Fractography as Assemblage single work   prose  
Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 Fractography as Assemblage
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'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)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Axon : Creative Explorations Manifestos, Diatribes and Creative Interventions vol. 10 no. 2 December 2020 20949009 2020 periodical issue

    '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)

    2020
Last amended 12 Jan 2021 08:44:16
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