Alison L. Black

Splitting the World Open: Writing Stories of Mourning and Loss

This article follows two women-academics engaging in a methodology of collaborative writing that holds each other in folds of friendship. By writing together that which has been hidden, new openings are being created where experiences of trauma, mourning, and forgetting are seeking out ways to re-member and heal. In this process, the authors are discovering ways of becoming-differently in their positioning as women-academics.

I am Keith Wright’s Daughter: Writing Things I ‘Almost’ Cannot Say

ABSTRACT I am Keith Wright’s daughter: Writing Things I ‘Almost’ Cannot Say is a personal and provocative perspective. Using creative writing and storying I piece/peace together my relationship to/with my father. Always a strong and unsettling presence in my life, his unexpected death forces me toward reconciliation of tensions, identities, wounds and memories. Writing/Wrighting/Righting my stories into being, my particular points of view at points in time, and examining this conflicted yet foundational relationship, helps me remember what I have learned and helps me reclaim what matters to me. Writing the things I ‘almost’ cannot say—and have not been able to say for most of my life—is a storying in and through the dark, a storying in and through the wounding, and a storying in and to healing.

Reducing the Drag

We are three women working across two Australian universities. We know the deadening, withering nature and containment of the neoliberal university. Yet, we find ourselves inspired by the wisdom of slow scholarship and recognize that with our deliberate activity with each other we have been emulating something of the cooperative reciprocity inherent in the energy-boosting-V-formations adopted by groups of flying birds.

Positioning ourselves in our academic lives: exploring personal/professional identities, voice and agency

ABSTRACT This paper provides a rationale for understanding personal/professional identities to support personal/professional learning and positioning in academe and higher education. It explains the importance of women writing and speaking out the stories of their lives (everyday and academic), having their voices heard and responded to, and using embodied knowledge to question and challenge workplace systems and structures of power and sexism and invisibility. Importantly, this paper opens the space for women’s visibility, voice and agency in academic and educational life.

Understanding and Influencing Research with Children

Black and Busch open a thoughtful dialogue about research with children, research relationships and the status and location of children in research. Particular attention is given to ethical motivations and considerations and children’s visibility in research and broader society. The chapter explores how researcher values and ethical commitments position children, determine their visibility and influence wider cultures of listening to children. The challenges and fruitfulness of research with children are discussed alongside researcher experiences and highlight the importance of ongoing conversations within research communities.

Digesting a life: embodying transformation through creative writing

ABSTRACT What does essential transformation entail? How does the caterpillar become a butterfly? What supports transformation inside the cocoon? This paper considers these questions alongside embodied struggles, experiences and insights of living a life – including situations of darkness and waiting amongst elements of depression, grief, and loss. In this piece, contemplative and creative storying generates sparks in the soupy darkness, offering catalysts for dialogue, and resources for supporting de/composition and re/emergence.

We cannot do this work without being who we are: Researching and experiencing academic selves

Loch and Black use their chapter to potently question what counts as research and the work of researchers. Powerful connections between professional and personal experiences and knowledge are produced, assembled and made public using aesthetic methodologies of story, poetry and image. Throughout their chapter, Loch and Black explore research through relationship and assert that it is they, the researchers, who decide what research is or might be. Their compelling chapter invites other researchers to consider who they are in their research and how their stories can matter.