Panel #2 Session 2
Wednesday 29 November - 14:00
Building 25, Room 2
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​Chair: Axel-Nathaniel Rose
Beyond the journey: fresh metaphors for articulating HDR candidature and early career academic life.
- The Critically Creative Reading and Writing Collective
Amelia Walker, Chloe Cannell, Dante De Bono & Simon-Peter Telford
University of South Australia
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Our presentation raises the need to expand the range of metaphors used to describe experiences of higher-degree-by-research candidates (HDRs) and early career academics (ECAs). We are a collective of HDRs and ECAs in creative research fields. Our presentation draws on cognitive linguistics, which poses that metaphors of daily communication reflect and reinforce dominant cultural assumptions in ways that can significantly influence thought, affect, agency, and well-being. In discourses portraying HDR and ECA experiences, metaphors of journeys abound, consistent with a commonality of journey metaphors across healthcare, film, literature, and other contexts. Critiques of journey metaphors problematise their linearity and emphasis on hierarchical progression, which privileges the telling of lives that match normative culturally western models of success. These critiques highlight a need to diversify ways of telling stories to more satisfyingly represent broader forms of lived experience, particularly in relation to intersecting axes of social privilege and marginalisation. Our presentation extends this need to metaphors for articulating HDR and ECA experiences and links it with issues of inclusivity in academic spaces. Writing from contrasting backgrounds, we reflect on ways in which journey metaphors fail to accommodate us, then offer fresh metaphors that, for us, enable more satisfying ways to represent and comprehend our experiences. We by no means claim our examples to be exhaustive. Instead, we aim to demonstrate the value this exercise bears and the benefits to be gained via ongoing expansion of metaphors and other devices for perceiving and portraying HDR candidature and ECA life.
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The Critically Creative Reading and Writing Collective (CCRWC) is a group of researchers based at the University of South Australia, on Kaurna Yerta. CCRWC members share an interest in creative research. We strive to practice kindness and mutual aid through academic collaboration, and meet regularly to read and write together.
Grieving; postPhD
- Gemma Nisbet & Daniel Juckes
University of Western Australia
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‘We’ — the two of us, and the Creative Writing scholarly community more broadly — need to talk about what follows the Creative Writing PhD.
GN: Since I completed my PhD, for which Daniel served on my supervisory panel, I have frequently been asked—and have asked myself—what comes next. This question encompasses not only the practicalities of seeking to advance a career, but also the affective experience of completing a PhD: it is a moment of celebration but also of rupture; perhaps even a kind of grief. The space a PhD leaves is one of silence.
DJ: On finishing my own PhD I remember, most piquantly, that moment of grief and silence—and, of course, the uncertainty which surrounds it: I had tried to prepare, but did not know how to cope with the task of reforming a sense of purpose, all the while staying in the ‘race’. This is partly to do with the nature of the system we are situated within, as well as the vacuum of a ‘finished’ project.
This paper will be a dialogue focused on the period of time immediately following the conclusion of a PhD; we see its form as both a product of precarity and a resistance to it. Given our practice as essayists, we hope to open a space for discussion which acknowledges the strengths and limitations of the personal as a route to knowledge. We will try to articulate, if nothing else, the ways a recent Doctoral graduate may need to be cared for.
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Gemma Nisbet is a Western Australian writer who recently completed a PhD in Creative Writing at UWA enquiring into objects, memory and the personal essay. Her creative and critical work has appeared in publications including Australian Book Review, Axon, Meniscus, TEXT and Westerly. She writes a weekly book reviews and interviews column for The West Australian and teaches Creative Writing and Literary Studies as a sessional academic. Her first book, The Things We Live With, will be published by Upswell in October.
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Daniel Juckes is a writer from Perth, Western Australia. He is a lecturer in Creative Writing at UWA, Editor at Westerly Magazine, Deputy Chair of the AAWP, and holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Curtin University. His creative and critical work has been published in journals such as Axon, Kalliope X, Life Writing, M/C Journal, Meanjin, TEXT, and Westerly. His work was highly commended in the 2021 Fogarty Literary Award, and he recently recorded a talk at TEDxYouth@KingsPark.
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Breaking the Locks: increased accessibility for rural poets in Covid
- Roxanne Bodsworth
Charles Sturt University
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In this performative paper, using spoken word and an autoethnographic approach, Roxanne Bodsworth shares a rural and personal perspective on the ways lockdown opened up new possibilities for creativity, poetry, and the sense of belonging to a community of poets online.
As someone living on bPangerang country in rural Victoria, the experience of Covid lockdown was one in which opportunities for Spoken Word on zoom platforms and participation in online workshops allowed Roxanne open access to the community of shared poetry that had previously been largely inaccessible. During lockdown in 2020, she was a runner-up in the Victorian Slam Poetry final through zoom performances, and has had work published since in Minerva Rising, Liquid Amber Prize Anthologies, Axon, and The Incompleteness Book. She has also self-published a verse novel called Unforgiven and a collection of poetry The Book of Hours. She regularly participates in the Kent and Sussex poetry workshops in the UK, which have continued to be available online. While there has been some research into the effects of lockdown on urban performance platforms, the effects of the pandemic on adult creativity and increased access to creative communities for country people has drawn very little consideration. We need to talk about including opportunities for creative practice in rural Australia and this performative presentation speaks to that.
Dr. Roxanne Bodsworth is a feminist poet writing from the Irish tradition in a contemporary style. She achieved her PhD in 2020 with a prosimetric reconstruction of the female journey in Irish mythology. As well as poetry in several literary journals using the pen-name of ‘Therese’ and ‘RTB’ and poetry performed on platforms in Australia, Ireland and online, her publications include peer-reviewed articles; reviews of art, music, and literature; feature articles in magazines and newspapers; and a non-fiction book. She is also a celebrant, sheep farmer, and learning skills advisor with the Country Universities Centre.