Panel #6 Session 1
Thursday 30 November - 11:00
Building 25, Room 1
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​Chair: Louise Falconer
Beyond artistic borders and into the future
- Felicity Castagna
Western Sydney University
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In artistic disciplines such as the visual and performing arts collaborations between artists working in different modes are commonplace, unlike the field of writing where the general attitude towards collaboration is much more conservative and practitioners have traditionally chosen to stick to their own discipline. The competition for audience and the increasingly limited funding and platforms in the current climate of crisis for the arts means that writers need to be looking at artistic partners and new contexts for making work.
This paper will put forward the argument that collaboration opens up a whole new territory, where writers are challenged and inspired to find new societal contexts to present their art and engage with new audiences in new spaces. Being curious about the work of others and working collaboratively is a powerful tool for writers and artists who want to make powerful art. Collaboration challenges our experience of making art and shifts our focus away from our individual skills, to our capacity to engage in creative dialogue within a new territory. In addition to this, it forces teachers of writing, particularly in the university sector, to consider new pedagogies for the teaching of writing.
This paper will explore the practice and teaching of collaboration through an analysis of the qualitative data collected during Testing Grounds, an experimental lab between writers and artists directed by Felicity Castagna in collaboration with The Parramatta Artists’ Studios and The Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University.
Felicity Castagna has published four novels for adults and young adults including her most recent book, Girls In Boys’ Cars which received The Victorian and Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and is now being adapted for stage and screen. Her previous novel, No More Boats was a finalist in the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award. She has worked with artists in many different fields to produce work for The Sydney Opera House, The Sydney Festival, The National Theatre of Parramatta and other places. Her creative non-fiction and critical responses to literature and art are published both here and internationally on platforms such as The New York Times, The Sydney Review of Books, Electric Literature, LitHub, The Griffith Review and ABC radio and television.
Interdisciplinary Writing Programmes: Challenges and Solutions
- Wing Sze Leung
National University of Singapore
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First-year writing classes play a very important role in the development of undergraduate students’ basic academic writing and research skills. In some institutions, students who take this foundational writing class major in different subjects, e.g., literature, architecture, biological sciences. To cater for the needs of an interdisciplinary student body, some writing programmes hire instructors from different disciplines. Therein lies the challenge. Scholars in different disciplines write their argument and teach argumentative writing differently. How should an interdisciplinary writing programme develop its classes, so that there can be sufficient commonalities between colleagues’ pedagogical practices?
In this paper, I am going to explain the challenges that our writing programme encountered and how we dealt with them. Our programme was originally set up by the Harvard Writing Program director in 2000. Over the years, we learned that while our humanities colleagues were very comfortable with the Harvard model, our social sciences colleagues found it inadequate and constraining. As a team, we decided to change our pedagogical approach, so that colleagues from different disciplines could have some freedom in designing their syllabus and assignment structure. However, we also made sure that students’ learning experiences in our different writing classes could be consistent. In my presentation, I would like to explain how we have strived to attain that consistency by working out the commonalities between our different writing classes. These commonalities include—but are not limited to—our learning outcomes, course design principles, and lexicon.
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Leung Wing Sze is a senior lecturer at the NUS College, the honours college of the National University of Singapore. She obtained her Ph.D. degree from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Before moving to Singapore, she taught for three years as a post-doctoral fellow at Fordham University. Her research focuses on Enlightenment and Romantic literature, aesthetic theories and moral philosophy. She is also interested in the history of colonialism. Her publications have appeared in the Journal of Aesthetic Education, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Romanticism, and Educational Theory.
Ginger Cake and Lemon Icing: Intergenerational Familial Autoethnography
- Indyana Horobin
Griffith University
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This paper will reflect on my current HDR project Ginger Cake and Lemon Icing a creative non-fiction biography which utilises interviews completed with my grandparents about the lives, war stories, and stories passed onto them from older family members specifically in relation to military conflict. The piece weaves through the spoken trauma of the Second World War, conscription in the Vietnam War, and the position of growing up exposed to wars in various forms of media. It comments on the still-current Russo-Ukrainian War, and other wars present in our post-modern age. Ginger Cake and Lemon Icing is framed within an autobiographic lens thereby allowing commentary on the nature of oral history between intergenerational family members. This work examines familial war histories and other personal life events through an autoethnographic engagement with family interviews. The nature of the work also allows the very notion of orality and subjectivity to be investigated.
This paper, Ginger Cake and Lemon Icing: Intergenerational Familial Autoethnography, will examine the ways in which the PhD work has been crafted. The paper will draw on the analysis of notable authors working within the familial war non-fiction arena, such as Eddie Jaku, Louise DeSalvo, and Jung Chang. A particular focus will be placed upon the form of shared spoken word, the auditory storytelling, and how these oral gestures are translated to the page.
Indyana Horobin is a PhD candidate currently studying at Griffith, with major focusses in modern history and creative writing. He has had multiple publications within Griffith’s Talent Implied works and a publication in Drunken Boat’s 2020 anthology Meridian. He also has a publications in SWAMP Writing Issue 29 and Family History ACT's The Ancestral Searcher. His current PhD project focusses on familial oral histories told in memoir.