Regular readers of this blog know that I am doing a bike-focused PhD in Education. In a nutshell, my project explores how bicycles feature in West African girls’ access to secondary education.
It is a great project and I love working on it.
I’ve been developing a research methodology called velo-onto-epistemology (VOE) as part of this project. I know it is a mouthful, but the article explains what it means.
I am delighted to share my latest publication which introduces my novel bicycle-focused research approach for the first time.
I wrote this paper with my incredible supervisor Dr Sherilyn Lennon. In this paper, I take Sherilyn for a bike ride as a way to put to work my VOE research methodology and destablise the traditional power hierarchy of the PhD candidate-supervisor relationship.
To show how velo-relationality works differently, we juxtapose – or ‘recycle’ our experiences next to each other (see below) in what we call ‘tandem writing’.
This article is an engaging read.
It is theoretical enough to be rigorous and interesting, but relatable for the everyday reader-rider.
Below is the abstract and a copy of the paper.
Feel free to download a copy (third icon on right below).
Check it out!
Ride on!
Enjoy!
ABSTRACT
Traditionally, the candidate-supervisor-relationship is predicated on a supervisor as teacher/expert – candidate as learner/novice model. But what becomes possible when the materialities of this power dynamic are destabilised and reimagined? This article draws from emerging feminist ontologies to introduce the concept of velo- onto-epistemology [VOE] as a means of re-cycling candidate- supervisor-relationships. VOE acknowledges the agency of the bicycle in moving and being moved. This novel approach is used to explore how stor(i)ed encounters and in-the-moment bodily responses enact current-future becomings. Through re-cycling, the candidate-supervisor-relationship is dis-articulated and re- articulated in ways that enable alternative and more equitable understandings of the world to emerge.
Image: Art of Quantum 2021. Eddleman Centre for Quantum Innovation, UC Santa Barbara
Undertaking a PhD is a constant mix of wild emotions, academic tensions and ever-present confusion.
Here is an example from today in 100 words.
Revisiting Chapters
It’s a strange feeling….being back at the research desk. Revisiting methodology. Trying to produce my first ‘real’ full chapter. I need to send this to my supervisors in 10 days. Throat is tight and house needs cleaning. I force myself to stay with it. Where did I leave off a month ago? Mmmm…there it is…now that bit is okay ….interesting… actually, I wrote more than I thought! There are some nice sections. Time to kill my darlings. Yellow highlights for gaps yet to fill. I add content from two years ago – surprised at its eloquence. It’s kinda coming together. Potential.
In the previous blog post, I detailed a project I was involved in earlier this year called Reading with Reciprocity run by The Ediths. In that post, I explained the contributor’s brief, what we did and how we did it. In this post, I am excited to share the final output that contributors cocreated. It’s such a wonderful way to wrap up the year. What a project! So exciting! Great ideas on how to research more generously. See more below. NG.
Image: The Ediths
The Ediths are a feminist interdisciplinary research collective based at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. The collective uses socially engaged creative methodologies to conduct ecologically responsive research.
I am delighted to announce the Edith’s Reading with Reciprocity Project has just been released. Congratulations to the organisers, Mindy Blaise, Jane Merewether and Jo Pollitt and to all book responders.
I was very honoured to be invited to contribute to this project and to have my book response included.
Reading with Reciprocityis an initiative by The Edith’s inspired by the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research’s (CLEAR) blog post,#Collabrary: a methodological experiment for reading with reciprocity (2021), which draws on the scholarship of Joe Dumit (2012), Zoe Todd (2016), and Eve Tuck (2017) to learn reading practices that are “humble, generous, and accountable” (CLEAR, 2021). We were interested and impressed with the ways in which this methodological experiment was creating reading practices grounded in a feminist ethic committed to making room for diverse knowledges.
This initiative began by first curating a list of books based on the research interests of the membership and our commitment to privileging different voices. After sending out an expression of interest, we were surprised and humbled at the overwhelming response to the invitation and selected 11 members to take part in Reading with Reciprocity. Similar to the care taken in deciding which books to read and review, we also selected members with consideration and intention, including representation of early career, mid-career, and experienced researchers. Because we see the roundtables as part of postgraduate supervision and an expanded form of mentoring, some of the students we supervise were also selected to participate.
Those who took part in Reading with Reciprocity were asked to read the (CLEAR) blog post, #Collabrary: a methodological experiment for reading with reciprocity (2021) and then submit a review that was based on reading a selected text with reciprocity. We hoped that participants would reciprocate the gifts that the authors had given in their writing.
Reimagining how we might read and review these books with care, reciprocity, and generosity ended up not being as easy as we first thought. It is clear that there is such a dominant way of reviewing work that makes being generous to authors so out of the ordinary and unsupported in the academy. We have to do better! Reading with Reciprocity is one way that we can do this work, individually and as a community of scholars who are interested in doing academia more kindly and generously.
The Ediths
I enjoy being part of The Edith’s collective because the group’s ethics, topics and discussions align so well with my research and personal interests. When we meet, we focus on exploring the material and situated effects of environmental change on feminist bodies and practices and the relations between social justice, ecological sustainability, and Indigenous self-determination. This means a strong commitment to the decolonization of Western knowledge production.
Being part of this research collective creates opportunities for dialogue and collaboration among feminists from diverse backgrounds and to contribute to the development of more just and sustainable societies – such as this Reading with Reciprocity project!
It is so helpful for researcher-writers to have like-minded people to process, feed and be inspired by – I hope you have your own group that does this for you!
Earlier this year, I was invited by The Ediths to participate in a new project they are undertaking called: A feminist initiative towards reading with reciprocity.
The Ediths wanted to explore what it might look, feel and be like to work with #Collabary practices as a way towards becoming generous and accountable scholars.
For me, it was a toss-up between A/P Fikile Nuxmalo and Dr. Laura Rodríguez Castro. Both these scholars work have direct overlaps with my research interests.
In the end, given the direct application of Post-humanist/New Materialist approaches and because of the place-base(ness) of site-specific work (aligns with emplaced bike trails and accounting for other-than-academic/outside environments) with a deliberate engagement with First Nations, Black and People of Colour perspectives (which I have an ongoing interest in), I chose:
Once chosen, you get sent a copy of your selected book – and of course, that copy is yours to keep as a token of appreciation for participating in the project. Woohoo!
3) Using the Collaborary and Dumit resources/links above as inspiration, we are encouraged to experiment with one or more of these reading practices (close reading, constructive reading, positive, generous, slightly genealogical, methodological in focus, and ethical).
4) Then write a 600–800-word review that is informed by one or more of these above reading practices to show how a reciprocal, generous, and accountable review might be done.
We had a generous 6-weeks turn-around to get out work back to the organiser-editors who will then feedback our piece before release.
Once finalised, all project contributions will be publicly available on The Ediths website.
I’ll let you know how it goes!
On March 8th, A/P Deondre Smiles and A/P Max Liboiron did a #Collabrary Zoom session. Here, they discuss: Feminisms from Unthought Locations: Indigenous worldviews, marginalized feminisms, and revisioning and Anticolonial social science by Gaile Cannella & Kathryn Manuelito from the Handbook of Critical Indigenous Methodologies
What a perfect time to explore haunting and ghosts!
For our final NM SIG for this year, we are focusing on ghostly matters, and in particular Barad’s (2010) Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations.
Barad explores the disjointedness of time through electron behaviours, the nature of entanglement and the ethics of the Bohr/ Heisenberg Copenhagen meeting during WW2.
An ethics of entanglement entails possibilities and obligations for reworking the material effects of the past and the future. As the quantum eraser experiment shows, it is not the case that the past (a past that is given) can be changed (contrary to what some physicists have said), or that the effects of past actions can be fully mended, but rather that the ‘past’ is always already open to change. (Barad, 2010, p.266)
We are coupling this with the paper of Lisa Blackman (2019) exploring the organizational dynamics of knowledge and scientific truths in a digital age and the hauntological implications inherent in such processes.
To help us work with the haunting nature of our research, bring along a ghostly image or story to contribute to the mix.
What we did in this session
Janis did a wonderful job of preparing and hosting this session.
After our introduction, we did a series of warm up activities:
We then each had time to share our Ghostly Images.
Everyone had something different to share.
Some quick notes during this discussion:
Locations with histories and personalities, wants and needs, reverberations with bottle trees that ring and chime and send out affective resonances with musical sounds to alert, soothe and repel.
Hanging in the tree – like words hanging in the air…things unspoken and ghastly or ghostly
I cannot pass on until I have completed this task
Humans being so reliant on the visual – with the unseen, the ‘dis’embodied’, the othering is more acute and ‘real’? How can that be…the less concrete it is, the more real the impact?
We scare ourselves
We spook ourselves and others
Haunted by visions and experiences (PTSD), haunted by/in ‘life’
Haunted\haunting keeps returning to a moment??
Ghost is morally changed
Have intention to scare
Giving them agency to haunt us
Alan Soko – quantum gravity nonsense findings
Salvia Kind – a taxidermist bear in a playground
The Bridge to Terabithia & euphemisms apolitical and no-biological…adults conversations about death with children – so interesting!
Geoff Bright and Gabrielle Ivison – Ghost Labs & Social Haunting socialhaunting.com
How NOT to be a mountain biker – My Ghostly Matters
For my contribution, I shared a popular MTB YouTube video which had recently been amended to blur out some content that at the time the video was published in 2013 was published in full, yet more recently has been picked up and challenged in 2021. The section in question explains MTB trail terminology by using a derogatory term for trans people as a joke.
Instead of removing the whole video, the producers chose to blur out the audio and visuals for that section only, leaving an eerie, ghostly trace of what was before. This elision and its haunted digital edited intervention speak to how/why content might/is changed and what is made un/known in the process. Such questions are very in line with Lisa Blackman’s work (see the reading).
For those interested in knowing more, my source comes from the extremely popular video called How To Be A Mountain Biker by IFHT Films. This video has more than 7,194,034 views since being released 24th October 2013.
The ghostly data section is at: (Step 18) 2.25mins – 2.34mins and looks like this:
Here is the current, redacted video in full:
Stretching and Murmuring
This session was really inspiring and thought-provoking. Each participant brought something completely different and I felt my brain being stretched and poked into new and interesting directions.
I came away from this session with much to think about.
Here are some of those murmurs from the Barad reading:
“Our debt to those who are already dead and those not yet born cannot be disentangled from who we are. What if we were to recognise that differentiating is a material act that is not about radical separation, but on the contrary, about making connections and commitments?
An ethics of entanglement entails possibilities and obligations for reworking the material effects of the past and the future.
Ethics is an integral part of the diffraction (ongoing differentiating) patterns of worlding, not a superimposing of human values onto the ontology of the world (as if ‘fact’ and ‘value’ were radically other).
Entanglements are not a name for the interconnectedness of all being as one, but rather specific material relations of the ongoing differentiating of the world. Entanglements are relations of obligation – being bound to the other – enfolded traces of othering. Othering, the constitution of an ‘Other’, entails an indebtedness to the ‘Other’, who is irreducibly and materially bound to, threaded through, the ‘self’ – a diffraction/dispersion of identity.
What if the ghosts were encountered in the flesh, as iterative materialisations, contingent and specific (agential) reconfigurings of spacetimematterings, spectral (re)workings without the presumption of erasure, the ‘past’ repeatedly reconfigured not in the name of setting things right once and for all (what possible calculation could give us that?”
I’ve been missing meeting with other like-minded writer-researchers. So August this year, I had an idea to form a ‘student club’ where we could meet to talk about writing and share skills and hold events that helped us become better writers and researchers.
Well… I pitched the idea to three friends, and we made it happen!
We called it the Research & Write Studio or RAW for short.
(Actually, we called it GAWLERS first… see more below)
I just found out that RAW has been award Griffith’s New Club of the Year!
Woohoo! I am so proud!
A big thanks to all the inaugural members for trusting in me!
And an especially heartfelt thanks to Janis, Rebecca and Jenny for all their great input and effort in forming the Executive Commitee with me.
You guys all rock!
See below for more about RAW.
Nina (R) with other Griffith Uni Club Awards Friends.
Origins
Like most other educational institutions, Griffith University life and work changed profoundly in response to the recent COVID-19 ‘educational scramble’. Soon after moving online in April 2019, EPS HDR candidate Nina Ginsberg established an online ‘Show Up & Write’ space for students she knew as a way of staying connected, focused and productive. These sessions were regularly attended and participants said how useful it was to have a collegial space to talk, share, and create academic work. In break times, we asked questions, offered support, discussed our writing, and gave suggestions for improvements in a low-stakes and impactful way.
While Griffith responded to COVID and snap lockdowns by reducing staffing, decreasing services, and suspending many student professional development and networking opportunities until further notice, our study group flourished. As word of mouth about our group passed to others, ‘new’ people joined from all over Griffith. It was clear there was an immediate need for this group and so in June 2021, the main proponents (Nina, Janis, Rebecca and Jenny) decided to formalise this opportunity and open it up for all Griffith students and candidates. We call the group Griffith ‘Research and Writers Studio’, or RAW for short.
What we do
We are an online club bound by our commonality of academic work, research, and writing. Our club aims (see at end) articulate our ethics, commitment and focus. RAW members include undergraduates, postgraduates, and professional teaching staff who are also studying at Griffith. Our members come from all Griffith locations not only in Brisbane (26) and Queensland (10), but all over Australia (6) and around the world (6). We are proud to be a truly transdisciplinary group, transcending cultures, hobbies, degrees and programs, ages, gender, ability, locations, backgrounds, and personalities. This plurality in membership adds vibrancy, interest and new skills we would not otherwise have access to at Griffith elsewhere.
Editing Heptathlon by RAW President Nina Ginsberg. November 2021.
What makes us exciting
We began with 28 inaugural members in August 2021. This increased to 48 members in 6 weeks by end of September 2021 with no advertising, further attesting to the popularity and need for this club. At a time when many other clubs have slowed activities, RAW has expanded in response to member needs, thus standing out as a unique, reliable and reassuring hub for Griffith students and candidates in progressing their university work.
What makes us so exciting as a new club at Griffith is that we are a cheap, open access and inclusive club for all. We are also lockdown proof, independent of university-dictated content and wholly needs-based and our events are run by RAW members for RAW members – meaning members gain valuable presenting and leadership experience. We are a grass roots club that continues to grow organically and is responsive to member’s needs.
One of RAW’s greatest features is that we are not defined by, or exclusive to, any particular educational discipline, cultural background, sporting or personal interest. On the contrary, RAW incorporates and celebrates disparate characteristics, harnessing these valuable differences in diversity collectively, so members collaboratively learn with other members, not learn about each other as separate from others in most other contexts. And it has been a smashing success!
Our membership includes Griffith researchers and writers who are First Nations, international students and speakers of languages other than English, mature aged and returning to study, first-in family, differently-abled and adaptive learners, part-timers, single parents and many others – including a wide range of cultural backgrounds. Being online means we are not bound by campus restrictions or scheduling, so RAW operates anywhere (across all Griffith campuses, remotely, online and for those on-campus as well) and at any time (for example, we have a 24-7 open online, drop-in ‘study’ space where local, national and international members meet). This enables multiple opportunities for social connections as people study and work from a myriad of locations.
As well as study group spaces, we offer a range of writing, editing and university skills workshops (see some examples below) which can be joined virtually in real time or accessed asynchronously via recordings. This means our events are equitable and accessible to all members. Our club allows for networking and skill sharing and provides opportunities to broaden minds and sharpen transferable capabilities. We have an active Teams site that is our communications, events and resource space where we also notify members of other (external) writing and editing events of interest so members can expand skills and contacts within and beyond the RAW cohort.
Screenshot of RAW’s Get ahead for T2 classes (Session 2): Rediscover your motivation! July 2021. This session was run by RAW Vice President, Wiradjuri woman & Griffith PhD Candidate, Ms. Jennifer Campbell
What is our future?
Our vision is to allow the club to grow and to continue to offer a range of academic skill workshops not provided elsewhere, while providing online participation and facilitation. We seek to connect people with our overarching purpose of enhancing our research and writing capabilities.
Some 2021 RAW events already held:
Show Up & Write Space – 24/7, online, drop-in study space.
Early Bird Study Sessions – every weekday 5am -7.30 am.
Inaugural Annual General Meeting.
RAW Coffee & Chat: Member Drop-in Meet-and-Greet. (1-hr)
Get ahead for T2 classes (Session 1): Leveraging course profiles. (1-hr)
Get ahead for T2 classes (Session 2): Rediscover your motivation! (1-hr)
Get ahead for T2 classes (Session 3): Start(ing) class right. (1-hr)
The Dark Academy (and how to survive it). (2-hr symposium)
Getting Feedback on Thesis Writing (HDRs). (1-hr)
Goal Setting Bootcamp. (half day intensive)
How trees help us write better sentences by RAW President Nina Ginsberg. December 2021.
Research and Writer’s Studio Aims
Aim 1. To present academic writing and research in influential ways to diverse audiences. Develop and grow fundamental and advanced academic, writing and research skills and experience through a range of online and in-person opportunities. These include exclusive focused study groups, writing, editing and specialist workshops, writing process forums, accountability writing groups, skill drill sessions, special events and writing retreats and targeted academic skill sessions. These events consolidate and extend transferable oral, written and visual communication skills underpinned by positivity, engaged expression and critical evaluation of information, argument and opinion. Applicable for all levels of study across all disciplines.
Aim 2. To build confident, competent, and collaborative identities.
An inclusive and safe space to share university, writing and researching experiences. Instead of the usual teach-to model, this club moves towards a learn-with approach. Members are X to pursue their own academic and professional goals in ways that are productive, thoughtful, engaged and self-directed. Supporting a passion for lifelong learning through achievement, capacity and mastery. Provide opportunities for leadership and active engagement. Connect members with additional editing, proofreading, mentoring and/or other academic support services if needed. Interaction between Ph.D, Masters, Honours and undergrads is encouraged. To build relationships within and beyond the physical campus by establishing a collaborative and diverse community of practice.
Aim 3. To extend, challenge and share innovative, creative, ethical, and positive writing-research-action.
Provide members with opportunities to develop their own personal and professional goals. Respecting and strengthening engagement with First Nations, cross-cultural, and individual or cultural diversity people, culture, perspectives and lifeworlds. This club adheres to an ethical code of conduct based on compassion, positive change and social and environmental responsibility and action. This club supports members to be intrepid and innovative in their writing and research endeavours to initiate, develop and implement new ideas and projects.
In this session, we are truly transcending time, space, place and bodies as we explore the NM potentialities of reimagining an inspirational, yet relatively, unknown WWII story.
We are very excited to have guest presenter Jenny Ginsberg (University of La Trobe) presenting key insights of her recent Master’s research.
Jenny is putting together a PhD submission and is keen to discuss this opportunity with the SIG to garner some initial New Materialisms ideas and suggestions as a launching off point for this exciting next step.
…and yes, as you might have noticed from the similar surname, Jenny is my Mum!
This session’s provocation was:
What new possibilities might emerge from a New Materialist ‘return’ to the inspirational flight and return of the Danish Jews 1943-1945?
The Civilizing Process: moving from sociological understandings to Posthumanist materialities.
Abstract
The genesis of this research lies in an extraordinary moment in history. It was one in which lives were saved; when courage, creativity and social cohesion combined and triumphed.
This research merges a fortuitous and rare meeting of a wartime story of escape and return. It is the story of the flight of the Danish Jews in 1943 and their return home in 1945. Nearly 8,000 Danish Jews escaped directly to Sweden while 470 were imprisoned in Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp. This project traces the extraordinary and unparalleled rescue of those imprisoned in Terezin, as well as the survival of more than 95 percent of the Jewish population of Denmark – a remarkable achievement at the time that was unmatched by any other Nazi-occupied European country.
In her Master’s, Jenny used Norbert Elias’ concept of national habitus to foreground relational, long-term state formation processes as part of a theory of The Civilizing Process (Elias, 2000). Jenny’s project uniquely put to work national habitus to argue that the events of 1943 flight and the 1945 return, must be considered as an ‘entangled’ experience. This enables a close relational understanding of the significance of this point in time with(in) the inclusive and compassionate Danish national ‘habitus’ at that time. This project looks at the multiple figurations found in Danish society and the crucial role they played in the successful escape and return of the Danish Jews.
Of particular interest for the NM SIG is the recognition of the often overlooked and under-appreciated contribution of Danish women to the wider occupation historiography, which was largely written and curated by men. Jenny invites the SIG to engage in the yet-to-be-explored materialities of this story – such as the boats used in the escape, letters, clothing, symbolisms and defiant collective practices adopted by the Danes – and myriad other material-affective-discursive forces and most notably, those co-contributing to the unified and compassionate leadership and the sustained, collective response to the urgent needs of fleeing and captive Danes.
Some session snapshots
We had an amazing time! The warmup activities got us thinking beyond and making links that we were not able to arrive at individually. Jenny’ session was expertly put together and she is a highly engaging storyteller.
The rich materiality of this era gave us much to discuss and there were some great ideas on how Jenny could move forward using a posthumanism and/or New Materialist approaches.
Below are a few session highlights.
NM SIG Activity
To start, we did a few collaborative thinking-writing activities. The first was a collaborative poll of keywords and ideas (see above). We then did a responsive, collaborative writing task using the chat box. That was great fun! Below is what we cocreated (names removed for privacy).
Collaborative chat box writing activity
My 100-word worlding for this session
Jenny’s telling untold stories again. The WWII flight and return of Danish Jews. Snippets of materialities: no yellow stars, food parcels, clothes, boats, Red Cross visitations, propaganda films and the king defiantly riding his horse down Copenhagen’s main street. Ignoring German soldiers in bakeries. Leadership agreements. Unspeakable everpresent brutality. Inescapable – ineluctable. A nation-wide underground resistance: all locals were in on it. National Habitas. Protect all Danes. Homes preserved (not looted), goods boxed up, gardens watered for those ‘away’. Rescue missions, drunk signatures and white buses sweep for ‘others’. Secret fishing boat crossings. Flowers, chocolates and K1,000 compensation on return.
*Postscript: As of March 2022, Jenny was accepted to do this topic as her PhD.*
CONGRATS to Jenny….
…and a massive thank you for sharing her hard work and this most remarkable story.
Presenter Bio
Jenny Ginsberg is an educator of 40+ years, a social activist and an artist. She has taught at a range of Melbourne schools, including MLC as a leading teacher in gifted education and oral history. This September, Jenny is submitting her Master’s by Research (School of Social Sciences at La Trobe Uni, Melbourne) and is looking to undertake a PhD in 2022.
She aims to use the PhD to deepen and extend her Master’s project (see abstract below). Jenny’s research interests include the sociological theories of Norbert Elias, an emerging interest in Feminist New Materialisms, long-term historical/sociological processes, leadership, and the interconnectedness of all things.
As a mature-age researcher (74), she is growing old, with the emphasis on growing, and brings a wealth of knowledge and life experience to her work.
Regular readers of this blog know that I have been working with Griffith’s Indigenous Research Unit (IRU) and Kungullanji as an Academic Skills Advisor for the last 4 years. But this is the first time I have put in to be a project mentor.
Image: Griffith News
Recently, Kungullanji announced their Summer Expressions of Interest (EOIs). These are small research projects that will be offered to Griffith’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students for the Summer 2021- 2022 Program. Students get to pick which project they would like to work on. The projects need to be achieved within eight weeks (over Summer before T1 starts). Usually, projects include field work, laboratory work, data analysis and statistics, literature review, case studies, method development, and/or product design.
So, I thought I’d through my hat into the ring this year.
It is an unusual project with experimental methodologies – so it’s a long shot that it will be attractive for an undergrad – but you never know! There might be a brave researcher out willing to try something a little different! We’ll see!
The process of writing up the abstract alone was a really helpful activity in helping me clarify aspects of the methodology and thinking through how to explain what VEO is in clear and simple terms.
Below is what I submitted.
I’ll find out in 6 weeks if a Kungullanji student-researcher chooses my project.
EOI: Project description
Title: Cycle Shiftings: Reconfiguring First Nation presences in Morton Bay Bikeway
Project supervisor: Nina Ginsberg (School of Education & Professional Studies)
Project description:
Bike riding is a ubiquitous part of modern life and offers significant social, economic, environmental and health benefits. However, there is ‘an unbearable whiteness of cycling’ (Hylton, 2017) that is keenly evident. Bicycle trails are not free from the history, culture and politics in which they are built and used.
This project focuses on one section of a popular bikeway located on Narlang lands of the Quandamooka peoples (commonly known as the Morton Bay Bikeway (MBB), Wynnum-Manly, Brisbane). This bike path is the focus of this project which uses emerging mobile ‘riding-with’ research approaches that work to decolonise place. ‘Riding-with’ research approaches are unique as they consider what bicycles can ‘do’ and ‘be’ beyond being just objects of transportation, utility or recreation.
This means paying close attention to what is seen, said, remembered, thought, felt, understood and experienced while bike riding researcher-community members move through particular environments – and in this case specifically, the Moreton Bay Bikeway. This project fits into an exciting and newly established research space that uses embodied and mobile methodologies to destablise current settler-colonial bike path logic and praxis – to look at what might be learned or discovered by cultivating more First Nations experiences as/into bike paths. The underlying aim is to bring forward possibilities for identifying and refiguring what is considered ‘normal’ on bike paths by promoting and celebrating First Nations presences – and that doing so will broaden and bolster similar conversations elsewhere.
The Kungullanji researcher will be encouraged to actively co-contribute to all aspects of the project process. There are opportunities for the researcher to communicate work undertaken (ie via publication, community bike tour, etc) which is highly encouraged, given time and interest. This project would suit a motivated, curious, mature and open-minded researcher who is interested in working with innovative research skills. The supervisor, Nina Ginsberg, will provide guidance at all stages of this project.
Student responsibilities:
Research mobile methodologies and local First Nations presences (around Wynnum-Manly area)
Write short summaries/narratives based on key research themes
Co-develop (with supervisor) an approach to action key research themes
Develop and experiment with riding-with approaches
This project involves being able to go for regular bike rides along Wynnum-Manly foreshore (accessible by train)at a leisurely pace with regular breaks for about 10 kms. Must have a general level of fitness and know how to ride a bike safely. Ideally, the Kungullanji researcher will have their own bike (in good working order) and safety gear (if not, Nina can help arrange this).
Meet with Supervisor at least weekly for bike ride-meetings to discuss findings, progress and next steps.
Opportunity for a co-authored publication (Kungullanji researcher and Supervisor) and/or community bike tour to share findings (if time/interest allows).
Morton Bay Cycleway. Image: Visit Queensland
The Kungullanji Program
The Kungullanji Research Pathways Program raises aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students by providing an undergraduate research experience, professional development, and connections to the broader Indigenous research community. The idea is to provide an introduction to research and develop valuable skills for students to start their research journey.
The idea is that First Nations undergrads work alongside research staff (who may be an academic staff member, research fellow, postdoctoral fellow or HDR candidate) to gain hands-on research. Supervisors provide regular and ongoing mentorship, guidance, research-specific training, and experience.
This award-winning program is a key part of Griffith University’s strategy to “grow its own” First Peoples higher degree research cohort.
Kungullanji is an Aboriginal word from the Yugambeh language that means ‘to think’ – and this service is specifically for undergraduates.
Kungullanji offers practical research experience and opportunities to develop research skills and confidence not found elsewhere for undergraduates. Students receive a scholarship and are provided with online and in-person research skills training, cultural experience activities, a transdisciplinary art-based workshop, and Peer Mentors provide additional guidance and support.
Image: Griffith News
Postscript: This year there was a remarkably high number of EOIs submitted (the highest ever!) – which speaks to the growing recognition and high caliber of this program! Ultimately, 46 projects were submitted. There were 23 students. My EOI was not selected – another time!
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on a new program for academic writers*, researchers and postgrads at Griffith Uni.
(*I am deliberately not using the term ‘students’ here – a strategic shift in language from a subordinate-learner mentality towards a more peer-professional modality).
During formulation, I called it GAWLERS.
GAWLERS stood for (whatever words work best for you):
G____(?) Growing? Griffith? Gorgeous? Graduate?
Academic
Writing
Language
Expression
Research
S_____(?). Studio? Students? Syndicate?
I pitched my idea to three kick-ass postgrads (Jenny, Bec and Janis) colleagues and invited them to come on board as the Executive Board – which they did! Woohoo!
We then set about formalizing the club and registering it with Griffith student associations. This took longer than expected, but we were undeterred and ran a number of sessions before being formalized anyway. I had contacted 26 students I’d worked with previously and they became the inaugural RAW members.
Internally, we referred to ourselves as GAWLERS, but we needed a more recognizable name – one that was easy to understand what the group was about. So instead of GAWLERS, we decided on RAW (Research And Writers).
RAW origins
Like most other educational institutions, Griffith University life and work changed profoundly in response to the recent COVID-19 ‘educational scramble’.
Soon after moving online in April 2019, I established an online ‘Show Up & Write’ space for students I knew as a way of staying connected, focused and productive. These sessions were regularly attended and participants said how useful it was to have a collegial space to talk, share, and create academic work. In break times, we asked questions, offered support, discussed our writing, and gave suggestions for improvements in a low-stakes and impactful way.
While Griffith responded to COVID and snap lockdowns by reducing staffing, decreasing services, and suspending many student professional development and networking opportunities until further notice, our study group flourished. As word of mouth about our group passed to others, ‘new’ people joined from all over Griffith.
It was clear there was an immediate need for this group and so in June 2021, the main proponents (Nina, Janis, Bec and Jenny) decided to formalise this opportunity and open it up for all Griffith students and candidates.
We call the group Griffith ‘Research and Writers Studio’, or RAW for short.
What we do
We are an online club bound by our commonality of academic work, research, and writing. Our club aims (see below) articulate our ethics, commitment and focus. RAW members include undergraduates, postgraduates, and professional teaching staff who are also studying at Griffith.
Our members come from all Griffith locations, not only in Brisbane (26) and Queensland (10), but across Australia (6) and around the world (6). We are proud to be a truly transdisciplinary group, transcending cultures, hobbies, degrees and programs, ages, gender, ability, locations, backgrounds, and personalities. This plurality in membership adds vibrancy, interest and new skills we would not otherwise have access to at Griffith elsewhere.
Research and Write (RAW) Studio
This group helps members be more confident, productive, and stylish academic writers and researchers.
Our group is guided by three key aims:
Aim 1. To present academic writing and research in influential ways to diverse audiences.
Develop and grow fundamental and advanced academic, writing and research skills and experience through a range of online and in-person opportunities. These include exclusive focused study groups, writing, editing and specialist workshops, writing process forums, accountability writing groups, skill drill sessions, special events and writing retreats and targeted academic skill sessions. These events consolidate and extend transferable oral, written and visual communication skills underpinned by positivity, engaged expression and critical evaluation of information, argument and opinion. Applicable for all levels of study across all disciplines.
Aim 2. To build confident, competent, and collaborative identities.
An inclusive and safe space to share university, writing and researching experiences. Instead of the usual teach-to model, this club moves towards a learn-with approach. Members are X to pursue their own academic and professional goals in ways that are productive, thoughtful, engaged and self-directed. Supporting a passion for lifelong learning through achievement, capacity and mastery. Provide opportunities for leadership and active engagement. Connect members with additional editing, proofreading, mentoring and/or other academic support services if needed. Interaction between Ph.D, Masters, Honours and undergrads is encouraged. To build relationships within and beyond the physical campus by establishing a collaborative and diverse community of practice.
Aim 3.To extend, challenge and share innovative, creative, ethical, and positive writing-research-action.
Provide members with opportunities to develop their own personal and professional goals. Respecting and strengthening engagement with First Nations, cross-cultural, and individual or cultural diversity peoples, cultures, perspectives and lifeworlds. This club adheres to an ethical code of conduct based on compassion, positive change and social and environmental responsibility and action. This club supports members to be intrepid and innovative in their writing and research endeavours to initiate, develop and implement new ideas and projects.
A massive thank you to Janis, Bec, Jenny, and all those early adopters who jumped in to get us started – thank you all!
We’ve already had some amazing sessions and I can’t wait to see where this leads.
I’m excited about this project and will be sharing some of our highlights along the way.
For our August New Materialisms SIG, we were delighted to have Dr. Theresa Ashford (USC) share some of her current NM research considerations, thoughts and processes.
In this session, we explored how ethics feature in New Materialisms research.
NM Session: Ethics in/with classrooms, comics and computers.
This session explores the idea of New Materialisms and ethics. This is a tricky space that tests emergence and experience. In this session, Theresa used several key papers as a way to continue working-with how to pull these aspects together in some (in)comprehensible form.
Bio: Dr. Theresa Ashford is a Geography and Sustainability Lecturer in the School of Law and Society (USC). Her key interest is investigating human-non human ethics and responsibility – response(ability) in the world. Her undergraduate and postgraduate education is in Geography and spans physical and human geography domains. She has worked in the regional planning field in Canada and her Masters research explored the use and role of public spaces in the support and co-construction of homeless punk youth identities in Winnipeg, Canada. Dr. Ashford’s Ph.D. research (2018, Education, UQ) used Actor-network theory to investigate the emergence of digital ethics in 1:1 classrooms and the active role of technology mediating, supporting, and translating human behaviour and understandings.
In this session, Theresa deep-dived into Ethics and how it has been bubbling up in her work wide-ranging research.
Theresa set the ethical scene and outlined the Artistolian entry point she was using to discuss ethics.
She then led us through a series of ‘searching for ethics in awkward places’.
Theresa used the metaphor of a ‘Mud Map’ to introduce herself and establish how her background as a human geographer and teacher informs her concerns for the state of inequity in the world and across human-nonhuman spheres of doing. She also outlined her particular interest in phronesis (practical wisdom informed by a sound understanding of ethics, the world and humans), and how she uses Aristotelian means to navigate the excesses and deficits in life and theoretical applications in the world.
We then turned to (Bruno) Latour, ethics and technology.
Theresa spoke of the New Materialisms tenets of decentring anthropocentrism, reconfiguring subjectivity, and elevating the role of non-human actors.
She problematized this type of ‘rethinking’ as it extends to sources of ethics – to the extent of which she argued, could be considered a ‘breaking point’.
Theresa also spoke about the cultivation of ethics grounded in care for the world. Here, we were provoked to consider how we enact and perform care (recognizing it is a network effect) what is derived in a positive ethos and practices of cultivation (requires awareness/wisdom), ideas on care in the human estate – and our “manifold entanglements” with non-human, and how we might reorient ourselves profoundly in relation to the world, to one another and to ourselves (Coole & Fox, 2010) and bioethics.
Collaborative NM SIG word association
There are four main NM streams (see here for more on this). I sit with the feminist New Materialists within the Baradian tradition, so it was really enjoyable to learn more about the Latourian approaches to New Materialisms, such as how ANT:
Sees technology as a mode of existence (exploring existence and being)
Technology as ‘fold’ – time, space and actants – it keeps folded heterogeneous temporalities (materials, modes, memories, mobilities)
Technology extends potentialies unrealisable without its presence
Affordance – schemes of action – permission and promise – a new entity together
Tech mediation – inadequately captures the new possibilities created
Teresa used three data vignettes from her research (a school daily internet bandwidth usage, Women Woman Stuff, and student-Apps), to highlight some of the ethical sticky points and moments of insight that come from looking at these educational situations from an Ethics and ANT New Materialisms POV.
After this incredible presentation, we had a lively Q & A and an open forum to unpack some of these vexing and encouraging connections between ethics and New Materialisms.
Below are a few ideas from Dr. Ashford’s presentation. I’ve deliberately not included the full PPT to respect and protect Dr. Ashford’s intellectual property and current research.
It was an exciting, robust, and thought-provoking session – so much to think and talk about!
A massive thanks to Theresa for sharing her ideas and experiences so generously.
Theresa’s Publications
Ashford, T., & Curtis, N. (2020). Wonder woman: An assemblage of complete virtue packed in a tight swimsuit. Law, Technology and Humans, 2(2), 185-197. doi: 10.5204/lthj.1593
Ashford, T. (2021). App-centric students and academic integrity: A proposal for assembling socio-technical responsibility. Journal of Academic Ethics,19(1), 35-48. doi: 10.1007/s10805-020-09387-w
Readings
Blackman, T. (2020). Experiences of vulnerability in poverty education settings: developing reflexive ethical praxis. Postcolonial Directions in Education, 9(2) 198-225.
Waelbers, K., & Dorestewitz, P. (2014). Ethics in Actor Networks, or: What Latour Could Learn from Darwin and Dewey. Science and Engineering Ethics, 20, 23-40, doi: 10.1007/s11948-012-9408-1
All images from Dr. Ashford’s presentation (attributed in-text) unless otherwise specified.
