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

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.

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.

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.

It is said stories support growth and transformation-personally and collectively, socially, culturally and spiritually. We can see this truth on ancient walls and history books, we can hear it in the words of elders passed down through the ages. In this space, I reflect and story my personal experience. Messages contained in the interpersonal of my everyday life (dis)connect with those of contemporary culture. In my dark cocoon-like experience of the everyday-depression, death, grief, loss, invisibility-the butterfly does not come. And so I (re)present to repossess using multi-layered, arts-based forms of narrative, image, poetry and creative writing-forms that embody and represent how change can happen, and the time it takes. These forms respond to deep desires to know and understand change and transition, to make meaning of experience-to make repossession visible. In this piece, contemplative storying creates sparks in the darkness, offering catalysts for dialogue and thinking, and possible frames for re/emergence.

During a tumultuous transition phase in my life I use creative writing and storying to piece/peace together painful and everyday experiences and reconcile past and present loss and trauma. Using poetry, story fragments and life history writing I work to connect to what matters to me and make sense of my life and my living. As I do this I discover that writing my stories into being, writing my particular points of view, at points in time, examining what I think I have learned in my conflicted and ruptured relationships, and in my moments of connection and love, matters - a lot. Writing the things I almost cannot say, stories written in the dark, to the dark, through the dark, and with the dark, offer me ways to remember what I have learned. Writing offers to me a way of being-becoming out the darkness into which I have fallen, out of the depression and discomfort that accompanies me, out of the wounding and numbness that follows me, and into a space to stop and rest. And listen. And remember. And heal. The depth of pain fully felt, allows light into my dark hours and awakens me to the life and love I have, have had, and will have.