The Person in the Tree: Shared Writings from Space, Place, Body (original) (raw)

Walking against the current: Generating creative responses to place

Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2015

This article is based on the paper I gave at Place-Based Arts: Brighton Writes on 29 May 2015. Walking allows for an immersive experience of place. As the tradition of the flâneur, the interventions of Situationists and the practice of contemporary Walking Artists demonstrate, walking and creativity share a manifest connection. In this article I present my use of alternative walking practices and discuss how these can be used to generate new creative work. Inspired by psychogeographical methods, I have developed a series of exercises, which I use to create text and which I employ as Learning and Teaching tools with writing students. These include: • Liberties-using the dérive to break convention and explore place afresh • Constraints-using randomly generated directions to steer experience and facilitate discoveries • Subverting mapping and signage-using superimposed mapping and reinterpreting signage in search of synchronicity • Gathering materials-using alternative walks to observe and record materials including found text, sound and image. Walking against the current: generating creative responses to place Sonia Overall 1 This article draws on my own practice-based research and recent case studies using these methods.

Walking as a wandering ethic of (re)location: A public ‘pedagogy of hope’

Journal of Public Pedagogies

This paper considers the public pedagogy of location in relation to walking. I walk and write withand from my compass orientated to the Freirean notion of a ‘pedagogy of hope’. Using an autoethnographic account of a local walk, walking is (re)presented and interpreted as a wanderingethic of (re)location. Temporal and spatial dimensions of my walking are revealed in the social,cultural and ecological context of the bushfires and the pandemic. Drawing from scholars whotheorize embodiment and the multiple natures of body~time~space, the inter and intra-actionswith/in ecologies are presenced in a sensory narrative. To consider walking as a wandering ethicof (re)location, it is argued that various temporal, spatial, material, historical and cultural dimensions are contingent within the context of change as evident in the aftermath of bushfires and thepandemic. What I examine is the inter-play in relation to what is present and otherwise absentwhilst walking that is interpreted as a ‘peda...

Pedagogies of place-spaces: walking-with the postprofessional

Practice, 2021

There has been a re-politicisation of the professional identity of English Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) teachers following revisions to the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum. This move from play-based to more adult-directed teaching has been challenged by the sector. In an attempt to bring back the embodied nature of teaching this article turns to posthumanist and feminist materialist scholarship to articulate how place and space influence ECEC teachers' perceptions of practice. It explores a field trip with ECEC student teachers to a nature reserve on the South Coast of England. We 'walked-with' each other to reimagine philosophical and policy expectations for teachers and children. During this trip we attended to the materialisation of place-space considering how social, cultural, and historical narratives entangle with, and impact on, perceptions of childhoods. These left 'impressions' on teachers' bodies helping them reconsider their pedagogy with young children. The walkers developed their own understanding of the impact of place-space which, although materialised in the moment of the trip, resonated and connected to contemporary perspectives of young children. These moments provide sites to challenge existing policy and professional knowledge allowing for a more expansive view of posthuman post-professional ethical response-able practice.

A Sense of Place: Matters of space, mind and personhood

In everything there is a context of place. These notes are meant to help explore the part that place plays in the identity and development of people especially when they come together in learning groups. Emphasis is placed on the role of the facilitator of “Development Training” groups that use adventurous activities in the outdoors to facilitate personal and organisational change.

IN SEARCH OF THE SHORTCUTS: Walking and narrative in physical, virtual and psychological space

In Search Of The Shortcuts is a practice-led research project carried out from the perspective of an artist. By engaging in a practical and theoretical analysis of how walking and narrative interact in physical, virtual and psychological realms, it asserts that this interaction is vital for defining space. A self-initiated artistic residency is both central to the methodology of the project and enriched by the knowledge gained through the research. In Search Of The Shortcuts situates the past in the present, a shared affective experience around the suburban spaces of the artist’s childhood in Wythenshawe, which lies on the outer fringes of South Manchester. The artist also addresses the relationship between expanded drawing methods and narrative representation, in order to explore how the influence of Wythenshawe and the socio-political context of the 1980s have impacted on his practice. The thesis draws upon the artist’s own past residency experiences, as well as current definitions of the artistic residency. Alongside this, the research explores relevant arts projects and spatial, poetic and non-linear literature that engages with a past to emphasise a present. This draws on Freud’s theories relating to autobiographical and procedural memory, specifically, Freud’s texts Remembering, Repeating and Working Through (1914) and Screen Memories (1899) that analyse an engagement with specific forms of childhood memory and deliberate why we return to fragments of them later in life. Retrieving and activating narrative through the practical methodology of walking is employed through a series of narrative guided walks – both physical and virtual – that are referred to as the Wythy Walks. The virtual, online process, which continually reveals collective and personal narrative, is examined as an artistic/curatorial tool for an exhibition called Unstable Ground. The thesis utilises a parallel ‘conversational’ text whereby one side presents a direct ‘live’ transcript from the Wythy Walks dialogue and the other side supports and highlights this narrative with further social, historical and anecdotal details. The relationships between the recorded walks and the drawn-out narrative and spaces are presented through an online artwork, also called In Search Of The Shortcuts, which incorporates a live outline version of Google Maps. The website maps out and activates the multi-sensory practice, methodology and theory, designed to be experienced in a way that is relevant to the research. Through practical analysis, narrative related to a past is generated. Whilst simultaneously interpreting, connecting with and within a present through the process of the Wythy Walks, the project supports engagement with shared outside, suburban spaces. The environments walked through become, simultaneously, vistas of history; that are interpreted and spoken through them. The Wythy Walks define and emphasise space and time as neither static nor linear. The thesis promotes the definition of spaces as an articulation of a past within a present, through physical and virtual arenas, a valuable collaborative methodology, communicated and presented through the website model.

Writing into or drawing from? Self-manifestation through movement in contemporary writing of space

Contemporary Australian cultural studies has seen a move towards a multimodal awareness of space and place in writing – a speculative turn in both critical and creative work confronting the subject/object dichotomy as a limitation in place-making. Theorists such as Ross Gibson, Stephen Muecke and Michael Farrell offer beautiful conceptualisations of written spaces, drawing from several philosophical traditions, which might give context to contemporary creative practices. This writing regularly draws from movement as an integral feature of the practice discussed, with walking emerging in several approaches to re-envision the poet wanderer. But it is also possible to trace in this writing an act of self-manifestation, a desire for the 'doing-making' of self to be inscribed within the multimodal spaces created. This paper will argue that this layering of self and space in the act of writing is both akin to and actively opposing the tradition of Romantic thought. While several features of the practices invoked might seem to draw from similar acts of immersion in landscape, the underlying trope of the Romantic poet's divine communion is inverted in the speculative drive towards multimodal relation.

Embodied literacies and a poetics of place

English Teaching: Practice and Critique

In this paper I explore the interconnected nature of literacy and the body, and the relation between bodies, landscapes and literacies. I draw on interview data from my doctoral study, the central problematic of which is to provide a rich account of the ways in which teachers' embodied histories, multiple identities and out-of-school lives relate to their environmental communications curriculum. I engage with the narratives of Toni, a primaryschool teacher, and show how she constructs multiple selves in relation to the places where she lives and teaches. My interest here is in how these multiple selves shape, and are shaped by, the actualities of her everyday life and her environmental communications curriculum. I use the feminist poststructuralist notion of body/landscape relations to argue that literacies are intimately tied to bodies and bodies are always somewhere: bodies and landscapes are shaped through acts of reading and writing them. I follow this line of thinking in a discussion of Toni's environmental communications curriculum and the ways of perceiving and acting in the world that curriculum makes possible for her students as they reinscribe relations of selves and the environment.

Space, place and body: temporary coalitions, nodes in a network

The space place and body group formed as a result of a process designed to re-imagine research in the Faculty of Education at Monash University in order to address ‘the big questions of our time’. As a leading global university with campuses in Asia and Europe as well as several in Australia, the Dean of the Faculty cited recent evidence that the field of educational research had become too narrowly focused and that new approaches were needed to enliven the field and move it forward. Individualistic research was no longer supported and groups were formed organically around coalitions of interest. The purpose of the space place and body group was to come together to generate new conceptual, theoretical and methodological resources within the core concepts of space, place and body by collaborating across our differences. In the early phase of our development we focused on linked identity (ontological) and knowledge (epistemological) work, at the intersection of postcolonial and poststructural approaches to place in educational research. A specific interest in alternative and creative methodologies emerged from these onto-epistemological activities. As part of our process we initiated temporary definitions of space, place and body, to appear on our group’s website drawing on examples from our collaborative projects. The text was accompanied by a series of images, which were as important in conveying these early meanings-in-progress as the words. Our website was intended to share these ideas as ‘a stammer’, a work in progress rather than the closed texts of experts. We invited others to participate in a wider conversation of global exchange towards their ongoing evolution.