Ali Black

With standardised student assessment data dominating educational policy, school governance, and teaching practices, this paper-creation unfolds from a post qualitative inquiry where a visual artwork artefact emerged as a sensory representation of teacher data relations. In an educational era where the datafication, platformization, and visualisation of students’ assessment data are reshaping ‘quality’ schooling, teaching, and learning, the artwork offers a glimpse into the relationality and affective intensities of school-data-events. Grounded in theorisations of affect, it is proposed that art can draw us into the compound of school-data-events, honour the force of affect, and gesture towards movement orientated renderings of knowledge-ing and not-knowing. We posit that artistic encounters have the potential to ignite lines of flight that can reconfigure the socio-material matterings of school-data-events, support affective sense-making, and gently disturb the commanding metricised logics of data visualisations. This contribution serves to support the imaginaries of those working with data.

This paper explores the embodied and metaphorical ways women describe their experiences of academic life and work. It bears witness to the impact of the academy's neoliberal, patriarchal, and masculinist cultures by attending to the disturbing themes of violence, brutality, injury, and war contained in women's descriptions of what it means to be a woman working in academia. These messages invite individual, collective, and institutional review of the distress university workplaces can cause. Resistance and re-imagining of higher education institutions is necessary, so that instead of suffering psyches and tyrannised brutalised bodies, the grip of managerialist performativity is broken. Creative methodologies help to loosen this grip, offering feminist shelters for women's experiences and bodies. Our paper invites vulnerable dialogue and visceral emotional connection - precursors for working differently, for caring for one another, and for the much-needed dismantling of damaging patriarchal practices and structures within the academy.

How do we dwell tenderly in the ruins of the modern university? This paper engages a hopeful, collaborative, and sensory methodology to imagine possibilities for research and researcher. As academic women navigating the decay of the neoliberal university amid the shadowy spectre of the ‘ideal’ academic, we explore our lived experiences, identities, and questions. For us, managing modernity’s disorientation and dislocation means showing up differently, with new tools, new theoretical frames, and new ways of relating. From our experiential and aesthetic inquiry, tendrils of possibility for what research does, has been, is, and could be, are emerging. Our dwelling together (co-sensing in radical tenderness) helps us see beyond the thicket of institutional requirements towards a more hopeful and collective existence – for if the sense of separation instilled by modernity is a social disease, healing must be a communal endeavour.

In this paper, we examine qualities of fast and slow academia, creatively interrogating the challenges and value of setting and reclaiming our own s/pace and course amid the turbulent waters of the postmodern academic landscape. Engaging experientially with metaphor and the methodology of causal layered analysis, we reflect on lived experiences, academic trajectories (individual and collective) and the challenges of finding/following our heartfelt desires to go deeper (while the academy’s conflicting currents and dangerous undertows of performance and productivity threaten). Collaborating way-finders, we write as one, engaging decolonial inquiry. We lash our ships together to form a life raft, part of a flotilla of safe space to breathe, connect and collectively dream of uncharted oceans and new possibilities for academia. Our writing together is a reclamation of our intuitive compasses and ancient relational maps, a space to regain our bearings and refocus our sights on what matters most in these uncertain times. We argue for a deeper view of time and s/pace that values ancestral thinking. As ancestors of the future, we must reflect on our roles and responsibilities in and as the university, acknowledging and deciding the legacies we are shaping through our values, practices and actions. We must critically consider the educational practices we are living out and passing on, taking responsibility for the landmarks we are creating and leaving. Through this exploration of inner and external worlds, we are opening up and offering possibilities for different ways of knowing, being and listening in (and beyond) the academy.

Blended Learning (BL) as a pedagogical approach has increased in significance during the COVID-19 pandemic, with blended and online learning environments becoming the new digital norm for higher educational institutions around the globe. While BL has been discussed in the literature for thirty years, a common approach has been to categorise learner cohorts to support educators in better understanding students’ relationships with learning technologies. This approach, largely unsupported by empirical evidence, has failed to adequately address the challenges of integrating learning technologies to fit with non-traditional students’ preferences, their BL self-efficacy and the associated pedagogical implications. Focusing on student preference, our study presents findings from a pre-COVID survey of undergraduate students across four campuses of an Australian regional university where students shared their learning technology preferences and the self-regulated learning that influenced their academic self-efficacy in a BL context. Findings show students want consistency, relevance, and effectiveness with the use of BL tools, with a preference for lecture recordings and video resources to support their learning, while email and Facebook Messenger were preferred for communicating with peers and academic staff. Our study suggests a quality BL environment facilitates self-regulated learning using fit-for-purpose technological applications. Academic self-efficacy for BL can increase when students perceive the educational technologies used by their institution are sufficient for their learning needs.

This paper is a collaborative reflection by four academic women using our creative writings about oceans and shorelines to think and reflect. We write from discrete locations along the Southern and Eastern coastlines of the invaded continent contemporarily known as Australia. Our methodology incorporates walking and creative writing. This walking-writing methodology has connected us to entangled feelings and lived experiences, including our embodied relationships with the ocean, our work in academia, and our rising levels of anxiety as climate change and related environmental crises coincide with our re-membering of oceans, bodies, rhythms and breath. To illustrate our re-membering, we intersperse fragments from our creative writing with reflective discussion. The social, environmental and political chaos surrounding us seeps into our processes, highlighting how neoliberal ideologies influence our inability to dis/connect, harming both human and beyond-human life. Through walking-writing, we seek to remember what we are losing and to imagine alternative futures.

Frenetic digital timescapes reduce academic life to the endless achievement of metrics. These forces produce unsustainable work practices that disconnect us from ourselves, from ideas, from the natural world and from each other. While there is a substantial body of literature critiquing this, the use of arts-based inquiry into academic work is less common. In this article, we use slow ‘thinking-in-movement’ practices and arts-based methodologies to argue that beach walking enables us to resist the academic machine. We suggest that beaches act as liminal spaces where we may engage in post-feminist, new materialist c/a/r/tographies. Beach walking enables us to defamiliarize our bodies and interrupt the academic machine so that we might enact more embodied, contemplative ways of working. Written as a performative piece, this article intersperses citations of towards a valuable academic life. Come, join us as we walk … 

As a response to the corporatization of the university, nine scholars worked together to create spaces that fostered the possibility of collective dissensus. Using scholarly performative methods, we have sought to push back against the increasing corporate incursions into our institutions of higher learning—the over-valuing of money, measures, and metrics which encroach upon our capacity to think. This one-act ethnodrama below is one of our responses to the new corporatism of higher education. In the generation of this scholarly work, we have created the space and time to reconnect as colleagues and as scholars.

Conference attendance is a feature of contemporary academic work and an accepted way of building academic identities and networks through the dissemination and promotion of ideas, achievements and research. However, our personal experiences have caused us to problematise the traditional conference and consider alternatives which mitigate its associated problems yet achieve its aims. In this paper, we use collaborative autoethnography to engage in inquiry about the roles of conferences, and their inhabited notions of representation, membership and inclusion/exclusion. We use personal experiences of virtual confer-ring to highlight that many agreed-upon purposes of attending conferences can be effectively achieved through other means. We explore how particular ways of engaging with technologies enable responsive gathering spaces, relational knowledge production, kinship and community; and facilitate the development, and promotion of scholars and scholarship. We offer a view that confer-ring interactions in online/virtual spaces can support collegial, feminist and egalitarian sharing and knowledge exchange.

This paper presents part of a poetic ‘call and response’ exchange between two poets who have never met. It shares the contemplative witnessing and ‘responding’ of an Australian poet to the poetic ‘calls’ of an Indian poet. Whilst the focus for the project was exploring the physical geography of place, the style of the Indian poet’s calling poems – and indeed the Australian poet’s responding poems – were entangled with ideas encompassing much more than geography. Dreams, desires, despair, loss, and hope wove around, and in ‘place’ of, geographical descriptions. The inquiry process was imperfect, and traversing time differences, language, culture, ways of understanding, and technology to share lived lives was no easy task. Yet, aesthetic methods invited socially and ethically engaged scholarship and contemplation. This paper offers glimpses of how two women poets produced poetic data to explore and witness lives and see and be moved by the other.