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. 

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.

Sometimes data invites more of us. To be physically held and touched, through hands creating and crafting with matter, cultivating a closer connection to the fibres, threads, textures and sinews of data. Through touching and shaping the materiality of data, other beings, places and times are aroused. Here, we share the story of data that invited more of us and how this has spurred the creation of an exhibition titled Stories of Belonging with Indigenous and non-Indigenous artist/scholars for an arts festival in Queensland, Australia. This work by the collective, SISTAS Holding Space, deeply interrogates our ontological positionality as researchers, in particular what this means in the Australian context – a colonised nation populated through waves of migration. The scars of colonization, migration and shame are held and heard through Black and White Australian women creating and interrogating belonging alongside each other – listening and holding space for each other. We air the pains of ontological destruction, silencing, disconnection and emptiness. Through experimental making research methodology, we argue the primacy of storying and making, and for provoking resonant and entangled understandings of belonging and displacement.

As creative economies and industries continue to impact emerging markets and cultural conversations, creative education seems no more central to these conversations than it was a decade ago. Two recent Creativity Summits marked a collaborative milestone in the global conversation about creative teaching, learning, ecologies, and partnerships, signaling a turn from nation-based approaches to more globally-networked ones. This essay and the summits offer not only an international and interdisciplinary survey of the “state of play” in creativity education, but also collaboratively-generated strategies for strengthening creative research in tertiary education contexts, teacher education, cross-sectoral partnerships, and policy directions internationally.

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to re-orientate assessment tasks in tertiary art and design, arguing the important role ecologies of practice and work-place learning play in professional identity formation. Linking coursework design with dilemmas and self-regulatory tasks which move beyond compliance and static content in isolated courses.
Design/methodology/approach
– Two purposive case studies were selected from one academic year across two programs. Student feedback data demonstrated how the first blog journal case provided a metacognitive structure for postgraduates’ while working in the arts industry. The second eportfolio case illustrates ecologies supporting undergraduate “practice architectures” during pre-service practicum.
Findings
– Ecologies of practice reveal complexity and inform professional judgment by allowing unsettling issues and concerns to be addressed. Changing commitment through future orientation counteracts institutional requirements for self-portrayal by fostering greater participation by learners.
Research limitations/implications
– Survey data limitations are addressed through peer-review, emergent trends and longevity of the learning design. Guidelines on how to provide critical and constructive feedback within collaborative cohorts, prioritizes intrinsic motivation, indeterminacy and authentic principles in career related pathways.
Practical implications
– Assessment, course and program re-design engaged with ecologies of practice produced student qualitative commentary giving “voice” and evidence of teleo (purpose) and affective (commitment) in ways not typically known in academic programs.
Social implications
– Students self-regulate learning and utilize technology within a “safe” learning space. Social connectedness through articulated encounters powerfully impacts personal awareness, confidence and resilience.
Originality/value
– This research has provided critical guidelines for how to scaffold feedback in professional learning. The case studies show how reflective environments engaged with unresolved critical incidents build professional knowledge and identity across time.

This research traverses the "cultural interface" (Nakata, 2004) from the perspective of a non-Indigenous art educator in order to propose a re-thinking of Indigenous Perspectives in the context of tertiary art and design education. It focuses on extending the capacity of educators to engage with contested areas of knowledge and ultimately to work with Indigenous and non-Indigenous students in creative fields of practice. The research has been framed around textual and visual metaphors, in particular the metaphor of "Bending the Twig", an educational practice which emerged in interviews conducted in 2013 and 2014 with Indigenous Elder, Artist and Educator, Vic Chapman. As the first Indigenous Principal in a Primary School in New South Wales Chapman's educational practices, particularly his 'bending of the twig' are particularly interesting (Savage, 2015). Three encounters selected from educational moments in Vic Chapman's professional life show how he creatively and flexibly negotiates contested space and enculturates Indigenous Knowledge and perspectives with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

Ongoing tension between Indigenous self-determination and Western educational frames of reference remains a potent force within educational debate. This essay voices some of the dilemmas of practice emergent in two Australian educators’ everyday work through exploration of some new spaces of possibility within this complex domain. Through observation and surveys with Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian tertiary educators experiences, beliefs and practices about teaching Indigenous perspectives are presented. This paper invites a re-thinking of tertiary educational space, as a possible site of multiplicity that is not preoccupied with the differences of meaning between Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds of knowledge and experience. Rather it is a space that recognises dilemmas and convergences of knowledge in relation to content and pedagogy.