y separately published work icon Axon : Creative Explorations periodical issue  
Alternative title: Manifestos, Diatribes and Creative Interventions
Issue Details: First known date: 2020... vol. 10 no. 2 December 2020 of Axon : Creative Explorations est. 2011 Axon : Creative Explorations
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The theme for this issue of Axon emerged during a conference in late 2019, where paper after paper combined coherent research with impassioned critiques of the state of the university, the state of the environment, and the state of politics. Evident in these presentations was both a determination to generate positive change, and impatience at the apparent slowness of senior members’ responses to the what-is of the current moment. It seemed timely to provide a platform for these concerns, and invite contributions that combine personal, political and scholarly passions; and the manifesto form seemed to have the right combination of elements for this context.' (Introduction)

Notes

  • Only literary material by Australian authors or with Australian themes are individually indexed. Other material in this issue includes:

    Despairimentalist Manifesto by HL Hix

    The Loneliness by Mark Roper

    A Vision of Water by James Harpur

    The Rhetoric of Emergency by Oz Hardwick

    What are You Telling Now? by Drager Meurtant

    Creative Frailty by Lesley Saunders

    Academic Happenstance by Brenda Cooper

    The Text is a Plastic Thing by Lauren Terry

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2020 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Five Poems about Australia, Marianne Boruch , sequence poetry
Backdrop and Reason, Marianne Boruch , single work essay

'During late summer into winter, March through July 2019, an enormous privilege befell me: I spent five months observing the astonishing wildlife of Australia to prepare to write a sequence of poems. To that end, and as an American Fulbright Senior Scholar, I was welcomed into the International Poetry Studies Institute at the University of Canberra while also — with my husband — volunteering at Tidbinbilla, that cherished nature reserve, and briefly at ACT Wildlife to help bottle-feed orphaned joeys. Elsewhere I was engaged in conversations with poets and wildlife people throughout the country, including the Outback.' (Introduction)

She of The Rescue Centre Answeredi"first thing —", Marianne Boruch , single work poetry
The Crown-of-Thorns Starfish Likei"The Crown-of-Thorns Starfish like", Marianne Boruch , single work poetry
A Kangaroo in Flighti"or bent forward, set to spring off bark", Marianne Boruch , single work poetry
Out There for The Famous Balloons —i"the colourful sort that go up with little baskets of", Marianne Boruch , single work poetry
Four Ways to Remember the Koalai"1) It never was a bear.", Marianne Boruch , single work poetry
Writing With Swamp: An E-Co[|]Lab Mani-Fe[A]St[O], Virginia Barratt , Ashley Haywood , Nick Taylor , single work prose
Jenga, Kafka, and the Triumph Of Academic Capitalism : A Taxonomy of Scholars and Their COVID Capital, Kate Cantrell , Kelly Palmer , single work essay
'As universities around Australia sever entire schools and faculties, others face collapse entirely. An over-dependence on international revenue and an unhappy marriage with the federal government had many universities already feeling some discomfort before COVID-19 exacerbated the pain. Whether universities rapidly decline, or languish and recover, they will undoubtedly see more violent restructuring as they transition into the recovery and renewal phase. In the meantime, the absence of any tangible assistance from the government, combined with mostly short-sighted cost reduction strategies, mean that a sector-wide crisis has now been left to individual universities to manage alone. As Teresa Tija et al. explain, ‘The immediate response of Australian universities was to defer capital works spending, reduce non-salary expenditure, scale back the use of casual and fixed-term staff, and introduce other short-term measures’ (2020: 3). These emergency surgeries, which in many cases have been performed without anaesthesia, reveal that universities need a more innovative ethical strategy for triaging and treating the many systemic disorders that the virus has not only aggravated but also exposed. As several academics have already observed, Australian universities were sick before the pandemic (Kunkler 2020; Zaglas 2020). Indeed, the commodification and destruction of ‘all the collective institutions capable of counteracting the effects of the infernal machine’ (Bourdieu 1998: 4) ensures that those commodified most — that is, the precariat — can do little to save the university from its self-cannibalising tendencies.' (Introduction)
A Mouth Swallowing the Storm : A Fugue for Uncountable Voices, In Her Interior , single work prose

'In this text three emergent accomplices — Krill, Spore and Terra — give voice to the anthropoetics of time-travelling fossil-becomings. They express an ‘animistic perception’ mirroring humans’ ‘default setting’ to ‘encounter ... sensorial surroundings as a field of sensitive and sentient powers’ (Abrams 2019, n.p.). These voices without organs, arising from an alembic transcribed with arcane symbols, had been channeled by In Her Interior (IHI) through field trips, programmatic word theft and the fugue-induced sympoiesis (Dempster 2000) of collaborative writing across timespace and collective production in open systems; inviting surprise, disappointment, destabilisation, crisis, fleeting resolution and homeostasis. The iterative conditions of making were creation-destruction-crisis-creation anew. And thus the results were generative and theoretically repeatable.' (Introduction)

Fractography as Assemblage, Corinna Di Niro , Pablo Muslera , Amelia Walker , single work prose

'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)

We Don’t Want to Go Back To ‘Normal’, When ‘Normal’ Wasn’t Good for Everyone, Bronwyn Fredericks , Abraham Bradfield , single work essay

'Alongside the disruptions caused by the spread of COVID-19 we have heard discourses reflect the theme of normality. Preventative measures employed to ‘flatten the curve’ and stop the spread of disease are often spoken of as creating a temporary ‘new norm’, while a post-COVID-19 world is seen as marking a return to ‘normality’. Positioned within a context defined by heightened uncertainty, anxiety and an urgency to respond to arising health, economic, and other social crises, in this paper we consider what a pre-COVID-19 normal means for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and whether it is something we aspire to return to. Unpacking topics relating to Black deaths in custody and the Black Lives Matter movement we consider the systemic failure of dominant White systems of governance that continuously prove themselves incapable of addressing and responding to the Indigenous voices they claim to represent. Throughout our paper we encourage a deeper consideration of the need to create to a lasting new norm that protects, is informed by, represents, and directly involves Indigenous peoples and their representative bodies. Exemplified by the Uluru Statement from the Heart, we argue that a new norm — which is not characterised by Indigenous socio-economic disadvantages and disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations — must be one where an Indigenous voice is enshrined within the parliamentary process. A new norm must build on the foundation created by the countless Indigenous activists, past and present, who have laid the tracks leading towards meaningful reforms that engages Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. No longer are tokenistic or symbolic gestures of recognition acceptable. The time for a new normal is now.' (Publication abstract)

We Thought We Knew What Summer Was, Susan Ballard , Hannah Brasier, , Sholto Buck , David Carlin , Sophie Langley , Joshua Lobb , Brigid Magner , Catherine McKinnon , Rose Michael , Peta Murray , Francesca Rendle-Short , Lucinda Strahan , Stayci Taylor , single work prose poetry
Master’s Tools, Master’s House, Sandra Renew , single work essay
'The attention being paid to the progression of the Covid-19 pandemic, the environmental destruction caused by changing climate, and the economic challenges of poverty and the obsessive drive to development, are all providing a cover to hide another social disaster. ' (Introduction)
All the Old Crimesi"All the old crimes, all the old violence continues.", Sandra Renew , single work poetry
Cruising into Covid, Dennis Haskell , single work essay

'When thinking about the focus of this issue of Axon on ‘natural, environmental and epidemiological disasters’ it would be hard to go past COVID-19, not only because of its topicality but because it fits all three adjectives. The possible exception is ‘environmental’: while the virus is a feature of the very air we breathe, in many parts of the world it has reduced air pollution and opened up previously prohibited spaces to the animal kingdom. Monkeys run amok in Thai towns, dolphins leap higher than normal in the ship-free Mediterranean around Malta. For almost anyone alive today the virological crisis is the most extraordinary experience of their lives — arguably more threatening than any of the wars with which it is analogised.' (Introduction)

Adrifti"We loll about on a languid,", Dennis Haskell , single work poetry
Plunge and Rise and Sideways Lurchi"Alert, out on the empty ocean", Dennis Haskell , single work poetry
Outlooksi"Tiny water drops scroll together,", Dennis Haskell , single work poetry
A Meditation in Time of Virusi"A strangely lethargic Sunday afternoon", Dennis Haskell , single work poetry

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 12 Jan 2021 09:50:29
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