Panel #11 Session 1
Friday 1 December - 13:00
Building 25, Room 1
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8 Little Words: The impact of writing events on emerging campus communities.
- Karen Hands
University of The Sunshine Coast
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This research paper discusses the impact of initiating a small writing event for creative writing and publishing (CWP) students at a young campus of a regional university. Specifically, this paper examines how the writing event, an 8 Word Story competition and installation, provided students with readership, cohort visibility, opportunities for collaboration with other creative discipline-based students, and creative fulfillment. By analysing qualitative survey responses from participants in two annual 8 Word Story installations, this research proposes that the event contributed to an enhanced sense of community and writerly identity amongst the student cohort, and shifted understandings of success in the CWP field.
Regional university students in low-socio economic areas experience additional challenges to their urban counterparts (Beer and Lawson 2017). Furthermore, for students in the creative fields, career paths are often less visible in these geographic areas, contributing to less certain graduate identities, outcomes, and pathways.
In an industry context, literary events are recognised as generating significance beyond their individual components of author, text, audience, time, and place (Ommundsen 2009). They offer an occasion for social connection and become catalysts for collective expression (Cryle 2006). Thus, literary events work beyond the significance of the text, the author/s and the institution, and contribute to shaping and reflecting dynamic communities. The experience of coming together over a text builds strong literary cohorts which builds shared understandings and identities (Gos, Hewett in Beck, Lyons, Waterbright 2022). This paper examines the impact of a literary event in a university setting for a regional CWP cohort and offers insight into engagement opportunities.
Karen Hands is a Lecturer and Program Coordinator of the Creative Industries at the University of The Sunshine Coast. She researches arts and cultural policy, creative/cultural work, literary communities, and gender and working life. Her research has been published in scholarly journals and her personal essay about teaching at a regional university, ‘The Fisher Kings’, was selected for inclusion in the celebrated anthology Teacher, Teacher: Stories of Inspirational Educators, edited by Megan Daley (2023). She was previously associate publisher of Griffith Review.
Logocentrism and a Reversed Hierarchy Within Practice-Led Research
- Oscar Davis
Deakin University
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Within contemporary creative arts discourse, many artist-researchers have discussed how creative practices can be a central and initiating part of academic research, and that creative research methodologies carry the capacity to bring into view marginalised and complex realities. My research argues, however, that even in the attempt to subvert traditional understandings of research, many artist-researchers repeat dominant hegemonies of logocentrism and transcendentalism. Drawing predominantly on the works of Jacques Derrida and his deconstruction of the speech/writing dichotomy, I argue that logocentric hierarchies between genesis/derivation, interiority/exteriority, nature/culture, and Self/Other permeate creative arts discourse, and particularly, the relationship between practice and theory. My paper begins by sketching historical views of artistic creativity throughout Western thought, focusing on how ancient notions of transcendentalism have come to be internalised and naturalised. Following this, my paper moves to contemporary creative research, mapping the rhetoric of transcendentalism and logocentrism within its scholarship and its positioning of creative practice against theory. Lastly, my paper claims that an unexamined logocentric approach to creative arts research often conceals and quashes moments of complexity, marginality, and otherness. I encourage artist-researchers to lean more heavily into moments of undecidability, questioning the stability of the practice/theory relationship and the artistic Self.
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Oscar Davis is a PhD candidate at the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Australia. Majoring in Literary Studies and Astrophysics at Monash University in 2017, Oscar went on to undertake an Honours Course in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne in 2019. Oscar’s PhD thesis involves writing an exegesis with an accompanying novel, Static Sun, Phantom Breath, which implements and explores a post-structuralist analysis of practice-led research and the relationships between theory and practice, and culture and nature. Oscar’s publications and research interests predominantly focus on and gender expression, creative rhetoric and artistic subjectivity.
Let’s talk about disobedience: the opportunities of epistemic refusal
- Rebecca Ryall
Flinders University
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Research within the post humanities, in critiquing the dualistic proposition at the heart of most Euro patriarchal research, necessarily troubles the enforcement of the structures of both research methodology and knowledge creation. Available methodological approaches - quantitative, qualitative and even post qualitative enquiry - cannot exist without a foundational, cosmological dualism – one must be able to stand separate from that being observed. Research which explores embodied thinking, entanglements, co-becomings and coproduction of knowledge/s, is only possible from a non-dualistic cosmological position, making such research incapable of meeting the paradigmatic demand for objectivity, which characterizes most Euro patriarchal enquiry. Rather than diminishing the value of such enquiry, this divergence liberates the researcher to explore alternative responses to the research inquiry. Fictocritical research seeks to understand theory through embodiment, placing the researcher squarely in the field of study, always and already entangled. In its refusal of mastery, the fictocritical form represents both the process, and the product of the research. This presentation invites us to start talking about methodology, to explore the relational possibilities of refusing the epistemic-ontologic divide, the binary opposition of discourse and materiality, and the Cartesian logic of separation upon which most hegemonic, Europatriarchial research depends. Through inviting us, as researchers, back into the field, fictocriticism offers opportunities to respond with the pluriverse, and explore alternative cosmological logics, perhaps more appropriate to this time and place.
Rebecca Ryall (she/her) is a white, non-Indigenous scholar of settler descent, living and enquiring on unceded Widjabul-Waibul Country in the far north of NSW. She is a current PhD candidate with Flinders University of South Australia, whose research explores entanglements with place and the onto-epistemological opportunities of recentring relations with Country.