Amelia Walker | University of South Australia (original) (raw)
Papers by Amelia Walker
Ludic Inquiries into Power and Pedagogy in Higher Education: How Games Play Us, 2024
This chapter explores issues that provoked this research collection of ludic inquiries into power... more This chapter explores issues that provoked this research collection of ludic inquiries into power, pedagogy, and games. The authors note key works from existing bodies of literature, and how this book’s contributions extend previous works on these themes. Chapter 1 also elaborates terms and concepts including literal games and games of power, formal and public pedagogies, and ludic inquiry. Particularly influential approaches include finite games versus an infinite game, conceptualisations of games as a magic circle, and reclaiming games as spaces of transformation. A key point is that games are involved in maintaining systems of uneven power in white-western cultures. Critique of these games can help raise awareness of injustices and signal possibilities for ethical change.
Ludic Inquiries into Power and Pedagogy in Higher Education: How Games Play Us, 2025
LGBTQIA+ people (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, plus more) face discrim... more LGBTQIA+ people (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, plus more) face discrimination across many social contexts, including academia. This chapter considers board games as a mode of public pedagogy that interacts with formal pedagogy to sustain situations of injustice for LGBTQIA+ people both in and beyond academic settings. The chapter also considers how injustices affecting LGBTQIA+ people intersect with those relating to factors of race, Indigeneity, disability, age, social class, and more. The methodological approach is that of co-creative writing-based inquiry through witnessing and assemblage. Collaborative prose poems are used to reveal similarities and differences in the experiences of eight LGBTQIA+ co-creators writing from different-yet-intersecting backgrounds of lived experience. The prose poems show how literal board games reflect and reinstate ideologies that support maintenance of metaphorical power games involving social privilege and injustices in and beyond academic cultures. However, reflecting the argument from queer theory that agency often resides in the same locations as its regulation, the chapter also shows how queer pleasures can be found in board games despite their problems and poses agential possibilities through approaching academia’s metaphorical games in ways that queer(y) their rules to creatively broaden out the fields for play.
Ethical Space, 2024
This paper applies literary rhythmanalysis to six queer life writing texts from The incompletenes... more This paper applies literary rhythmanalysis to six queer life writing texts from The incompleteness book, an Australasian anthology of writings produced in 2020 under early COVID-19 home isolation protocols. The analysis is steered by Halberstam’s theory of queer time in articulation with rhythmanalysis as theorised by Lefebvre and Régulier. The paper includes discussion of these driving theories, followed by the literary rhythmanalysis itself. Across the six texts, two common themes arise. The first is geo-temporal dissociation. The second is an acute sense of pain stemming from social arrhythmias that preceded the pandemic but were exacerbated or made more noticeable by it. The concluding section reflects from a current day vantage on what these findings reveal about queer people’s relationships to dominant social rhythms before and during 2020 and how this can inform future situations.
New Writing, 2024
This paper explores poetry as a means of augmenting cross-cultural connections; we maintain that ... more This paper explores poetry as a means of augmenting cross-cultural connections; we maintain that the genre is inherently humanistic, and that connecting with poets abroad and at large can be generative, exploratory, and invested in locating traits amid our differences that ulitmately draw us closer toward renewed ethical engagements. In a world that seems increasingly distracted by noise (often produced willfully, it seems, to ideological intent), poetry remains yet a means of intervening, interfering with, and interrupting the myopias of narrowed accounts of self, and self in relation to others. We argue that poetry can continue to make uncommonly useful contributions towards a common humanity: as our numerous inter-cultural projects demonstrate, to think poetically and connectively is to work non-reductively, in resonant ways that can shift us beyond the quotidian, into the boundlessly possible.
Cordite Poetry Review, 2024
Samantha Faulkner is a writer and poet from Badu and Moa Islands in the Torres Strait and the Yad... more Samantha Faulkner is a writer and poet from Badu and Moa Islands in the Torres Strait and the Yadhaigana and Wuthuthi/Wuthati peoples of Cape York Peninsula. She is the author of Life B’Long Ali Drummond: A Life in the Torres Strait (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007) and editor of Pamle: Torres Strait Islanders in Canberra (Kuracca, 2018) as well as the forthcoming nonfiction anthology Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia (Black Inc, 2024). Faulkner has represented women and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander interests on local, state, and national boards and is a Director of the ACT Torres Strait Islanders Corporation. She is a current board member of both the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN) and Us Mob Writing Group, a Canberra-based First Nations writing collective. When I travelled to Ngunnawal Country (Canberra) in late 2023, I invited Faulkner to sit down for a chat about her writing practice, her insights into community work, and the importance of nurturing new and emerging writers. I was thrilled and grateful when Faulkner agreed. This interview is an edited transcript of our exchange.
TEXT
James Vicars reviews Antonia Pont’s A Philosophy of Practising; Amelia Walker reviews Owen Bulloc... more James Vicars reviews Antonia Pont’s A Philosophy of Practising; Amelia Walker reviews Owen Bullock’s Pancakes for Neptune and Timothy Mathews’s There and Not Here; Stephanie Green reviews Rosanna E. Licari’s Earlier; Sophie Finlay reviews Willo Drummond’s Moon Wrasse; Michel Seminara reviews Richard James Allen’s Text Messages from the Universe; Ella Jeffery reviews Rose Lucas’s Increments of the Everyday; Paul Scully reviews Les Wicks’s Time Taken: New & Selected; and Moya Costella reviews an edited collection by HK Hummel and Stephanie Lenox, Short-form Creative Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology.
Geographies of Gender-based Violence
Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment
TEXT
This article approaches group fitness as a textual practice and site for creative writing researc... more This article approaches group fitness as a textual practice and site for creative writing research analysis. Through autoethnography and discourse analysis of cues from instructor DVDs, I demonstrate how choreographed barbell fitness classes appeal to people uprooted by personal and/or socio-economic upheavals. My treatment of uprootedness connects Hannah Arendt’s writings on twentieth-century totalitarianism with Simone Weil’s account of “the need for roots”. These I read in the context of moral philosopher Elizabeth Minnich’s call to revive Arendtian theory via attention to “the evils of banality”. The resulting reflections position group fitness as a practice that reflects and reinstates cultural attitudes. I also consider how analysis of group fitness can inform understanding of human responses to uprooting situations including 2020’s COVID-19 outbreaks and global financial challenges of the early twenty-first century. Observing that group fitness operates together with popular ...
Axon: Creative Explorations
Geographies of Gender-Based Violence
Poetry and Sustainability in Education, eds Sandra Lee Kleppe and Angela Sorby, 2022
This chapter explores pedagogical potentials of ecopoetry-an 'inclusive, ecological and political... more This chapter explores pedagogical potentials of ecopoetry-an 'inclusive, ecological and political' range of writing practices that 'interrogate the egregious impact of humans on the world and other species' (Chisholm 2014, 119). According to environmental education researcher Alette Willis, reading and discussing ecological writing can 'facilitate reader shifts in perceptions' about 'the valuing of non-human organisms and the more-than-human world' (2019, 443) because it immerses people in 'aesthetic, emotional and relational contexts' that encourage transformation of people's 'attitudes and even their identities' (455). A potential problem, however, is that much ecopoetry is formally complex and thus not always
Text: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, 2022
This article approaches group fitness as a textual practice and site for creative writing researc... more This article approaches group fitness as a textual practice and site for creative writing research analysis. Through autoethnography and discourse analysis of cues from instructor DVDs, I demonstrate how choreographed barbell fitness classes appeal to people uprooted by personal and/or socioeconomic upheavals. My treatment of uprootedness connects Hannah Arendt's writings on twentieth-century totalitarianism with Simone Weil's account of "the need for roots". These I read in the context of moral philosopher Elizabeth Minnich's call to revive Arendtian theory via attention to "the evils of banality". The resulting reflections position group fitness as a practice that reflects and reinstates cultural attitudes. I also consider how analysis of group fitness can inform understanding of human responses to uprooting situations including 2020's COVID-19 outbreaks and global financial challenges of the early twenty-first century. Observing that group fitness operates together with popular music, team sports, and fashion, I conclude by emphasising the need for ongoing critique of fitness alongside these and other ordinary-seeming aspects of our always-already unprecedented, never-normal lives. Biographical note: Prior to her academic career, Amelia Walker worked in nursing and group fitness instruction. At present, she lectures at the University of South Australia. Her published research articles are thematically diverse, but all in some way engage creative writing as a method for thinking through problems and developing knowledge outcomes.
Ludic Inquiries into Power and Pedagogy in Higher Education: How Games Play Us, 2024
This chapter explores issues that provoked this research collection of ludic inquiries into power... more This chapter explores issues that provoked this research collection of ludic inquiries into power, pedagogy, and games. The authors note key works from existing bodies of literature, and how this book’s contributions extend previous works on these themes. Chapter 1 also elaborates terms and concepts including literal games and games of power, formal and public pedagogies, and ludic inquiry. Particularly influential approaches include finite games versus an infinite game, conceptualisations of games as a magic circle, and reclaiming games as spaces of transformation. A key point is that games are involved in maintaining systems of uneven power in white-western cultures. Critique of these games can help raise awareness of injustices and signal possibilities for ethical change.
Ludic Inquiries into Power and Pedagogy in Higher Education: How Games Play Us, 2025
LGBTQIA+ people (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, plus more) face discrim... more LGBTQIA+ people (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, plus more) face discrimination across many social contexts, including academia. This chapter considers board games as a mode of public pedagogy that interacts with formal pedagogy to sustain situations of injustice for LGBTQIA+ people both in and beyond academic settings. The chapter also considers how injustices affecting LGBTQIA+ people intersect with those relating to factors of race, Indigeneity, disability, age, social class, and more. The methodological approach is that of co-creative writing-based inquiry through witnessing and assemblage. Collaborative prose poems are used to reveal similarities and differences in the experiences of eight LGBTQIA+ co-creators writing from different-yet-intersecting backgrounds of lived experience. The prose poems show how literal board games reflect and reinstate ideologies that support maintenance of metaphorical power games involving social privilege and injustices in and beyond academic cultures. However, reflecting the argument from queer theory that agency often resides in the same locations as its regulation, the chapter also shows how queer pleasures can be found in board games despite their problems and poses agential possibilities through approaching academia’s metaphorical games in ways that queer(y) their rules to creatively broaden out the fields for play.
Ethical Space, 2024
This paper applies literary rhythmanalysis to six queer life writing texts from The incompletenes... more This paper applies literary rhythmanalysis to six queer life writing texts from The incompleteness book, an Australasian anthology of writings produced in 2020 under early COVID-19 home isolation protocols. The analysis is steered by Halberstam’s theory of queer time in articulation with rhythmanalysis as theorised by Lefebvre and Régulier. The paper includes discussion of these driving theories, followed by the literary rhythmanalysis itself. Across the six texts, two common themes arise. The first is geo-temporal dissociation. The second is an acute sense of pain stemming from social arrhythmias that preceded the pandemic but were exacerbated or made more noticeable by it. The concluding section reflects from a current day vantage on what these findings reveal about queer people’s relationships to dominant social rhythms before and during 2020 and how this can inform future situations.
New Writing, 2024
This paper explores poetry as a means of augmenting cross-cultural connections; we maintain that ... more This paper explores poetry as a means of augmenting cross-cultural connections; we maintain that the genre is inherently humanistic, and that connecting with poets abroad and at large can be generative, exploratory, and invested in locating traits amid our differences that ulitmately draw us closer toward renewed ethical engagements. In a world that seems increasingly distracted by noise (often produced willfully, it seems, to ideological intent), poetry remains yet a means of intervening, interfering with, and interrupting the myopias of narrowed accounts of self, and self in relation to others. We argue that poetry can continue to make uncommonly useful contributions towards a common humanity: as our numerous inter-cultural projects demonstrate, to think poetically and connectively is to work non-reductively, in resonant ways that can shift us beyond the quotidian, into the boundlessly possible.
Cordite Poetry Review, 2024
Samantha Faulkner is a writer and poet from Badu and Moa Islands in the Torres Strait and the Yad... more Samantha Faulkner is a writer and poet from Badu and Moa Islands in the Torres Strait and the Yadhaigana and Wuthuthi/Wuthati peoples of Cape York Peninsula. She is the author of Life B’Long Ali Drummond: A Life in the Torres Strait (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007) and editor of Pamle: Torres Strait Islanders in Canberra (Kuracca, 2018) as well as the forthcoming nonfiction anthology Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia (Black Inc, 2024). Faulkner has represented women and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander interests on local, state, and national boards and is a Director of the ACT Torres Strait Islanders Corporation. She is a current board member of both the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN) and Us Mob Writing Group, a Canberra-based First Nations writing collective. When I travelled to Ngunnawal Country (Canberra) in late 2023, I invited Faulkner to sit down for a chat about her writing practice, her insights into community work, and the importance of nurturing new and emerging writers. I was thrilled and grateful when Faulkner agreed. This interview is an edited transcript of our exchange.
TEXT
James Vicars reviews Antonia Pont’s A Philosophy of Practising; Amelia Walker reviews Owen Bulloc... more James Vicars reviews Antonia Pont’s A Philosophy of Practising; Amelia Walker reviews Owen Bullock’s Pancakes for Neptune and Timothy Mathews’s There and Not Here; Stephanie Green reviews Rosanna E. Licari’s Earlier; Sophie Finlay reviews Willo Drummond’s Moon Wrasse; Michel Seminara reviews Richard James Allen’s Text Messages from the Universe; Ella Jeffery reviews Rose Lucas’s Increments of the Everyday; Paul Scully reviews Les Wicks’s Time Taken: New & Selected; and Moya Costella reviews an edited collection by HK Hummel and Stephanie Lenox, Short-form Creative Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology.
Geographies of Gender-based Violence
Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment
TEXT
This article approaches group fitness as a textual practice and site for creative writing researc... more This article approaches group fitness as a textual practice and site for creative writing research analysis. Through autoethnography and discourse analysis of cues from instructor DVDs, I demonstrate how choreographed barbell fitness classes appeal to people uprooted by personal and/or socio-economic upheavals. My treatment of uprootedness connects Hannah Arendt’s writings on twentieth-century totalitarianism with Simone Weil’s account of “the need for roots”. These I read in the context of moral philosopher Elizabeth Minnich’s call to revive Arendtian theory via attention to “the evils of banality”. The resulting reflections position group fitness as a practice that reflects and reinstates cultural attitudes. I also consider how analysis of group fitness can inform understanding of human responses to uprooting situations including 2020’s COVID-19 outbreaks and global financial challenges of the early twenty-first century. Observing that group fitness operates together with popular ...
Axon: Creative Explorations
Geographies of Gender-Based Violence
Poetry and Sustainability in Education, eds Sandra Lee Kleppe and Angela Sorby, 2022
This chapter explores pedagogical potentials of ecopoetry-an 'inclusive, ecological and political... more This chapter explores pedagogical potentials of ecopoetry-an 'inclusive, ecological and political' range of writing practices that 'interrogate the egregious impact of humans on the world and other species' (Chisholm 2014, 119). According to environmental education researcher Alette Willis, reading and discussing ecological writing can 'facilitate reader shifts in perceptions' about 'the valuing of non-human organisms and the more-than-human world' (2019, 443) because it immerses people in 'aesthetic, emotional and relational contexts' that encourage transformation of people's 'attitudes and even their identities' (455). A potential problem, however, is that much ecopoetry is formally complex and thus not always
Text: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, 2022
This article approaches group fitness as a textual practice and site for creative writing researc... more This article approaches group fitness as a textual practice and site for creative writing research analysis. Through autoethnography and discourse analysis of cues from instructor DVDs, I demonstrate how choreographed barbell fitness classes appeal to people uprooted by personal and/or socioeconomic upheavals. My treatment of uprootedness connects Hannah Arendt's writings on twentieth-century totalitarianism with Simone Weil's account of "the need for roots". These I read in the context of moral philosopher Elizabeth Minnich's call to revive Arendtian theory via attention to "the evils of banality". The resulting reflections position group fitness as a practice that reflects and reinstates cultural attitudes. I also consider how analysis of group fitness can inform understanding of human responses to uprooting situations including 2020's COVID-19 outbreaks and global financial challenges of the early twenty-first century. Observing that group fitness operates together with popular music, team sports, and fashion, I conclude by emphasising the need for ongoing critique of fitness alongside these and other ordinary-seeming aspects of our always-already unprecedented, never-normal lives. Biographical note: Prior to her academic career, Amelia Walker worked in nursing and group fitness instruction. At present, she lectures at the University of South Australia. Her published research articles are thematically diverse, but all in some way engage creative writing as a method for thinking through problems and developing knowledge outcomes.