Ali Black

This chapter offers a creative inquiry into the author’s embodied experiences with living and learning as an academic. Playfully mobilizing the rich concepts of hap and hope, Black uses journal entries, photographs, and embodied, rhythmic, poetic ‘hap’ writing to create spaces for herself and for her readers to pause, reflect, think, feel, and be differently in the world. Through the form and style of her life writing in this chapter, she pushes against the weight of academic cultures to embrace an orientation to embodied reflection and theorizing that unsettles and transcends traditional academic writing and norms. For Black, academia is too often a relentless, hungry institution that extracts rather than nourishes. At mid-life, she uses the chapter to imagine otherwise, to take meaningful time, and to listen to her body as it leads her into new ontological possibilities for her future academic life. The body emerges as a vital site of wisdom and teaching that with time and care can protect and guide each of us against tyrannical work demands and the constant changes that characterize contemporary neoliberal institutions. Black invites readers to consider how to embrace slow rhythms of productivity and embodied engagement to seek holism in their own lives.

It is understood that our ecological identities are driven by a sense of wonder and delight towards the Earth by a connection to beauty and place, a love of the environment, and a concern for its well-being. Yet little time is given to supporting children's ecological relationships, or to valuing their aesthetic, emotional, sensory, and embodied engagement and encounters with nature. What happens when time is offered, and when adults step back and listen to the Meanings children are building? This chapter draws on findings from a participatory research project focused on listening to young children during their encounters in a botanical garden. Benefiting from opportunities to slow, settle and connect with place, children shared their developed capacities as meaning-makers. Using drawing, storytelling, and photography, children revealed their aesthetic sensibilities, and their sensory attentiveness. Children's created and captured images highlight their sensitive listening and noticing, their sense of wonder, openness, and curiosity, and their appreciation of beauty. This research highlights that children are indeed meaning-makers who are seeking to interact with nature and its creatures and who value agency and freedom to take the lead and follow their interests, curiosities, and imaginations. It highlights that companioning “listening” adults and peers make a difference and support the relational building of meaning.

With standardised student assessment data dominating educational policy, school governance, and teaching practices, this paper-creation unfolds from a post qualitative inquiry where a visual artwork artefact emerged as a sensory representation of teacher data relations. In an educational era where the datafication, platformization, and visualisation of students’ assessment data are reshaping ‘quality’ schooling, teaching, and learning, the artwork offers a glimpse into the relationality and affective intensities of school-data-events. Grounded in theorisations of affect, it is proposed that art can draw us into the compound of school-data-events, honour the force of affect, and gesture towards movement orientated renderings of knowledge-ing and not-knowing. We posit that artistic encounters have the potential to ignite lines of flight that can reconfigure the socio-material matterings of school-data-events, support affective sense-making, and gently disturb the commanding metricised logics of data visualisations. This contribution serves to support the imaginaries of those working with data.

This paper explores the embodied and metaphorical ways women describe their experiences of academic life and work. It bears witness to the impact of the academy's neoliberal, patriarchal, and masculinist cultures by attending to the disturbing themes of violence, brutality, injury, and war contained in women's descriptions of what it means to be a woman working in academia. These messages invite individual, collective, and institutional review of the distress university workplaces can cause. Resistance and re-imagining of higher education institutions is necessary, so that instead of suffering psyches and tyrannised brutalised bodies, the grip of managerialist performativity is broken. Creative methodologies help to loosen this grip, offering feminist shelters for women's experiences and bodies. Our paper invites vulnerable dialogue and visceral emotional connection - precursors for working differently, for caring for one another, and for the much-needed dismantling of damaging patriarchal practices and structures within the academy.

This chapter considers the many challenges and choices academics face in neoliberal workplaces. It highlights the authors’ individual and collective experiences as they make decisions that reject the intimidation of the neoliberal university. Embracing Harré et al.’s (2017) conceptualisation of the university as an infinite game, the authors have been repurposing neoliberal obligations and standards using an ethics of care and rest to guide them. Employing collegially supportive collaborative writing processes, the authors are learning how to make intentional choices that do more than tick neoliberal boxes, but which purposefully enrich their lives. In this chapter, readers are invited to join the quest and become ‘game masters’ of their own lives and work. They will negotiate obstacles and overwhelm, recognise and gather the resources that sustain them, and ultimately, face ‘The Boss’.

This chapter explores issues that provoked this research collection of ludic inquiries into power, pedagogy, and games. The authors note key works from existing bodies of literature, and how this book’s contributions extend previous works on these themes. Chapter 1 also elaborates terms and concepts including literal games and games of power, formal and public pedagogies, and ludic inquiry. Particularly influential approaches include finite games versus an infinite game, conceptualisations of games as a magic circle, and reclaiming games as spaces of transformation. A key point is that games are involved in maintaining systems of uneven power in white-western cultures. Critique of these games can help raise awareness of injustices and signal possibilities for ethical change.

An arts-based researcher, I make meaning using art and story. This chapter is a retrospective and subjective account, a looking back through a window of time in my life history. Tracking sense-making across the last decade, this chapter examines when, how and why I came to write/research in autoethnographic ways and the importance of this writing as research. Creative/arts-based methods have helped me to piece/peace together life experiences, and to consider my wholeness—who I am across personal/professional identities and histories. As a way of bearing witness to my lived and felt experiences, this chapter uses poetry, image and memoir-like threads to illuminate stories and meaning-making, making learning public.

This chapter is a response to the impact of the prevailing neoliberal discourse of corporate managerialism in universities. It contains the authors’ communal experimentation with collaborative gameplay as an intentional and collective form of arts-based activism and intervention focused on subverting and unravelling the finite and managerial games at work in their universities. As a way of giving pause to how the pandemic and related workforce crises have intensified power dynamics and precarious work, authors use arts-based and poetic offerings to reflect on the role of power operating in their work/lives. Their creative methodology provides a site for playful protest and resistance to the competitive individualism and win/lose outcomes so treasured across the academy. It also offers space for authors’ realisation that while they desire to be radical, they are mostly compliant in their academic work. Subsequent insights about their ‘playing with power relations’ but also how they are ‘being played’ by succumbing to managerial demands helps them stop and ‘ask questions’ and ‘think outside the game’.

This book interrogates the roles games and playfulness bear in both formal education and informal social learning. Responsive to contemporary social and ecological challenges, this book especially explores games’ interactions with social power. On one hand, games sometimes operate to reinforce ideologies that normalise social injustice and environmental disregard. On the other, games offer rich possibilities for questioning such ideologies and encouraging change.

Strongly interdisciplinary, the book assembles twenty chapters written by fifty experts across fields including education, game design, cultural studies, sociology, Indigenous studies, disability studies, queer studies, STEM, legal studies, history, creative writing, visual arts, music, the creative industries, and social inclusion. These contributions not only make games a focus, but incorporate playful research writing strategies, demonstrating methods of what we term ludic inquiry. This includes chapters written using arts-based research, practice-led research, poetic inquiry, narrative inquiry, autoethnography, duoethnography, and more.

Organised across four themes – ‘philosophical sparks’, ‘lived experiences’, ‘pedagogical perspectives’ and ‘the spirit of play’ – this book emphasises the radical egalitarian possibilities inherent in critical attention to games and how we play (or get played by) them. Its fresh insights will interest all readers interested in creatively remaking our worlds.

Career Narratives and Academic Womanhood is a collection of essays in which life writing scholars theorize their early-career, mid-career, and late-career experiences with the documents that shape their professional lives as women: the institutional auto/biography of employment letters, curriculum vitae, tenure portfolios, promotion applications, publication and conference bios, academic website profiles, and other self-authored narratives required by institutions to compete for opportunities and resources. [Book Synopsis]