AustLit

'This paper is a collaborative reflection by four academic women using our creative writings about oceans and shorelines to think and reflect. We write from discrete locations along the Southern and Eastern coastlines of the invaded continent contemporarily known as Australia. Our methodology incorporates walking and creative writing. This walking-writing methodology has connected us to entangled feelings and lived experiences, including our embodied relationships with the ocean, our work in academia, and our rising levels of anxiety as climate change and related environmental crises coincide with our re-membering of oceans, bodies, rhythms and breath. To illustrate our re-membering, we intersperse fragments from our creative writing with reflective discussion. The social, environmental and political chaos surrounding us seeps into our processes, highlighting how neoliberal ideologies influence our inability to dis/connect, harming both human and beyond-human life. Through walking-writing, we seek to remember what we are losing and to imagine alternative futures.' (Publication abstract)

'In the context of academic financialisation where writing is ‘repurposed’ as an outcome designed to maximise financial profit, and to resist the pressure to be ‘careless’ (Lynch 2010) ‘ideal functionaries’ (Pereira 2012), we – a group of five women academics – come together to share stories of our accrued wisdom about living in the afternoon of our lives. We also share our creative writing and theorising about collaborative writing processes in papers, chapters, and conference presentations. As we do so, we encounter a conflict between our practice of inter-personal collaboration and the traditions and pressures of academic authorship where we are expected to publish in a vertical hierarchy of

(first author, 
nameless et al.s, 
date).

We therefore reflect on the paradoxes and tensions involved in collaborative writing within the academy. In particular, we explore how co-operative practice congruent with the philosophical framework of new materialism sits jaggedly against an academic culture of individualism, surveillance, audit, and the pressure for academics to (be seen to) publish. We offer no conclusion or easy resolution, but like Socratic ‘gadflies’ we seek to trouble the structural impediments to collaborative writing in the academy.'  (Publication abstract)

'Black and white artivist women embody ancestry and place  

'Ever wondered who you really are? Where’s your mob from? Where are your roots? Where do you belong?

'Hear, see, and feel embodied stories of ancestry and place. Black and white Australian women artivists together provoke resonant and entangled understandings of belonging and displacement through storied artworks, performances and installations.

'Artworks created by eight artist/researchers that trouble belonging in the colonial nation Australia will be brought to life through performed storying. Exhibition directors (Tracey Bunda and Louise Phillips) will introduce the exhibition (that stems from their book Research through, with and as storying), then the audience will be guided to move through and engage with performative encounters of the installations.' (Production summary)