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.

Interrogating Boundaries of the Nonhuman: Literature, Climate Change, and Environmental Crises asks whether literary works that interrogate and alter the terms of human-nonhuman relations can point to new, more sustainable ways forward. Bringing insights from the field of literary animal studies, a diverse and international group of scholars examine literary contributions to the ecological framing of human-nonhuman relationships. Collectively, the contributors to this edited collection contemplate the role of literature in the setting of environmental agendas and in determining humanity's path forward in the company of nonhuman others. [Book Synopsis]

Since the mid-1990s, Australian writers have been shifting the form and function of animal representation to explore the material realities of the more-than-human as well as the violence implicit in the human/animal relationship. This chapter provides a brief overview of some of these fictive challenges, turning to a close reading of Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015). I argue that Wood’s novel operates as a taxonomic replication of some of the paradoxes and limits in contemporary, literary discourses on non-human animals. At first blush, the work’s satire of the romanticisation of animal imagery and its exposure of modernity’s entwined anthropocentricism and anthropomorphism are a challenge to the projection of human needs onto animals. Yet, the novel also deploys a symbology where animals diversely signify the female inmates and conversely pathways to freedom, a symbology that reduces the animal to a referent.

This chapter describes the Sustainability Focused Community of Practice (SFCoP) at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. The SFCoP is a diverse group of academics committed to teaching and assessing a complex and contested concept. The SFCoP emerged in response to an institutional requirement that graduates from all programs needed to demonstrate the graduate attribute of sustainability focused. A single convener used course outlines to identify the community of academics that taught and assessed sustainability and invited them to join the SFCoP. The intention of formally creating a SFCoP was to negotiate the boundaries of the domain, consolidate the body of knowledge that was disaggregated across the university, and to enlarge the set of best practice materials for common use. In addition to outlining the origins of the CoP, this chapter provides practitioner accounts of the role that the SFCoP played in enhancing the incorporation of sustainability content in the fields of English literature, environmental economics, public health, sustainability and planning. The different academic voices highlight how individuals drew benefit from this alternative social learning space. Common elements included a reduced sense of isolation, an expanded understanding of the domain, and the enlargement and fortification of a permissible space in which to explore how to best teach a difficult concept.

Mongrel Signatures reviews the Australian writer Mudrooroo's career and deals with central issues of identity, authenticity and truth. After 1996, academics and writers in Australia and around the world endorsed or denied Mudrooroo's Aboriginality after research had dramatically called his Indigenous identity into question. There has also been a long silence among fans of Mudrooroo, who has not commented publicly on his racial belonging. These challenging and lively "reflections" by European and Australian scholars and writers are not meant to discuss whether Mudrooroo can legitimately sign his works with an Aboriginal name (an essentialist and problematic view of identity and authenticity). Instead, they explore how Mudrooroo's writing restages the drama of subjectivity in terms of 'articulation' rather than 'authentication', and ask how we are to read him now in the face of current accusations and the cultural scenario of Aboriginal arts and studies. The contributors - in disagreement or in dialogue - treat questions of identity and representation, reading Mudrooroo's work through the lenses of such perspectives as psychoanalysis, postmodernism, postcolonialism, deconstruction and queer theory. The essays are designed to provoke debate and to dissolve the rigid polarities hitherto characterizing discussion of this highly influential creative artist. Contributors Clare Archer-Lean - Maureen Clark - Graziella Englaro - Eva Rask Knudsen - Ruby Langford Ginibi - Maggie Nolan - Annalisa Oboe - Wendy Pearson - Lorenzo Perrona - Cassandra Pybus - Adam Shoemaker - Gerry Turcotte [Book Synopsis]