Panel #4 Session 4
Wednesday 29 November - 16:30
Building 25, Teal Room
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Creative writing and other practices employed in the evaluation of women’s football community projects in the Pacific Islands
- Lee McGowan, Dani Medina Hidalgo, Kasey Symons, Chelsea Taylor & Emma Evans
University of the Sunshine Coast, Swinburne University & Oceania Football Confederation
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Football (soccer) organisations in the Pacific Islands frequently employ stories – text and images – of participants to underline highlights and individual activities, augment social media presence, and demonstrate provision of services. The programmes implemented across women’s football tend to be designed by men, with men and boys in mind, and privilege men and boys’ football communities over those of and for women and girls (McGowan et al., 2023). While measurement of participation in football related events, training, and programmes delivered by these organisations is commonplace, efficient and empirical, assessment of broader impact within or on football communities is relatively rare, particularly for those marginalised through ethnicity, gender, or sexual identity (Pratt et al., 2021).
Recent research in the evaluation of social impact – the net effect of an activity on a community and the well-being of individuals and families (Centre for Social Impact, n.d.) – in the creative arts has assisted in identifying community needs and underlines accomplishment through other measures, including shared narratives and storytelling practices (Gattenhof, 2017; Gattenhof et al., 2021; Hancox, 2019).
Where football (soccer) is an effective way to engage marginalised communities (Sherry, 2010) and place-based creative arts approaches to evaluation afford opportunities for community members to feedback in ways most comfortable for them (Badham 2019), the regional governing body, the Oceania Football Confederation, seek to create safe spaces for programme participants to realise more than football skills. This paper therefore considers and reflects on challenges in the application of transdisciplinary practices, including creative writing, in the evaluation of social impact of women’s football programmes in the Pacific Islands.
Lee McGowan is a senior lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast. He researches creative writing, sport, and community storytelling. Publications include books journal articles, book chapters, a digital history, fiction, and creative non-fiction.
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Kasey Symons is a Research Fellow at the Sport Innovation Research Group (Swinburne University) with research interests in women in sport, sports media, sports literature, and fan culture.
Danielle Medina-Hidalgo is a Research Fellow in the Australian Centre for Pacific Islands Research (ACPIR) at the University of the Sunshine Coast, her publications include journal articles, book chapters, policy briefs and case studies.
Kasey Symons is a Research Fellow at the Sport Innovation Research Group (Swinburne University) with research interests in women in sport, sports media, sports literature, and fan culture.
Chelsey Taylor is the Social Responsibility Impact Manager (OFC) and PhD candidate. Among a range of elements, she is responsible for design and delivery of football development and social responsibility programmes in Oceania.
Emma Evans is the Women’s Football Manager (OFC) and directly responsible for a team of 22 staff and the development of the women’s game across 11 OFC national member associations.
The Mother Tongue: how contemporary fairy tale retellings can re-centre women’s lived experience
- Sarah Hart
Deakin University
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Writing fairy tales that authentically centre contemporary experiences of relationship between women requires an approach that is itself relational and experiential. However, the bulk of contemporary feminist retellings are produced within parameters imposed by the very creators (including Disney and the Brothers Grimm) whose socio-cultural harms they aim to undo. Who, to invoke Audre Lorde, has ever dismantled the master’s house with the master’s tools? Ursula Le Guin’s mother tongue, articulated in 1986, provides a theoretical path to a new approach: ‘The mother tongue is language not as mere communication but as relation, relationship. It connects. It goes two ways, many ways, an exchange, a network.’ Fairy tales were originally spoken, embodied, practiced wholly in relation to others, they were told in the mother tongue. Written down and disseminated en masse they have assumed an authority more akin to Le Guin’s father tongue: a statement to argue against. There is little room for interruptions, adjustments, explanations. These exchanges, vital to connection and reinvention, have been silenced by an archive that privileges the fixed over the fluid. But that does not mean they cannot be reclaimed. It is open to us to write in conversation, to cross the lines between fiction, critique, and our own experience of self. This paper proposes an alternative feminist approach to a literary tradition that has, over the past 200 years, devalued women’s voices and evolved in service of a neo-liberal capitalist agenda that celebrates individual triumph over communal good.
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Sarah Hart is a creative PhD candidate at Deakin University. Her research explores feminist fairy tales and the relationship between contemporary fairy tale retellings and life writing. She presented at the Australian Fairy Tale Society’s 2020 conference on connection and collaboration between women in contemporary feminist fairy tales, and in 2022 co-authored an article in Marvels & Tales (36.1) titled ‘Female Collaboration in Australian Fairy Tales’.
Queering the short story YA cycle
- Chloe Cannell
University of South Australia
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A short story cycle is a collection of individual short stories arranged and linked together to enhance the reader experience when read as a whole (Ingram 1971). This form can be utilised to tell stories of communities by representing diverse characters and perspectives. The potential for short story cycle to explore representations of marginalised communities has largely focused on stories centreing ethnicity and race, but my research explores how the short story cycle can be used for queer storytelling. My short story cycle features multiple intersectional LGBTQIA+ characters with whom I do not share identity experiences, which prompted me to consider how can writers practice allyship through the telling of intersectional LGBTQIA+ young adult (YA) stories? I collaborated with members of the LGBTQIA+ community in writing workshops where we discussed LGBTQIA+ representation, tested creative writing strategies and critiqued excerpts of my drafts. This presentation speaks to the benefits of short story cycle for queer YA fiction and challenges of producing these stories as an outsider author invested in social justice.
Chloe Cannell is a creative writing PhD candidate at the University of South Australia. Her research has been published in Writing From Below, TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, and the Journal of Further and Higher Education. Her short stories were published last year in the Green: Blue Feet anthology with Buon-Cattivi Press.