About
Biography
Dr Ali Black is an innovative arts-based and narrative researcher. Her research and scholarly work seeks to foster connectedness, community, wellbeing and meaning-making through the building of reflective and creative lives and identities. Employing distributed leadership/followership approaches and encouraging teamwork and trust, Ali leads the SETA research theme: 'Art and Wonder in Education (AWE)' which values slow scholarship and aesthetic ways of knowing to support spaces of creativity, collaboration, and kindness.
Ali is a highly regarded early childhood specialist who lectures into the Education Programs at USC. She contributes to understandings about children, families, learning and education through a range of academic and community forums. She is also Program Coordinator for the Master of Education program, and uses this role and her postgraduate focused teaching to foster a sense of community for new education researchers.
Recognised internationally as a leader in her discipline and research areas, Ali has published extensively for a range of audiences. Reward and recognition of excellence in learning and teaching is supported through the Advance HE Higher Education Academy Fellowships of which Ali is a Senior Fellow.
Program coordinator
Supervision and research expertise for HDR and PhD students
Inquiry using arts-based research methods
- Narrative and visual/arts-based inquiry
- Memoir
- 'Research as writing'
- Autoethnography, self-study, narrative constructions of the 'self'
- Digital, visual and aesthetic pedagogies
- Arts-based representations
Understanding lives and learning
- Participatory research with children
- Child/nature relationships
- Academic identities
- Women's lived experience
- Gender studies and agency
- Wellbeing and holistic education
- Explorations of creativity, connection, identities, relationships
- Relational knowledge construction
Editor Roles
Ali is Associate Editor and Reviews Editor Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal
Art/Research International is a forum dedicated to exploring and advancing art as and/or within the research process across disciplines and internationally.