Associate Professor Kim Snepvangers

In Part 1 of ‘Encountering Berlant’, we encounter the promise and provocation of Lauren Berlant's work. In 1000-word contributions, geographers and others stay with what Berlant's thought offers contemporary human geography. They amplify an encounter with their work, demonstrating how a concept, idea, or style disrupts something, opens up a new possibility, or simply invites thinking otherwise. The encounters range across the incredible body of work Berlant left us with, from the ‘national sentimentality’ trilogy through to recent work on negativity. Varying in form and tone, the encounters exemplify and enact the inexhaustible plenitude of Berlant's thought: fantasy, the case, love, impasse, feel tanks, slow death, ellipses, gesture, attrition, intimate public, ambivalence, style. Part 2 of ‘Encountering Berlant’ focuses on Berlant's most influential concept: ‘cruel optimism’. Across these heterogeneous encounters, Berlant's enduring concern with the tensions and possibilities of relationality and how to enact better forms of common life shine through. These enduring concerns and Berlant's commitment to the incoherence and overdetermination of phenomena are summarised in the Introduction, which also explores how Berlant's work has been engaged with in geography. The result is a repository of what an encounter with Berlant's thought makes possible.

Focusing on a section of the Teaching International Students (TIS) project this article captures student and mentor perspectives within a Project-Based Professional Experience (PBPE) in the context of a large research-intensive university in Sydney, Australia. Animations co-produced with students were part of a Work Integrated Learning (WIL) compulsory upper-level course, leading to a ‘Community Building Framework’. The research goal shifted the educational purpose from didactic physical placements to collaborative dynamics where students, including international students, staff, and industry perspectives were ‘valued’. Prioritizing intercultural learning ‘challenged’ contested attitudes and ‘built’ communities of practice in a workforce focused ecology. Findings emerged from reflective interchanges whilst working iteratively and collaboratively with students, to inform the PBPE online framework. 

Ever wondered who you really are? Where’s your mob from? Where are your roots? Where do you belong? Hear, see, and feel embodied stories of ancestry and place. Black and white Australian women artivists together provoke resonant and entangled understandings of belonging and displacement through storied artworks, performances and installations. This video is a short of overview of the 75 minute performance.

My artwork investigates key questions of storying as research using the 1848 marriage of my paternal Great Great Grandfather (GGF) as a catalyst. A key question that arises in the Australian settler colonial context, is ‘Where do you belong?’ particularly if your paternal ancestry is shrouded in darkness, with little information available about the history of intermarriage and Aboriginal ancestry. Using arts-based A/r/tographic research my artworks comprise lightbox’s, aprons, documents, embroidery and a performance. Alongside the visual components of the artwork, I sit, sew and stitch, staging a “visual encounter” to embody my ancestry in contemporary form. The artworks bring previous entanglements and being into current receptivity. Re-examining lived conditions and moralities of early colonial Australia, when my ancestor as an Aboriginal black stood alongside his white marriage partner brings new assemblages and wordly sensibilities into view. The marriage was one of only a handful of reported intermarriages in the early days of colonial Australia. Text about my GGF from an 1848 Sydney Morning Herald (*SMH) article reports on the “Marriage of an Aboriginal”. Hence the name of my artwork highlights the disembodied way that my ancestor was spoken about. The psychological metaphor relating to the exhibition theme of Dark Days/White Nights engages text and interrogates colour binaries to powerfully highlight how cultural divides and quasi acceptance of diversity as ‘novelty’ and ‘industriousness’ can be reconsidered and disclosed as micronarratives of colonisation with resonance today.

Student as Partners (SaP) projects that utilise animation as digital learning tools are presented as propositional evocations for working with International students in an Australian tertiary art and design context. Rather than purporting a singular progress narrative in the formation of international students’ stories, identities and perspectives, the role of making practices for promoting communication, collaboration and social interaction is discussed. A ‘more-than-representational’ approach has been devised to show how visually layered images provide a powerful ‘voice’ for working with international students. The concept of ‘more than representation’ noted by contemporary authors (Lorimer, 2005; Thrift & Dewsbury, 2000) and Connell’s (2017) sense of the significance of alternative spaces informs the design of visual artefacts within a new university wide initiative: Teaching International Students (TIS). TIS is an educator-initiated space focused on developing teachers’ case base knowledge, providing a non-threatening series of events, activities and online visual artefacts for discussing contested cultural issues. A Distributed Facilitator Framework (DFF) for working with visual artefacts, people and relationships using iceberg models of surface and deep culture (Ting-Toomey & Chung, 2005; Weaver, 1993) and ‘ecologies of practice’ theories of Kemmis and Heikkinen (2011) will be outlined. The aim is to provide a non-hierarchical, authentic, inclusive and generative space for academics and students to work together to holistically improve the International student educational experience and impact identity formation. This system provides bite size, online and on demand accessibility that promotes ongoing opportunities for all year-round interaction. Connections to the “Australian International Education Strategy 2025” (2016), as well as how this model utilises visually connected data gathering practices to build scaffolded architecture, will be explained. Future research will focus on creating digital artefacts that showcase best practice case studies that are authored and designed by educators’ worldwide, evolving a living ecology of practice.

This paper will discuss a Distributed Facilitator Framework (DFF) that was created to visualise the reflective practice processes that were utilised to develop educators Teaching International Students (TIS) partnerships. The DFF is non-hierarchical, non-judgmental, authentic, generative, interconnected and inclusive Career Development Learning (CDL) Model. It aims to promote transformative practice with the outcome of producing authentic artefacts to inform TIS. The processes used in educator interactions and knowledge exchange are visualised in the DFF to capture the nuances of moving from the generalised to the specific TIS transformative CDL model. An Action Practitioner Research (APR) methodology over a one-year cycle was utilised to capture design educators’ CDL, which is visually mapped in a flexible, adaptive, practice-based scaffold architecture. How the DFF was created to visually capture an interconnected series of processes and events utilising the Kemmis and Heikkinen, (2011) characteristics of ‘sayings, doings and relatings’ to develop a creative ‘Ecology of Practice’ will be explained. The DFF is underpinned by the theoretical premise of Kruger’s (2013) Iceberg Model for surface and deep culture; the Australian Government International Education Strategy 2025 and Leask and Carroll (2013) ‘Good Practice Principles: Teaching across Cultures’. The DFF provides a reflective practice visualisation that is in the service of providing transformative professional learning, which is transferable to other educational settings and disciplinary contexts. The ultimate objectives of the Ecologies of Practice DFF include engaging in meaningful international educational development and empowering educators to self-direct their own CDL after the TIS scaffold architecture is removed.

The Australian art and design curriculum is informed by the country’s status as an island continent as well as a specific historical and contemporary cultural milieu. Australia is the smallest continent and the only one surrounded by water, and is administered by one national federal government. Australia is the sixth largest country in area after Russia,Canada, China, the USA, and Brazil. However, one of the key historical and contemporary challenges for Australia in educational provision relates to the size and distribution of its population of 24million people, which is small relative to the landmass.This brings a suite of social and political ecologies into the purview of curriculum organization and authority. In terms of population dispersal and differentiation, diverse populations are largely concentrated in cities mostly along the coastal fringe, in addition to smaller rural communities and large unpopulated remote regions. High levels of postwar immigration, alongside religious and cultural diversity, ensure a wide range of approaches to curriculum design, implementation, resourcing, and impact.

Using images as a ‘catalyst for conversation’ this poster responses to the challenges of global education through new conceptions of creativity as collaboration and partnerships (Snepvangers et al, 2018). This poster showcases a creative ecologies approach utilised in the Teaching International Students (TIS) project as an exemplar to show how synergistic community-based approaches develop independent case-based knowledge in academic and student professional learning. Rather than focusing on traditional models of individual student learning and creativity as genius, which can end up reinforcing highly suspect, elite forms of deficit educational dependence, this poster focuses on the TIS project. Here, digital media students work with academics as ‘Students as Partners’ in their Career Development Learning (CDL). How three students created storyboards and animations, using the primacy of images as a narrative of collaboration informs the poster design. These students’ will reflect on how this collaborative practice model developed into an ‘Ecology of Practice’ (Kemmis et al, 2014) including diverse forms of co-mentoring and co-dependence in projects of partnership. The TIS project prioritises interdependent student and practitioner case-based action research methodology. In this creative ecosystem students and educators work iteratively to develop reciprocal relationships, making shifts in practice visible whilst simultaneously documenting career development (Rourke & Snepvangers, 2017). Shifts in practice are evidence by students moving from artistic outcomes to producing ‘visual learning artefacts’ that act as catalysts for conversation in the teaching and learning environment. Underpinned by Kruger’s iceberg theoretical model (1996; 2013) the student’s narrative animations explore themes ‘below the waterline’ to take a more holistic view in creatively exploring teaching with International students.