Clare Archer-Lean

It is well understood that the climate crisis and global racial injustice are inextricably linked and tied to the practices of colonisation and the enduring imperial project of education. This chapter draws on a research project called "Reading Climate: School English, Indigenous Writing and Sustainability" which seeks to support teachers in Australia to address the imperative for critical approaches to climate education and racial justice across the curriculum. This chapter draws in the insights of Indigenous writers and Indigenous speculative stories, which, as Cherokee scholar Sandra Muse Isaacs notes, can always be understood as climate fiction. We explore the ways that critical literacy, as a justice pedagogy that traditionally pivots on Western binaries, might be productively unsettled and expanded by reading practices that foreground Indigenous relationality and Indigenous futurism. To do this we juxtapose two events: the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum and our team's international symposium centralising Indigenous writers' voices in dialogue with questions of climate action. In concert, these two events embody the crises and potential futures of critical literacy in Australia today. Reflecting on these events clarifies the issues facing anti-colonial relational reading practices for teacher professional learning at the intersection of literacy, social justice, and climate education.

It is this idea that is relentlessly battered by international capital, as we are asked to forgo belonging, and to accept that any place is the same as any other, that apart from purely functional aspects, the land has no personality, no infusion of spirit. Big stories are failing us as a nation and will probably not save our natural environment (i.e. us) from the greed and stupidity and indifference that assail it. (Lucashenko, "Not Quite" n.p.)

This paper responds to Indigenous futures' intersection with reading and reception practices. Indigenous futurisms have always been storied and cultural. We contribute to existing research by considering Grace Dillon's Indigenous Futurisms paradigm in conversation Mary Graham's relationality, bringing both in proximity to literary form and reception. 'Indigenous relationality' as proposed by Mary Graham, Elder Scholar of the Kombumerri clan of the Yugambeh Nation (2014) is a core principle in moving from an excavating close reading of Indigenous cultural texts. We interrogate sometraces of coloniality in reception of Indigenous cultural artefacts, practices that fail to recognize the energizing realities of Indigenous futurism as fundamentally relational. Finally, we offer some emergent modes of reading practice, with a particular focus on Lystra Rose's young adult speculative novel Upwelling (2022). We reflect on the place of Country and generative reading in literary and cultural studies and critical Indigenous studies.

This paper outlines the emergent findings and theoretical foundations of Reading Climate: Indigenous literatures, English and Sustainable Futures, cross disciplinary research in Indigenous Studies, Education, and Literary Studies. Our team investigates epistemologies for the teaching of secondary subject English and tertiary courses and how they might be productively reworked. We draw on ‘Indigenous relationality’ as proposed by Mary Graham, Elder Scholar of the Kombumerri clan of the Yugambeh Nation as a core principle in shifting English pedagogy from text-focused close reading. We investigate how a move from exclusively close-reading approaches is important because of the ways in which such a scholarly practice is premised on both potentially canonical and thus Eurocentric intertexts, and the abstraction of the text from cultural and authorial sovereignty. Further, close reading limits the use of textual artefacts, and the knowledge contained within them, to literary concerns of structure, features, devices, effects, and audiences. Here we show how reader relationality involves the reader's reflective stance, the writing's contexts, the guidance of the writer, and the function of the reading process. This paper contributes to and extends approaches to English arguing that inclusion of Indigenous writing in curriculum includes but must go beyond text selection and adoption.

This paper shares findings from a 2022 pilot project called ‘Reading Climate'. Indigenous speculative and climate fiction was centred to contribute to existing research on anti-colonial approaches to secondary school subject English in Australia. The broader project (continuing through 2024–2026) is a collaboration between Indigenous and white settler researchers based at universities across two Eastern Australian states. The core research questions of the pilot study were: How do English teachers engage with Indigenous ways of knowing and understanding Country? How do English teachers engage with Indigenous fiction in the content of climate education? What, if any, factors prevent teachers from engaging with Indigenous fiction, particularly speculative and climate fiction? Findings from the book clubs show significant diversity in terms of teachers’ pedagogical confidence with and knowledge of Indigenous climate fiction and highlight the ways in which a lack of confidence can both perpetuate the colonial project of school English and limit the interdisciplinary potential of literary study. Further, findings from the book clubs offer insights into the kinds of approaches to teacher professional learning that might support anti-colonial, climate-aware approaches to school English.

This essay reports the findings of a survey of almost 300 respondents from every Australian State and the ACT1, all of whom had graduated in the past two decades with a graduate or postgraduate qualification in English Literature. We asked participants to reflect on their experience as tertiary students: what had studying English meant to them at the time? How has studying English affected their working and their personal lives post-graduation? The data collected counters neoliberalist myths about the lack of value in humanities education. Using a mix of quantitative and thematic analysis of the survey data, we argue for lifelong benefits for students graduating with a major in English.

Australian teenagers have grown up with abundant choices in digital screen entertainment including social media, gaming, and global streaming video services such as Netflix. This participatory audience study investigates how, why and to what extent Australian teenagers engage with drama and movies in their daily lives, including Australian stories. The research findings show that Australian teens enjoy watching long-form screen stories on their favourite streaming services and that on-demand delivery is critical to their viewing preferences. Although many remember with affection the Australian drama they watched as children, teens now place a low priority on a screen story being Australian. A sophisticated audience that particularly values diverse and inclusive representation, teens’ deprioritising of Australian content – and linear television – has profound implications for policy, for Australian screen production and for public service broadcasters the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Special Broadcasting Service.

The study of English is evolving, and the classroom is at the forefront of witnessing its flux and transformation. The Work of Literature: Literary Studies in the Classroom engages in extended inquiry into the work of English within its sites of learning in these times of rapid change. For scholars of literature, as Ellie Chambers and Marshall Gregory observed as far back as 2006, ‘teaching is becoming less a job and more an intellectual activity worthy of serious consideration and investigation’.

Creative writing, transdisciplinary literary animal studies, and law-anthropology don’t often appear in the same sentence, but this interdisciplinary mingling is where we as editors meet in animal studies. We were particularly enthused by discussions that emerged during the Australasian Animal Studies Conference, held at the University of Sydney in November 2023, providing a rich source from which to consider the conference theme: ‘Animal Cultures’. Keynote speaker, Carol Gigliotti, wondered about the animal cultural research ideas that can be taken with us to ‘make lives better for animals, both wild and captive'.