Cirrus@Austlit

'This article outlines successful practices employed by two experienced researchers from different knowledge fields (in this case, creative writing/applied arts and nursing/applied science) who bring diverse research methodologies and approaches to work on multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary projects. Defining single discipline, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research, and based on a review of their own disciplinary – as well as multidisciplinary and traditional ‘mixed methods’, research methodologies – this article investigates how these researchers navigate the range of available methodologies to both make meaning in their research projects and also allow a wide, and project-relevant, dissemination of their findings. It profiles completed collaborative projects and evaluates the approaches utilised, including how this rationale has influenced their practice as higher degree research student supervisors.' (Publication abstract)

'Autobiographical writing embodies a wide range of interdisciplinary actions not only from the perspective of the writing of the narrative but also for those reading it. Drawing on interdisciplinary studies when researching the personal gives a broader base on which to base the creative work and an understanding of its purpose. This article examines aspects of writing the self in memoir, such as memory, truth, embodiment and identity, drawing on work from a range of disciplines and conclude showing the effects that these interdisciplinary studies can have on our creative selves and our research.' (Publication abstract)

'After two colonial occupations, one systematically brutal racial segregation campaign and two decades of democracy, there is no wonder that contemporary South Africa is characterised by complex, hybrid identities. This paper connects this past and present though the lens of embodiment, taking six snapshots that tell significant stories of South African bodies that span time and place. Together, slowly, these bodies create a corporeal dialogue, a weaving in of various writing practices and around the issue of embodiment in space and time. In the interplay between their differing levels of contextual strangeness in these narratives, I hope to reflect a certain social estrangement that characterises something of a country in its third decade.' (Publication summary)

'Using hokku poet Bashō’s aesthetics of wandering, as defined by Thomas Heyd, I argue that, by detailing the excruciating pointlessness of work undertaken according to commands that take little or no account of their feasibility, Richard Flanagan’s novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (which takes its title from Bashō) transforms the features of this aesthetics into the lived experience of prisoners of war on the ‘line’. In doing so, Flanagan transfers Bashō’s aesthetics into a represented actuality through the privileging of subjectivity over identity and the dissolution of the body on the line. The three prongs to Bashō’s aesthetics are found in Flanagan’s novel. In this, Flanagan is identifying the complexity of meanings evident in the terminology of such aesthetics, rendering what appears positive in the context of Bashō’s poetry negative in its practical application as this is articulated through the prisoners’ wartime experiences. Rather than being formative, Flanagan’s novel suggests wartime experience has a complexly ‘opposite’ effect. This is apparent in the complications of identity represented in postwar terms as a disunity (rather than a coherent unity), as articulated through the use of spatial metaphors that reverse the formative intensities of subjectivity and body through symbolic acts of dispersal and dissolution.' (Publication abstract)

'This article considers the place of image-making in interdisciplinary research. The author created a visual response to each of the other articles in this Special Issue, and reflecting on this process, thus investigating a multi-layering of interdisciplinarity: the texts themselves each engage across disciplines and the visual element then overlays a further interdisciplinarity. The arguments around the validity of creative practice as a focus for scholarly research are examined in light of Sullivan's (2010) assertion that ‘artistic thinking’ constitutes scholarly research because it invokes metacognitive practices.' (Publication abstract)