Abstract: Abstract Bioindication is a process whereby organisms signal environmental events such as air pollution, and that occurs across multiple organisms as they are affected by, sense and even transform their environments. Lichens are particularly sensitive bioindicator organisms that sense and accumulate environmental pollution. Also used to detect air pollution levels, lichens can be used to monitor environments in ways that are more indicative or qualitative in comparison to technical instruments. Bioindication could then be considered to be expressive not just of other ways of doing environmental sensing, but also as productive of other engagements with environmental politics that attend to the lived effects of pollution as experienced by nonhuman organisms. In this register of reworking environmental conflict and environmental sensing through pollution, I ask how lichens, as fungal-vegetal vectors for sensing environments, might go beyond representational modes of politics to generate more ecological and speculative encounters with environmental politics and worlds in the making. Using a speculative bioindicator garden as one method for encountering environments from a lichen point of view, I develop propositional ecological relations that might, through sensing environments in other registers, also realise more expansive environmental political engagements with conflicts such as pollution.

Abstract: This article reads Amilcar Cabral’s much under-studied early soil science as a body of work not dissociable from his project of liberation struggle against Portuguese colonialism in Guinea-Bissau a...

Abstract: In this article, I consider Brexit as the expression of a more general ideology – Brexitism – which I explore through commentary upon a series of quotations drawn from speeches, newspapers, propaga...

Abstract: Street cultures of make-do and reuse in contemporary India, colloquially known as jugaad, is a set of material practices that have had a long and established history in the country. This article ju...

Abstract: Brexit re-asserts England’s dominance over ‘Britain’, the ‘United Kingdom’, and the eccentric political accretion ridiculed by Tom Nairn as ‘Ukania’. ‘Brexitania’ is a volatile crucible for...

Abstract: This article consists of an introductory text and visual essay based on The Drift, a fifty-one-minute film produced by Maeve Brennan in 2017. The Drift traces the shifting economies of objects in c...

Abstract: A key criterion in the recognition of practice as research is the inclusion of some form of critical self-reflection as a component of the creative project. This requirement that some form of complementary/supplementary discourse is necessary to establish the research status of creative practice is currently the subject of scrutiny and contestation across a number of disciplines. Noting how much work has been done in this area within the doctoral degree in Creative Writing in Australia, this paper explores some of the problematic areas in the formal recognition of practice as research within the UK’s research structures and processes. It argues that the scholarly rubric expected of the reflective component is not always the most appropriate medium through which creative work may be recognised as research. It considers tensions implicit in the dual role of supplementary discourses: that of documenting practice for institutional purposes and that of articulating and generating new knowledge about practice. The disciplinary placing of Creative Writing in the UK context also complicates its relation to other forms of practice as research. This paper argues that the recognition of a wider range of modes and media for supplementary discourses would allow the generation of new and different knowledge about creative practice, and make that knowledge differently available to researchers.

Abstract: Papers are full with debates and opinions on Brexit; yet despite this seemingly endless commentary nothing seems to make any sense. The debates associated with Brexit seems to imply that we can ‘co...

Abstract: In game studies, ‘agency’ is typically defined in terms of the ‘choices’ or ‘freedom’ granted to the player, which prioritises the influence of ludology on player engagement while discounting the impact of narratology (Tanenbaum & Tanenbaum 2010: 11). Alternative approaches to agency in games are under-theorised but equally important. This paper explores how player agency extends beyond in-game choices to their individual understanding and interpretation of a text, and how this form of player agency is equally evident in creative writing texts and other narrative mediums. Furthermore, this paper considers the understandings of ‘character agency’ that have been established in traditional creative writing and considers how this form of agency can influence our understanding of narrative in games. Character agency – and the autonomy of characters that it implies – engages an audience in the motivations of characters they (seemingly) do not control, and practitioners should consider how player agency intersects with the agency of non-player-characters (NPCs) if we are to understand the multi-faceted relationships audiences have with game narratives. This paper explores the ways game studies can engage with a broader consideration of agency, and how narrative is improved by the intersection of these approaches.;

Abstract: A university professor with a reputation for creative practice research finds himself at a crossroads when, en route to an international conference, he meets a younger and somewhat modest dementia researcher whose work is clearly having an impact on people’s lives. A keynote at a creative writing conference in Hawaii, the professor is impelled to reflect on his own research practice and piece together fragments of his work history to reassure himself that what he does is not only valid as research, but also that it has rigour. With flashbacks to a variety of painful and often comic encounters with colleagues trying to articulate their practice as research, he is able to overcome his midflight, mid-career crisis and come to a renewed and satisfactory understanding of what good creative practice research is, and how that can be articulated clearly and confidently to others. Originally performed at the University of Southern Queensland’s inaugural ‘Scriptwriting as Research’ symposium in 2016, _A Vacuous Screenplay in Search of Rigour_ thus interrogates not only the very mode of creative practice research, but also the broader (and varied) institutional research cultures within which it operates.

Abstract: Repairs, like many of the people who carry them out, often constitute an invisible background that ensures the smooth functioning of everyday life-worlds. This extended introduction instead places ...

Abstract: With heightened funding pressures on Australian universities, academics are being placed under more pressure to increase class sizes. Creative writing workshops, where students provide feedback on each other's creative work, can be rigorous and demanding sites for teachers in ways that differ from 'traditional' classroom settings. This article surveys critical research on class sizes and the workshop model, as well as third-year University of Wollongong creative writing student perspectives, arguing that the in-person workshop model, while imperfect, remains vital to the discipline of creative writing. When successful, it can teach students the technical elements of craft as well as the skills to build workshop communities, consider process and develop a sense of who their audiences are. However, increasing class sizes make it difficult, if not impossible, to fulfil these potentials, and put the workshop at risk. If creative writing academics don't fight for manageable workshop student numbers, our very discipline will be at risk with the rise of the information economy, as outlined by Paul Mason (2015).

Abstract: ‘Brexit’ is a shocking new political-cultural-psychological archetype, so rich in metaphorical potential that it is difficult to know how to ‘hunt’ its deeper meaning. Therefore, it seems fitting t...

Abstract: In the context of academic financialisation where writing is ‘repurposed’ as an outcome designed to maximise financial profit, and to resist the pressure to be ‘careless’ (Lynch 2010) ‘ideal functionaries’ (Pereira 2012), we – a group of five women academics – come together to share stories of our accrued wisdom about living in the afternoon of our lives. We also share our creative writing and theorising about collaborative writing processes in papers, chapters, and conference presentations. As we do so, we encounter a conflict between our practice of inter-personal collaboration and the traditions and pressures of academic authorship where we are expected to publish in a vertical hierarchy of (first author, nameless et al.s, date). We therefore reflect on the paradoxes and tensions involved in collaborative writing within the academy. In particular, we explore how co-operative practice congruent with the philosophical framework of new materialism sits jaggedly against an academic culture of individualism, surveillance, audit, and the pressure for academics to (be seen to) publish. We offer no conclusion or easy resolution, but like Socratic ‘gadflies’ we seek to trouble the structural impediments to collaborative writing in the academy.

Abstract: Trump’s campaign slogan forces us to ask a simple question: when was America great? Surely, what he has in mind here is the America of the post-war Fordist and Keynesian social welfare models, whic...

Abstract: The prescription opioid crisis in the United States is among the worst human-caused public health disasters in modern history, with over 500,000 dead and by some estimates almost 5% of the American...

Abstract: Postfascism is very much a cultural phenomenon. And the conflicts of today occur less as class struggle than as cultural battles. Why is that? I propose to use Fredric Jameson’s classic text on pos...

Abstract: Since the late 1990s, Maria Thereza Alves has been using botanical research as an integral component of her art practice, blending the methods of the natural sciences, documentary art, historical r...

Abstract: This article addresses questions of memory, matter, temporality and narrative as they emerge in stable plant variation throughout processes of cultivation and breeding. I have come to investigate t...

Abstract: This essay moves between the performative, the discursive and the ethnographic to compose an argument about how essaying as method, and then collective essaying as method, might contribute to new approaches to world-making. It begins with an essay-within-an-essay that takes as its object of pressure the contemporary context of biophysical crisis that has been called the Anthropocene, which soon becomes entangled with another pair of objects: the image on the front of a vintage jigsaw set and the essayist's affective response to that image. Thereafter it brings in Latour's concept of the 'risky account' to argue for essaying as a reflexively constructed mode of making accounts of the world. The experimental nature of essaying is extrapolated into a collective context, with a report on a transcultural creative writing workshop conducted as part of a residency program in the Philippines. The essay proposes and teases out the concept of 'collective essaying'. It circles back to look at world making with Haraway's invocation of sympoesis as a method for 'worlding-with, in company' (Haraway 2015), and asks how collective essaying might be considered in this light.

Abstract: This article considers how we put together stories about the (violent) past, emphasising how stories emerge through our selective attentions that are themselves necessarily dependent on the modes by which the past is sustained, whether those be traces or material supports that sign(post) the past, or through the care and words of human subjects. Taking as its focus the author’s experience of chasing stories from the Chacabuco ex-detention centre in the Atacama desert, Chile, the article argues that one’s receptivity to stories of ‘what happened’ requires both passivity to receive and creativity, since nothing – not art, not memorials, not even human subjects - truly ‘speaks for itself’. As researchers, we facilitate the way stories – often as in this case, shocking, horrific stories, but also humorous, wonderful stories of human kindnesses and sociality – are passed on. Like a game of cat’s cradle, we must receive that entangled crystalline past carefully, for we will turn and entwine it such that new relations and connections appear, and others may be lost from sight. Such a process reminds us of an inherent responsibility; the art of allowing related stories to acknowledge the multiple subjects and struggles for which they are told while affirming the fragility of each unique existent.

Abstract: Human culture needs to reinvent itself in order to evolve, to adapt and survive in new environments. From an ethical point of view, there is reappropriation because there has been disposses...

Abstract: Abstract South Africa in 2018 finds itself at yet another crossroads with a changing of the presidential guard set against a backdrop of protests, state capture and a growing disenchantment afforded by the euphoria and promise of 1994, the year of the first democratic elections. This article considers the contemporary South African moment through the lens of the photographic archive of the racially oppressed who were subject to forced removals in Cape Town. It poses questions about the aftermath of racial oppression, representation and the nexus of history, the human and freedom.

Abstract: In the former Yugoslavia, Students’ Cultural Centres played host to the conceptual and performance art scenes that came to be known as the ‘New Art Practice’, fostered under the political programme of socialist self-management. This article traces a specific episode in the history of Novi Sad’s Youth Tribune, when the city’s New Art Practices crossed into political engagement and provocation. I follow the increased bureaucratisation of the Youth Tribune – the resistance to it, and the coercive consequences – along with the ultimate dilution of radical practices in Novi Sad, that forced its key players to appeal to an ‘Invisible Art’. Though Yugoslavia is frequently characterised as a country which encouraged public debate, the unique and important case of Novi Sad reveals the consequences of a direct confrontation with the city’s cultural apparatus, at a moment marked by oppressive change and political turmoil.

Abstract: This article brings together Sophocles’s tragedy, Oedipus at Colonus, with an account of the 2013 Lampedusa disaster in which over 300 migrants perished off the coast of Italy. This juxtaposition c...

Abstract: Through an analysis of Zina Saro-Wiwa’s food interventions, this essay re-visits the idea of entanglement (Hofmeyr 2004; Kiewiet 1957; Mbembe 2001; Wenzel 2009; Nuttall 2009). This concept, I argue...