Blogging art and sustenance : artful everyday life (making) with water

In the local area of Western Port Catchment, Victoria, Australia, I engaged in an arts-based qualitative inquiry over seven years. As a marine ecologist, educator, maker and mother, I looked to artists who created artworks in relation to water to investigate how art-making might contribute to traditional science-based Sustainability Education. Initially I examined: What alternative relationship is negotiated and knowledge attained between an artist and a waterway in the art-making process? Artworks, photographs and transcripts of time spent with seven women – each of whom creatively encounter their local waterways in their everyday lives – were captured on my private research blog. A new query surfaced: How can I sustain waterways if I am not sustaining myself? An alternative methodology of blogging formed (bodyplaceblogging). I used an awareness of my body and its inclusion in the ecology of the world around me (place) through Somerville’s (1999) embodied response to place which asserts a body’s right to know place. With the bodyplaceblogging process, I moved through a post-structural/ (post)qualitative style onto a posthuman platform. I began to think with-water, moving playfully through an initial methodological frame of sustainable education (Sterling, 2001); beauty in everyday life (Rautio, 2009); post modern emergence (Somerville, 1999); and material thinking (Carter, 2004), into an emerging methodology that continued to be reframed as I encountered the words and images of the local artists, my children, the academic and theoretical literature (e.g. Grosz; Barad; Bachelard; Rautio; Deleuze and Guattari), and an emerging critical, embodied, place-aware everyday life. Data analysed in the blog was discovered to be data again in the thesis-writing process, leading to an a-typically formed and formatted thesis: a blogged, knitted blanket of space, place and body-squares. A linear notion of time became disrupted in a space of virtual time preserved in the past (blog posts) and actual time passing in the present (academic/prose) (Grosz, 2005). Here there is an abundance of matter made with, and making, all that I encounter in my mothering, artful, ecological, everyday life with water. Sustainability, as a movement, is traditionally defined as resisting the catastrophe before the end, sustaining what we have in rations – a provocation for lack. New possibilities for sustenance and for what is becoming, and unbecoming, emerge here in the making processes of everyday life

Evaluating a peer-led wellbeing programme for doctors-in-training during the COVID-19 pandemic in Victoria, Australia, using the most significant change technique

This article discusses the use of the Most Significant Change (MSC) technique in a mixed-methods evaluation of a pilot wellbeing programme for obstetrics and gynaecology doctors-in-training introduced at a large public hospital during Melbourne, Australia’s second coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown, which occurred from 7 July to 26 October 2020. The evaluation was conducted remotely using videoconferencing technology, to conform with pandemic restrictions. MSC complemented the program’s participatory principles and was chosen because it seeks to learn about participants’ perceptions of programme impacts by evaluating their stories of significant change. Stakeholders select one story exemplifying the most significant change resulting from the evaluated program. Inductive thematic analysis of all stories is combined with reasons for making the selection, to inform learnings (Dart & Davies, 2003; Tonkin et al., 2021). Nine stories of change were included in the selection. The most significant change was a more supportive workplace culture brought about by enabling basic needs to be met and breaking down hierarchical barriers. This was linked to five interconnected themes – connection, caring, communication, confidence and cooperation. The evaluation learnings are explored and reflections on remotely conducting MSC evaluation are shared. © The Author(s) 2022

Academia’s Breath: Oxygenating Academia One Creative, Embodied Breath at a Time

Australia is one colonised country in the Global South trying to live differently with our ‘morbid symptoms’. The global South’s Academy has a neoliberal coating that hopefully can be perforated – even if slightly – with intentional and unintentional shifts in how we do academia that allow oxygen into scholarship with some different scholarly processes. The health of the planet, where we are inextricably linked to planetary health, calls for care within and between academic bodies – (non)human bodies, water bodies and bodies of knowledge. I have examined some old blogposts playfully to understand creative blogging as one hopeful way toward an academic sustenance. This entry listens like a record to select blog posts through the voices of feminist black scholars and First Nations informed expertise in the post qualitative, new material turn. By re-experiencing and expressing the sustaining nature of academia to date there are some practical possibilities for an everyday, mothering, emerging academic to do academia differently. Entangled with the unceded lands and waters of Australia’s First Nation people’s – the Boonwurrung / Bunurong – a moment of everyday, academic emergence asks – an academia that plays out one creative, embodied, oxygenated breath at a time – how would you do that

Growing communities in a garden undone : worldly justice, withinness and women

Where communities are ecological and humans are nature, ways of reimagining and regenerating communities as human and more, offer a timely response to the call of the Anthropocene for worldly justice. We, the authors, as women and mothers, look into time, place and space, harvesting our ‘becoming (undone)’ for the reader, seeded in the botanical world. Creeping and whispering, still and subtle, plant species are ever present in our survival yet often go unnamed and unnoticed, and to date are under-represented in multi-species becoming research. Via Foucault’s shining light upon power, we muse with Barad, Haraway and Grosz—how does growing (with) plant-life, amongst what is ‘said’ and ‘unsaid’, matter (to) the world as it turns? We have been returned to the same sediment after a decade: Our bowed-together life revived in the childhood–motherhood–nature community entanglements of the Anthropocene. Now, this paper, waters plant–human relationalities living beyond the traditional parochial human-to-human role. We accept our humanness in its onerousness and ownership but look to the leaf litter to reacquaint with our multispecies lives in a garden that has, at times, been sacrificed and lost. Our contribution is chlorophyllic. New ideas enfold and energise what constitutes a community. As women woven with botanica and academia, where mothering is a collaboration rather than a raising, we invite the reader to journey with us into the worldly, life-giving relations that garden a community undone

Restored saltmarshes lack the topographic diversity found in natural habitat

Saltmarshes can be created to compensate for lost habitat by a process known as managed realignment (MR), where sea defences are deliberately breached to flood low-lying agricultural land. However, the vegetation that develops on MR sites is not equivalent to natural habitat. In natural sites, surface topography and creek networks are drivers of vegetation diversity, but their development on restored sites has not been well studied. We investigate the topographic characteristics of 19 MR areas, and compare these to nearby natural saltmarshes (representing desired conditions) and to coastal agricultural landscapes (representing conditions prior to MR). From high-resolution LiDAR data, we extracted values of elevation, six measures of surface topography (although two were later excluded due to collinearity), and three measures of creek density. MR and natural marshes differed significantly in all surface topographic indices, with MR sites having lower rugosity and more concave features, with greater potential for water accumulation. MR sites also had significantly lower creek density. MRs and coastal agricultural landscapes were more similar, differing in only one topographic measure. Importantly, there was no relationship between age since restoration and any of the topographic variables, indicating that restored sites are not on a trajectory to become topographically similar to natural marshes. MR schemes need to consider actively constructing topographic heterogeneity; better mirroring natural sites in this way is likely to benefit the development of saltmarsh vegetation, and will also have implications for a range of ecosystem functions

Appealing for help: A reflection on interpellation and intertextuality in the visual narrative of an Australian welfare campaign poster

We know the world, our world, through stories (Turner 1988: 68). Stories in childhood, whether verbal or written, are inevitably accompanied by visual language forms. This might be the storyteller’s body or a puppet performing mime and gesture; it may be pictures in storybooks, or the endless hybrid combinations of these in film and the electronic media. Even a single photograph can perform in a narrative way: “A picture of a forest tells implicitly of trees growing from seedlings and shedding leaves; and a picture of a house implies that trees were cut for it and that its roof will soon leak. (Goodman 1981:111)” Within a story–making activity, however, the visual image is not a sole performer; it is a participant in an intertextual web of discursive forms and endless meaning-making exercises. It is a complex, fluid experience (Belova 2006). The aim of this paper is to raise some questions about how narrative processes might operate in and through visual texts designed to communicate social injustice and elicit emotional and moral response, such as social documentary photographs and fundraising campaign posters. Using the example of an Australian Salvation Army Red Shield Appeal poster, the paper reflects on how the engaged viewer might be implicated as both character and author in the resonance between the meta–narratives and personal stories from their own life–world and the meanings arising from the poster’s text. In doing so, concepts of interpellation and intertextuality help explain some of the processes which position and compel viewers to respond, and also how they contribute to identifying meanings which reach beyond commonly received readings

Imagining Women as Homeless : Re/tracing Socially Concerned Photography

This text is primarily concerned with the meanings that are produced when women become visible amongst the homeless through photographic representations. While there have always been homeless women, unlike their male counterparts, they have remained largely invisible to the public and government policy- makers. Social documentary photography has acted as one of the main avenues through which homeless women have, literally, been rendered visible. As an evidence producing technology, photography has exercised considerable influence in the construction of meaning about homelessness by employing concepts of the feminine and the masculine in various, and oppositional ways. Driven by, and implicated in complex sociocultural and political circumstances, socially concerned photographs draw on the real and the fictional to generate truth/power effects. Thus, this inquiry re/traces the representation of ?homeless woman? in a range of visual texts and ask how this construct has been discursively produced and deployed

Breaking silences : telling stories about family photographs

This paper tells a story. It relates how a 1940s photographic portrait of a smiling young woman became a conduit for telling the story of family violence hiding behind her smile. I suggest that although sharing this memory across three generations of women in the same family played a critical role at the personal level, 40 years after the silence was broken, it has the capacity for ongoing political effects at the collective level. This paper is one of those effects

The search for a feminism that could accommodate homeless young women

Young women experiencing homelessness ore confronted by a range of oppressive circumstances. Their disadvantage is multilayered; they are young, they are women, they do not have access to safe, secure accommodation and they ore poor. While these young women do not consfilute a homogeneaus group, they share gendered experiences of victimisation from within their families, their peer group and their wider social networks. Their active resistance to becoming victims is displayed in many aspects of their practices and behaviours. This paper discusses some of the queries that arose in the course of examining the relevance of feminism for understanding the experience of young women's homelessness. In particular some poststructural concepts are used to question the processes of victimisation as conceptualised from a more traditional feminist framework. The paper ends by suggesting that feminist work practice might need to develop more of an understanding of these processes and what they mean in young women's experience "-'if they are to be adequately and effectively addressed