AustLit

'This paper presents an interdisciplinary dialogue between a cognitive scientist (Steven Langsford) and a researcher in the field of creative writing (Amelia Walker). The dialogue concerns a proposition that ecopoetry encourages people to become more open to mind styles that differ from their own and can thereby help support what Félix Guattari (1989) termed the mental ecology by facilitating interaction between people whose mind styles differ from one another. In contrast with models of evolutionary literary criticism that champion competition and selection, a Guattarian approach emphasises collaboration and variation, arguing the need for humans to work together with one another and with beyond-human beings to support diversity and thereby promote stronger possibilities for survival and wellbeing on the collective scale. A diverse mental ecology supports environmental sustainability and collective survival because it enables the raising and consideration of a broader range of approaches to problems including but exceeding environmental crises. The chapter connects these ideas with research concerning Bayesian inference, rational speech act (RSA) theory, and the benefits of strategy diversity in scientific communities.' (Publication abstract)

'This creatively-critical collaboration confronts issues of precarious employment in contemporary universities. As three early career academics currently employed on casual or fixed-term contracts in Australian universities, we have produced a writing-based fractography — a study of cracks — in order to show the effects of what Bill Readings has called ‘the ruined university’ on the bodies, minds, and lives of academic workers. To produce this work, each of us penned an individual narrative employing cracks as a metaphor for our lived experiences of working in academia. We then spliced the three separate accounts into fragments and combined them into a single text, interwoven with quotations from published sources. The quoted materials set the personal against the political, showing how our individual and particular experiences reflect specific but non-isolated instances of a much bigger, shared problem. Our polyvocal collaboration thus forms an instance of what Drager Meurtant describes in terms of ‘artistic assemblage’. In line with Cathryn Perazzo and Patrick West, we engage this approach in order to affect ‘non-didactic didacticism’ in our critique of the socio-political problems rife throughout academia today.' (Publication abstract)

'In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the character Helmholtz Watson muses: “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced”¹. Deb Stewart’s The White Line of Language is full of words that do just this. Honed words, skilfully arranged into just the right orders, creating just the right shapes for ears as eyes, aloud as on the page. Words that press hard against silence and space, against one another, language, limits, the unsayable and still-to-be-said. Words that sing and cry and hope and ache and wonder, unfolding always into more – and more. Words to read again and again, always and endlessly for the very first time.' (Introduction)

'We live hyperlinked lives, expected to be switched on and logged in 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Time is a dwindling resource, multitasking is our default setting. We’re constantly reading: online articles, emails, social media posts. But for many of us, this dip-in, dip-out reading feels dissatisfying. We crave deeper engagement.' (Introduction)