CCCR seminars

2019 Seminar Series

Please come along to our public work-in-progress seminars. Check this page for the latest updates.

Semester 2, 2019

Semester 1, 2019

Experiencing screen healing through natural scenery

Associate Professor Young Jun Choi (Cheong Ju University, South Korea)
Wednesday 13 March 12:00-1:00pm
Building 1, Room 1A21

Writing as Discovery: Investigating a Hidden Component of Scholarly Method

Associate Professor Paul Magee
Monday 18 March 12:30-1:20pm
Building 20, Room 20A02

Abstract
Is writing an academic paper or book really just a matter of ‘writing up’ a set of pre-established results? Reporting on a pilot study towards a large-scale exploration of the heuristic dimensions of scholarly and scientific composition, this paper analyses its author’s interviews with three leading academic authors: literary scholars Derek Attridge (York) and Hannah Sullivan (Oxford), and linguist Michael Hoey (formerly Liverpool). All three confirm that the act of writing articles and monographs serves to generate ideas they had not realised they were working on, whether through the internal pressure of their concepts as they unfold, the happy finds of revision, or the influence of external agencies in the inherently social process of publication. A coda points to related findings in the sciences, suggesting that, far from ancillary, the act of writing papers may well constitute a key plank of method in those disciplines as well.  

Short Bio 
Paul Magee is Associate Professor of Poetry in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra. He is currently working on The Collection of Space, which is in verse, as well as a monograph based on interviews with poets, entitled A Window of Two Seconds: On the Composition of Poetic Thought.

We are Lost: Redacting and reclaiming misogynistic language

Dr Caren Florance
Monday 25 March 12:30-1:20pm
Building 20, Room 20A02

Abstract
I have long worked within the overlapping spaces between artist books, text art and visual poetry, testing outcomes that can be sent into any of these fields and engage with their particular concerns. My 2018 CCCR Donald Horne Creative & Cultural Fellowship allowed me to build on the understandings developed in my doctoral exegesis about the concepts of the open work, print-performance and material poetics. My latest body of work stems from a deep dive into misogynistic online culture, where, inspired by a body of feminist work produced in the 1990s by artist Emma Veal, I compiled a glossary of language used by various levels of men’s activism. These words and phrases are used in contemporary attacks on women, communications that seem immaterial and fleeting on page and screen but sink deep into the psyche. I used processual creative strategies to materially subvert the impact of such language through physical systems of abstraction and redaction. This seminar will report on my fellowship, sharing this work and other outcomes. I am very grateful to the CCCR for the opportunities that this fellowship opened up.

Short Bio
Dr Caren Florance is a typographic and bibliographic artist and writer who currently lives and works in Canberra, Australia. She currently teaches in the School of Design and Built Environment at UC and in the Printmedia & Drawing Workshop at the ANU School of Art + Design.

Preliminary findings from the Story Ground Project

Dr Jen Crawford
Monday 1 April 12:30-1:20pm
Building 20, Room 20A02

Abstract
The Story Ground Project was funded by the Indigenous Languages and Arts Program for two years, beginning in late 2017, to investigate the possibilities of using oral and written story practices to engage Indigenous community members with university study. We’ve done this in a number of ways: 1) through outreach to Indigenous members of the community  2) by developing research information and pedagogy around the integration of Indigenous story practices into the teaching of creative writing, and 3) by supporting the literary production of the Indigenous members of our research team, helping to build the body of Indigenous creative works available to all Australians. This session will report on our progress and findings at this point, midway through the second year of the project.

Short Bio
Dr Jen Crawford is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Canberra. She has also lived and taught in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and in Singapore, where she was the founding coordinator of Nanyang Technological University’s Creative Writing Programme.

Surrealism, the ‘free-line’ and prose poetry’s metonymic intensity

Professor Paul Hetherington
Monday 8 April 12:30-1:20pm
Building 20, Room 20A02 

Abstract
In 2018 I spent a period of Outside Studies at various universities, working on a variety of projects. The most significant of these was completing the manuscript for a monograph on the contemporary English-language prose poem for Princeton University Press (written jointly with Associate Professor Cassandra Atherton of Deakin University). Today’s presentation uncovers aspects of that research and discusses how prose poetry may be considered as an exemplary postmodern literary form.

Short Bio
Paul Hetherington is Professor of Writing at the University of Canberra and head of the International Poetry Studies Institute in the Faculty of Arts and Design. He is also a poet and prose poet.

Adult Literacy/Recurrent Education Programme in Timor-Leste

Assoc. Professor Tahmina Rashid
Monday 15 April 12:30-1:20pm
Building 20, Room 20A02

Abstract
Since independence, Timor-Leste has taken initiatives to improve adult literacy. This paper explores the non-formal literacy programmes with a particular focus on the Second Chance Education Project (SCEP), an accelerated learning model that helps improve literacy and numeracy, integrating academic and life skills through tailored support. This paper examines the impact of SCEP employing a mixed-methods approach; examining public policies & literature on adult learning, incorporating the views of various stakeholders to assess the impact and sustainability of the programmes. It also explores intersection between language and literacy. It concludes that programme and policy level structural limitations hinder efforts to eradicate illiteracy among adults and needs remodelling.

Short Bio
Tahmina Rashid is an Associate Professor in Global Studies, Faculty of Arts & Design, University of Canberra Australia. Her academic interests include, Sustainable Development; Gender & Development; Feminist movements in South Asia; Human rights; Religious Extremism; and Politics of Migration, Identity and Citizenship.

News vs. Poems, Prose into Poetry

Emeritus Professor Marianne Boruch, Purdue University USA (Fulbright Senior Scholar at UC)
Wednesday 1 May 12:30-1:20pm
Location: 20B02

Forecast

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

--William Carlos Williams
(from “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower”
in SelectedPoems, NY: New Directions, 1969.)

In fact, poems come from somewhere below the starry heavens, though often breaking past any clear agenda we might have for them. It’s just that things happen to self and world, and poets collect images and ideas from life the way—as American poet Robert Frost claimed—we walk through a meadow, burrs sticking to our pantleg. We stop and stare at whatever it is, sink down into it. And off we go…

Or not exactly.

Sylvia Plath, for example, used such a method but in a more complicated way, moving first through a prose rendering when writing her haunting “bee sequence” after attending a beekeepers’ meeting in Devon, then starting her own hive. Her journal entries about it were a clear source for language and imagery in those poems. And Brigit Pegeen Kelly worked her astonishing poem “Song” after reading a news article in a New Jersey paper. And Yeats, well, there’s Yeats, doing a short version of this method long before any of us were breathing.

My project in Canberra is to observe the stunningly strange wildlife of Australia, with an eye to write a bestiary, of sorts, a series of poems eventually using the images I see. So I am taking notes too from the great world, hoping to launch poems.

All of which is to say, this informal talk will be about such a practice, how a more journalistictake on actual events--personal or worldly—can morph into poems, how straightforward “facts” and “evidence” sometimes find their life on the page in a very different guise. I will focus on what was a deep surprise to me, my first prolonged attempt at this mysterious negotiation a few years ago in the so-called “Cadaver lab,” an experience supported by a Faculty Fellowship in the Study of a Second Discipline at Purdue University where I’ve taught for 32 years. I will track bits from the journal I kept during that semester I spent with medical students in their first course, Gross Human Anatomy, and how I later drew from that prose reportage to write the long 32-sectioned title poem of my 8^th collection, Cadaver, Speak. (No worries—I will choose only one or two of those poems to discuss!)  

Handouts provided.

Short Bio
Marianne Boruch is delighted to be a Fulbright Senior Scholar in UC’s International Poetry Studies Institute. Her work includes 10 poetry collections, the latest Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing and forthcoming, The Anti-Grief (Copper Canyon, 2016, 2019), three books of essays, most recently The Little Death of Self (Michigan, “Poets on Poetry Series,” 2017), and a memoir about hitchhiking in the early 70s, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana, 2011). Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The Poetry Review, The Edinburgh Review, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Nation, New England Review, and elsewhere. Among her honors are the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award for The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon, 2011), fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, residencies from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, Yaddo, McDowell, and an earlier Fulbright professorship at the University of Edinburgh. She’s been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome and at two American national parks, Denali and Isle Royale. Boruch taught at Purdue University for 32 years, was the founder of the MFA program in the English Department there, becoming a Professor Emeritus last May. She continues on faculty in the low-residency Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College where she has taught since 1988.

Crafting professional practice in UK higher education

Lauren England (King’s College London in partnership with Crafts Council UK)
Tuesday 21 May 12:30-1:20pm
Location: 20B02

Abstract:
Higher education is a popular route into craft careers and the system is facing increased scrutiny over how it prepares students for future employment or as entrepreneurs. In particular, creative graduates have been positioned as underserved in their professional preparation.

In this seminar Lauren England will provide an overview of her research on professional development education for craft in the UK, drawing on the perspectives of craft educators, students and graduates. This will include her recommendations for higher education providers, policy makers and craft sector stakeholders to facilitate the professional development of early-career makers and support the establishment of sustainable craft enterprise.

Short Bio:
Lauren England is a PhD student at King's College London working in partnership with Crafts Council UK. Her research investigates professional development pedagogy in craft higher education and the requirements for sustainable business development in the UK’s contemporary craft sector. As part of her PhD Lauren has published reports via Crafts Council UK on craft entrepreneurship and higher education policy.

Past seminars