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.

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’.

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]

In this chapter, the authors focus on working collaboratively with the wider community to engage in ECEfS values. They do this through discussing a story from the field from Korea, where children actively engaged in a project to protect local wildlife, and a collaboration in Australia between an early childhood university academic with an interest in participatory and arts-based approaches that support listening to children, and an environmental educator with the local council. Each project demonstrates the value of shared goals, openness and trust between partners. The Australian project was based at the Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve, a public environmental visitor centre situated in a popular rainforest reserve on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, and comprised partnerships between environmental education centre staff and volunteers, student teachers, early childhood practitioners and children aged from 3 to 10 years. The ripple effects of these projects led to powerful ways of thinking and doing ECEfS that enriched child, family and community connections, and strengthened individual, collective and organisational commitments to sustainability.

Engaging with sensory ethnography, we are walking on the beach and writing in embodied ways. Employed in a neo-liberal institution, our episodic travelling together along the seashores is inviting new ways of being, seeing and thinking in and beyond academe. We are interested in cultivating relationship, inquiring contemplatively and aesthetically, wandering/wondering, walking/working, and writing/representing lives/worlds/words. We are committed to processes of sensory learning, to creatively piecing/peace-ing together entangled sensory moments and meanings. In a spirit of listening and reconciliation, we are wondering deeply about the First Nations peoples who have walked these beaches since time immemorial. We are following pathways suggested by Truman and Springgay (The Routledge International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research. Routledge, pp. 259–267, 2016) and tracing how walking is a radical and critical art of inquiry that opens spaces for creativity, de-familiarises our bodies, blends visual and non-visual senses, (re)creating belonging, place, feelings and relationships through movement. We reflect on our walking/writing as a source of resistance; a sensory archive; an inquiry of motion and meaning-making. Using memoir-like writing and arts-based artefacts we are blurring the boundaries between creative inquiry, activism, and everyday life, and attending to issues of settler colonisation, and gender, resisting commodification and quantification, and creating spaces for restorative, responsive and decolonial walking/writing expression.

This chapter is concerned with the impact of the neoliberal university on experiences of wellness in academic work/life. It highlights how arts-based and feminist methodologies can help explore the distress of toxic workplaces, the breaking points, and history of experience. It offers warnings, too, about turning structural/social/political issues into individualist frameworks of personal strategies or tools for managing the stress and pressure of academic work/life. Without structural interventions, our "making and movement as mindful moments" cannot save us. They can, however, create spaces and expressive channels for viewing the damage, slowing the wear and tear/s, and interrupting the never-ending production demanded by the academy. Illustratively, I use feminist methods and arts-based offerings to attend to slowing down, to making visible the "sap" of my academic experiences, "the hidden injuries" and the bodily impact academic culture has wrought, and to invite/incite a collective and "feminist snap" of revolt, resistance, and reimagining.