Unsettling creativity: intercultural spaces, study abroad and internationlization beyond the curriculum

This chapter argues that short-term student Study Tours, coupled with preparatory and reflective classes on the home campus, are a more successful way of internationalizing the curriculum and promoting intercultural reflection than the more traditional, longer term student exchange. This is because taking students out of their comfort zones to travel overseas in a study intensive promotes greater ‘productive discomfort’ while supporting this process with classes on the home campus promotes its life changing effects.This chapter draws on two important Study Tours in Creative Writing and Creative and Commercial Entrepreneurship at Deakin University, Australia. The first is an outbound Study Tour to the United States and the second is an inbound Study Tour from India. These Study Tours foreground an important ‘unsettling’ of creativity that impacts on the students’ thinking and writing processes, and prepares them most effectively for their role as global citizens.

Why do you write? Creative writing and the reflective teacher

Whether we write creatively or academically (or both) it takes time to understand the reasons why we ‘want’ to write, and the more we write the more we fully begin to appreciate why we write and why we have to write in the first place. From the age of nine, I kept a diary and now, 31 years later, I’m still writing down thoughts, opinions, feelings and aspirations. Nearly every day, I actively participate in recording my reflections. These reflections are part of an academic writing ritual that fuels research ideas and potential narratives associated with reflective teaching practices. I have discovered that the daily practice of imagining and writing compared to academic research and writing has more similarities than differences. Other creative writers who operate in higher education as learning and teaching academics have also taken note of ‘the similarity between the processes of writing fiction, and writing learning texts, not the contrasts’ (McVey, 2008, p. 290, emphasis). More specifically, I have come to realise that strengthening one’s use of the imagination via self-confessional writing exercises is a central ingredient in order to fulfill a well-rounded learning and teaching career.

Analysis of psycholinguistic processes and topics in online autism communities

Current growth of individuals on the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) requires continuous support and care. With the popularity of social media, online communities of people affected by ASD emerge. This paper presents an analysis of these online communities through understanding aspects that differentiate such communities. In this paper, the aspects given are not expressed in terms of friendship, exchange of information, social support or recreation, but rather with regard to the topics and linguistic styles that people express in their on-line writing. Using data collected unobtrusively from LiveJournal, we analyze posts made by ten autism communities in conjunction with those made by a control group of standard communities. Significant differences have been found between autism and control communities when characterized by latent topics of discussion and psycholinguistic features. Latent topics are found to have greater predictive power than linguistic features when classifying blog posts as either autism or control community. This study suggests that data mining of online blogs has the potential to detect clinically meaningful data. It opens the door to possibilities including sentinel risk surveillance and harnessing the power in diverse large datasets.

Material writing: Towards hybrid-making

Writing operates in an expanding field of intersections between symbol, inflection and further meaning. The materiality of writing, its embodied action, situated context and myriad substantive expressions, requires an interdisciplinary approach best advanced by collaborative teams and fuelled by collective concerns. At a recent design conference, Doha 2013: Hybrid Making, our team of creative arts researchers (Jondi Keane, Patrick West and Valerie Jeremijenko) conducted a workshop based on the idea of reverse engineering the notion of a souvenir, by starting with the sensation rather than the iconic image. The approaches explored by the group focused on the ways in which a sensation, emotion and/or idea attach to an object and how an object offers itself as an attractor for memory and indicate that when experience, sensation and place are emphasized, the materiality of writing comes to the fore. We assert that material writing allows or even requires a fluid movement between conceptual and perceptual modes of creative practice. In this paper we will unpack different methods of material writing: the materiality of the act of writing with substances, site-specific/site-conditioned writing and 3D printing. Through the particularity of each mode of material writing our discussions will examine the points of attachment that we, as symbolizing creatures, produce in order to orient and reconstruct a world on the fly. Material writing constantly brings us back to earth, anchoring us to the expanded processes integral to hybrid-making.

Sensing the story: structure and improvisation in writing for performance.

This article discusses the process of writing through devising in performance. It takes as a case study Apart of and A Part From in which muscle and sense memory – touch, smell, taste, sound and sight – were the points of departure for a contemporary performance piece on migration and identity. This was a practice-as-research project aimed to better understand the artist’s body (myself) in improvisation with memory fragments. Working from a non-verbal frame the writing experience began as actions in space, then new memories in my body, to maps on paper, to key word and some staging patterns, to systematic capturing of the textual, rhythmic and spatial structures in the emerging 30-minute performance. Various objects were incorporated to give aesthetic coherence of the piece. The article reports on the processes of writing in action, the writing and performing as lived experience and how the writing emerged from the spaces in between – self and other, self and object, self and space, present self and past self.