problems demands more than one approach or solution. Such complex problems require nuanced, and at times bespoke methodological approaches to better understand and support not just regional adaptation, resilience and transformation, but to manage all these things at a time when change is everywhere.

Angela Campbell is a Senior Lecturer at the Arts Academy, Federation University, Australia where she teaches into the Performing Arts program. Her research and published work in theatre and performance has been both practical and theoretical and has investigated performance from the archives, site-specific theatre, the politics and poetics of place, intercultural theatre, Indigenous theatre, contemporary paradigms and practices in theatre and performance, and practice led research.Michelle Duffy is an Associate Professor in Human Geography, in the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research interests include community resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability; the significance of emotion and affect in creating notions of belonging and exclusion; the role of art and sound practices in creating and/or challenging notions of identity and belonging in public spaces and public events; and an exploration of the body as a means of embodied, emotional and affective communication.Beth Edmondson has lived and work in regional locations for most of her life. As a Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts, Federation University, Australia, she engages in co-designed research in Gippsland Victoria. She is Series Editor of thePalgrave Studies in Environmental Transformation, Transition and Accountability series.

1 Introduction.- 2 Regional contexts and regional research.- PART 1 PLACE AND CHANGE.- 3 Yenama Budjari Gumada, walk with good spirit as method co-creating local environmental stewards on/with/as Darug Ngurra.- 4 Redefining landscape art.- 5 Kristin Linklater, finding the natural voice, in Orkney.- 6 Local values driven change management and leadership from the regions: Ballarat and UNESCOs HUL approach.- 7 The role of festival networks in community building.- 8 Leadership: Untapping the secret to regional wellbeing, belongingness and resilience.- PART 2 TRANSITION AND RESILIENCE.- 9 Mental Health and Mining: Research Challenges and Influences.- 10 A coalition of hope! A regional governance approach to Indigenous Australian cultural wellbeing.- 11 Real and virtual communities of practice: a case study from the Outer Hebrides.- 12 The dynamics of place-based virtual communities: Social media in regions.- 13 The significance of collaborative approaches and collective hope in Gippsland during a time of regional transition.- 14 Constructing the Green Metropolis Ruhr Post-industrial greening narratives between regional transition and social distinction.- PART 3 CHALLENGES FOR THE FUTURE.- 15 Watery Places: stories of environmental and community renewal.- 16 Tidal Cultures in North Australia.- 17 Researching opportunities and disadvantage in regions.- 18 Energy, households and regions: feminist methodologies for transdisciplinary research.- 19 Out in the Regions: Queer Film Festivals, Community-Building and the Cultivation of Creative Talent in Regional Victoria.- 20 The Dialectics of Community and Government.