Ali Black

“The Breathing Space” is symbolic of the living, dynamic context in which we work together. Spaces within academia, much like living organisms, breathe and evolve. These spaces are not fixed, but are shaped by the actions, interactions, and collaborations of those within 18 them. We are an all-female writing collective inspired by slow academia and rest as resistance. We share personal narratives illustrating how we mould our environments to foster collaboration, support, and empowerment, thereby shaping the space to contain the dynamism of our collective selves. We embellish our space in ways that make it more hospitable and conducive to enlightenment, personal enrichment, and shared wisdoms. We invite conference participants to engage by contributing to our collective vision of academia as a living, breathing space, where voices are heard, and every contribution valued. This vision challenges the status quo, redefines the boundaries of academic workspaces, and reimagines the potentials within them

The aim of many conferences, including AARE, is to provide spaces for researchers to engage in forums, discussion, ideas and the sharing of research. Such spaces are considered vital for the development and dissemination of academic ideas, and the building of academic careers. But who is not here? Research around gender and academia highlights how opportunities to attend and participate in traditional academic conferences are often out of reach for women with caring responsibilities, or for casual staff, research students and other marginalised groups.

Interrelationships between humans and more-than-human worlds are complicated - with critical climate justice issues influencing our shared fates. This presentation explores research where innovative assessment practices have awakened future teachers to the delights of childhood and the realities of changing environments. The context of this presentation is a sustainability-focused course in an Australian undergraduate early childhood education teaching degree. Over the last four years, cohorts of pre-service teachers have used arts-based methods and stories of experience to explore their childhood memories, interactions and relationships with people, place, and more-than-human worlds. Harnessing the power of the arts to celebrate the natural environment and human relationships with-in it, pre-service teachers use their own stories and creative and historical artefacts to remember, reflect upon, and represent significant childhood experiences. The making visible of early relationships with people, place and more-than-human, serves to expand their minds and hearts, connecting them to their hopes for children and for the planet. Pre-service teachers' reflections illuminate their renewed understandings about how significant early experiences with-in nature contribute to resilience, physical, mental and spiritual health across the lifespan. Their experiential and narrative understandings inspire feelings of connection and empathy with the natural world, environmental and ethical awareness, and advance sustainability as they reconnect with their passion for the planet and renew plans for advocacy, action and change. Through storied and arts-based assemblages and reflections, this research highlights the power of the arts for connecting educators to their personal and professional commitments about working with young children toward sustainable, well, and hopeful futures.

Wearied by the ringing noise of corporatisation that currently pervades the academy, this ethnodrama-influenced presentation engages us in speculative silence and speaking back. Using performative and contemplative methods, we react to the increasing corporate incursions into institutions of higher learning - the over-valuing of money, measures and metrics - which encroach upon our freedom to think. This neo-liberalisation of our scholarly practices (which demands we pay attention to rankings, performance and comparison) is reducing time for knowledge work focused on the public good. Rather than courageously working for long-term sustainability and social justice, our scholarship is limited to narrowed, short-term and fundable agendas - our care, desire, creativity and blue-sky, novel pursuits subsequently compromised.

We are four women from three Australian universities in various phases of (un)becoming academics. One of us has moved from casual to "permanent" in the last year only, one is awaiting a probation review to secure permanency, one has been in academia for more than twenty years with "very little to show for it", and one has recently walked away choosing voluntary retirement. This virtually-delivered performance-based presentation draws on forms, expressions and traditions of arts-based inquiry as vehicles for exploring our academic identities and unveiling our vulnerable, feminine/ist, embodied and multi-layered selves in our work and research (Black, Crimmins, and Henderson, 2017). Our performance includes a metaphorical enactment of our lived experiences of being, becoming and (un)becoming academics. Across this virtual presentation we include drama and visual/poetic representations of our experience, as well as oral vignettes from our (un)becoming stories. Within the performance we engage with autoethnography and collective memoir as feminist processes to explore and make manifest our lived experiences of academic measurement and constraint, and to illustrate the (contained) liberation that has accompanied the stripping away of academic 'agenders' and masculine matrices of success. We reveal to each other our 'tender pink underbellies' and offer to one another our 'landmarks of experience' (Black & Loch, 2014). These help us to understand the impact of the academic machine and inspire us to find new ways of becoming. Our storying has and is generating friendship, kindness and ethics of care and caring. Whilst the machine continues to influence our experience, we are creating spaces of pleasure and joy (Black, Crimmins and Jones, 2017). These storied, collaborative and kind processes have opened ways for us to respond to our in/vulnerable longings to be differently-more open, raw, exposed-in academia, and have facilitated the building of regenerative and restorative spaces for hope, agency, relationship and authenticity in the academy.

We, seven women writers performers artists academics, have been working collectively for a year, storying, de-storying and re-storying the experience of our lives. We write to 'taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect' (Nin, 1976), to uncover and learn ourselves through writing (Richardson, 2000), to take the 'risky' steps of talking to each other about our inner lives (Palmer, 1998). Cognisant of the limitations and masculinities of traditional academic discourses, in form and content, and heavily confined by neoliberal expectations to count and be counted, we write and express the stories of lives we didn't choose or imagine, but the lives we are given and live through. Our expression inhabits aesthetic, contemplative and sensory ways of knowing and employs poetry, image, song and story to create a poly vocal account of women's lives, voices, struggles and learning. For our panel discussion we come together from different physical locations and different spaces in the field of education to make public our stories and the promiscuous forms (Childers et al, 2013). We contemplate the conscious de-disciplining (Richardson, 2000) of our practice which we express using performance, tableaux, and voice to further extend women's imagistic ways of knowing and communicating (Langer, 1942)..

Is 'slow scholarship' feasible in the competitive context of academic careers where managerialism, self-promotion, and tick-the-box measures of achievement have become determiners of academic success? This paper interweaves visual, auditory and performative narratives to represent an emerging alternative to the existing paradigm as seven female academics and educators gradually find ways to disrupt and cross the boundaries of their tenuous roles as academics in four regional Australian universities. Over one year, they create a space where new thinking, confidence and wellbeing emerges. They negotiate an ethics of praxis for writing and publishing: this disrupts the self-seeking habitus of academic life, re-constitutes academic writing as an emergent space for speaking back to received values about what counts as research writing; and reconstitutes and acknowledges the intrinsic value of each individual life as a contributing element of the combined strength and energy of the group. These practices are then adopted by a second group of academics who work alongside the first group. This creates a counterpoint to the market-driven rhythm of universities which diminishes academics by demanding that they compete for an increasingly shallow pool of funds. By interweaving words, images, sound and performance over a series of publications the authors demonstrate the power of arts-informed storytelling to disrupt the habitus and expectations of academic life. More important than the publications generated in that emergent space is the evidence that 'slow scholarship' practiced within a cooperative group where listening is as important as talking can generate a powerful ethic of care for self and other. In turn this re-humanising of the research space can re-vivify personal and professional wellbeing cross multiple dimensions by creating new personal, social and academic frameworks for 'being an academic'.