Ali Black

For over a year we have been overcoming distance, initiating conversations and building relationships, and acquiring ways to communicate, connect, and engage in deep scholarship. These meaningful processes have been sustained and supported by videoconferencing and emails, storytelling and memoir writing, poetry and artmaking, and research collaboration. Individually and collectively we have experienced the positive impact of narrative and storytelling, discovering our personal and collective voices as safe spaces for storying and connecting have been created and expanded. Over time, formerly concealed and embodied stories have become public and communal, sometimes as quiet whispers, sometimes as forceful outpourings of emotion, sometimes as everyday meandering in the ordinariness of our middleaged lives. In this presentation we contemplate our becoming into our stories, and how our collaboration and connection is changing the way we want to work and be in both workplace and community. We consider the relevance of this as women academics working in universities in the Regional Universities Network - universities with commitments to playing a transformative strength and identity building role in their regions. We extend to others an invitation to consider the value of creating nurturing, responsive, reciprocal spaces that support connections and collaborations across distances and regions. And, we invite a shared exploration of the power of aesthetic tools and creative activities for transforming individuals, communities, and the work of academics in regional universities.

We are two early childhood educators and researchers working in RUN universities and regional communities. In our presentation we are considering the importance of collaboration for engaging with issues of marginalisation and advocacy for children and young people. We consider projects, processes and experiences where negotiation of our own and others' perspectives, knowledge and approaches have been needed in order to promote children's visibility in communities. As we reflect on interactions that have supported the relational production of knowledge across these projects we suggest that opportunities for debate, dialogue and collaboration among different stakeholders and audiences (including children, educators, researchers and researched communities) can alleviate marginalisation by heightening new ways of seeing, thinking about and engaging with marginalised groups.

I awake, it is still dark. I fumble for my torch and look at the clock. I read the time and I remember. It was about this time… It was about this time, exactly 10 years ago, when I held my mother's hand and she drew her sacred last breath. It hits me in my body, the remembering, the witnessing, and I have to get up and write. Because, death has not been the end of my relationship and connection with my mother. With this presentation I remember the passing of my mother and I grapple with notions of time. In an effort to explore and conceptualise what I have learned about death and about life, and about time, I engage with my responses to death and dying, living, aging and im/mortality using poetry, image, and story. I ponder the close and dynamic relationship between writing and death, and how death, and life after death, has become a driving force of creativity, consciousness and meaning for me. This deepening of understanding cultivated by creative processes, methods and outputs offers new contexts for living and invites a questioning: Does death really have the last word?