Ali Black

We are a collective of academic women engaging in decolonial inquiry and slow scholarship. Through our research focus of ‘Art and Wonder in Education (AWE)’, we are valuing and promoting aesthetic ways of knowing in education and research. Art, wonder, and imagination support our expression of the relational and cultural characteristics of our being and knowing in the world. Our research offers a challenge to accelerated grind culture. Our experiential and creative research approaches offer ways to inhabit our university, our academic work, our academic identities, and our academic bodies, differently. Our research writing uses arts-based and autoethnographic fragments of our lived experiences of the academy. Theorising with slow scholarship, we engage a relational ethics which guides our collective writing and supports our building of community. Engaging with a spirit of listening and responding, our poster shares a series of aesthetic-relational explorations, experiments, and reclamations from our embodied and storied inquiries together. Our research and writing together offers us alternatives to the competitive counting and output driven culture that drives universities and promotes individuals. Functioning more like an ecosystem rather than isolated silos of people and projects, we use our writing to create spaces of healing, generativity, and kinship in our workplace. Our research writing is conducive to ‘life’, providing opportunities for joy and connection. It is guided by a more feminine and circular ethic of care, an ethic that values meaning-making, relationship, collaboration, emergence, wonder, creativity, and wellbeing.

We also connect to the SDGs in the following ways:

SDG 4: Quality Education: Incorporating deep philosophical inquiry into education supports SDG 4 by ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education. It fosters critical and creative thinking and broadens the scope of learning to include ethical and existential dimensions.
Cultivating a sense of wonder and curiosity in education can drive lifelong learning and innovation. Our work aligns with SDG 4 by fostering an engaging and stimulating educational and research environment.
SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being: Encouraging individuals to explore their passions and ethical responsibilities can enhance mental health and well-being. Our work together aligns with SDG 3 as we are promoting holistic well-being through our co-creation and ethical behaviours.
SDG 5: Gender Equality: We write against a cultural backdrop where we have each experienced gender-based discrimination, inequality, sexism, and harassment. Collective attention to persistent gender inequality and the emotional and psychosocial experiences of masculinized and patriarchal work cultures is necessary if we are to reimagine universities. Valuing philosophical and existential inquiry alongside ethical callings encourages an academic environment where gender equality is discussed, leading to greater awareness and action towards achieving gender parity.
SDG16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions: Establishing environments for reflection and dialogue can promote peace, justice, and strong institutions. By encouraging the exchange of diverse ideas, research can contribute to more inclusive and responsive institutions, aligning with SDG 16. Through incorporating and honouring the arts (and alternative ways of knowing and communicating knowledge) we strengthen capacities for inclusion and understanding, moving forward towards peace and justice and away from managerialism’s neoliberal operations where push and shove, competition, and ‘winning’ reign.

“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.