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We call ourselves the Arctic terns after the birds that migrate between the northern and southern hemispheres. Three of us live in south-west Britain and three in south-east Australia. We tried to make sense of our lockdown lives and the ways we were imbricated in world events. We wrote and made art in response. We read our work to each other and showed each other our artworks. The material practices we developed helped make the pandemic endurable, and at times hilarious. Here we share some of our work and some of our thinking about why it matters.

In 2020 when schooling was abruptly reconfigured by the pandemic, young people were required to demonstrate new capabilities to manage their learning and their wellbeing. This paper reports on the feelings, thoughts and experiences of eight Year 9 and 10 students in NSW and Victoria about the initial period of online learning in Australian schools that resulted from the Covid-19 pandemic. Beyond dominant narratives of vulnerability and losses in learning, our participants offered counternarratives that stressed their capacities to rise and meet the times. We trace three central themes on how they: found moments of agency that increased their confidence, reconfigured resilience as a socially responsible set of practices, deployed sociality as a resource for the benefit of themselves and others. The pandemic opened up conversations with young people about where and how learning takes place and how schools might adapt and respond to young people’s growing sense of urgency about the future of schooling.

Vocational decisions made at school have significant long term impacts on young people’s life chances, their opportunities for securing decent jobs and economic growth for themselves, their familie...

In secondary schools, English teachers are often made responsible for writing results in national testing. Yet there have been few studies that focussed on this key group, or on how pedagogical practices have been impacted in the teaching of writing in their classrooms. This study investigated practices of English teachers in four secondary schools across different states, systems and regions. It developed a novel method of case study at a distance that required no classroom presence or school visits for the researchers and allowed a multi-sited and geographically dispersed design. Teachers were invited to select classroom artefacts pertaining to the teaching of writing in their English classes, compile individualised e-portfolios and reflect on these items in writing and in digitally conducted interviews, as well as elaborating on their broader philosophies and feelings about the teaching of writing. Despite and sometimes because of NAPLAN, these teachers held strong views on explicit teaching of elements of writing, but approached these in different ways. The artefacts that they created animated their teaching practices, connected them to their students and their subject, suggested both the pressure of externally driven homogenising approaches to writing and the creative individualised responses of skilled teachers within their unique contexts. In addition to providing granular detail about pedagogical practices in the teaching of writing in the NAPLAN era, the contribution of this paper lies in its methodological adaptation of case study at a distance through teacher-curated artefact portfolios that enabled a deep dive into individual teachers’ practices.

This article focuses on academic temporalities to consider the rhythms, repetitions and discontinuities of academic work. Using a photo-serial methodology which generated an archive of images taken at the same time of day for a fortnight, we take up material and affective theories to rethink academic work as assemblages or micro-worlds that emerge through happenstance at particular moments. Our nonrepresentational, new materialist approach shifts away from discursive analyses of accounts of academic labour, and from assumptions of visual methods as ‘documentary’ representations of the world. We adopt an emergent, processual and experimental mode of inquiry that works against linearity, and an analytical approach that attends to the ‘punctum’ of images through glimpses, tangents and elusive details. The contributions of this paper lie in its mobilisation of images to think differently about the ubiquity and ‘throwntogetherness’ of academic labour, and its theoretical reframing of academic temporalities as composed of affective and material entanglements of events, relations, doings, objects, and spaces of all kinds.

Neoliberal ideologies, marketization and performative regimes associated with recent reforms in universities have exerted considerable pressure on academic working conditions and subjects in recent years. While analysing these pressures is important, it is also productive to consider the ways in which academics engage in moments of resistance by mobilising resources beyond those of critique. This paper therefore focuses on joy and positive affect in the everyday moments of academic life. It utilises the feminist methodology of collective biography to explore ways of making the restricted spaces of our working day more expansive and finding within them unexpected openings for joy. Our analysis of the stories included in this paper traces the mercurial and ambiguous affective atmospheres of academic work. We suggest that joy is founded upon connections with others, that it arises in different academic spaces and that it can lead to revised knowing of ourselves. We argue that the glimpses of joy evident in this paper provoke affective attunement within the everyday, sensitizing us to other fragments of joy and providing strategies to strengthen that resistance.

This article offers a diffractive methodological intervention into workplace studies of academic life. In its engagement of a playful, performative research and writing practice the article speaks back to technocratic organisational and sociological workplace ‘time and motion’ studies which centre on the human and rational, and presume a linear teleology of cause and effect. As a counterpoint, we deploy posthumanist new materialist research practices which refuse human-centric approaches and aim to give matter its due. As a means to analyse what comes out of our joint workspaces photo project we produce two ‘passes’ through data – two diffractive experiments which destabilise what normally counts as ‘findings’ and their academic presentation. The article deploys the motif of ‘starting somewhere else’ to signal both our intention to keep data animated, alive and interactive, and to utilise visual and written modes of seriality as enabling constraints which produce a more generative focus on the mundane, emergent, unforeseen, and happenstance in studies of daily working life.

Universities are dominated by marketisation, individualisation and competition, forces inimical to individual flourishing and collaborative endeavours. This article presents four stories from a collective biography workshop in which a group of women academics explored everyday moments in their university lives. The stories are grim tales of damage, silencing, frustration and cynicism, whose affects continue to reverberate. The article makes two contributions to higher education research. One, its focus on mundane moments offers insights into embodied dynamics of gender, power and affect within the neoliberal university. Two, it demonstrates how collective biography as a feminist methodology can mobilise increased awareness of shared experiences and, thereby, enable participants to work together to recognise and contest the affective grimness of their workplaces.

This article deploys a collective biographical methodology as a political and epistemological intervention in order to explore the emotional and affective politics of academic work for women in neoliberal universities. The managerial practices of contemporary universities tend to elevate disembodied reason over emotion; to repress, commodify, or co-opt emotional and affective labor; to increase individualization and competition among academic workers; and to disregard the relational work that the article suggests is essential for well-being at work. The apparent marginalization of feminist and feminine ways of being, thinking, and feeling in academia is examined through close readings of three narrative vignettes, which are based on memories of the everyday academic spaces of meetings, workshops, and mentoring. These stories explore moments of the breaking of ties among women and between men and women, as well as document how feminist relationalities can bind and exclude. The article suggests that academic ties are both part of the problem and the solution to countering neoliberal policies, and that academic relationships, especially with other women, are often experienced as unrealized spaces of hope. Building on feminist scholarship about race and diversity, the article reflects on how relational practices like collective biography create both inclusions and exclusions. Nevertheless, it suggests that the methodology of collective biography might engender more sustainable and ethicalways of being in academic workplaces because it provides the resources to begin to create a new collective imaginary of academia.

Our contribution to this collection responds through collaborative writing to the editors’ summons for writing that aspires to “free impulses to generate different creations and different connections” (p. 8). During our 2014-15 collaborative writing project at Edinburgh we – a group of faculty and students – engaged in writing and creating practices that asked us to think again about citationality. We found ourselves borrowing each other’s words and phrases to inspire new writing of our own; we took cues from each other’s breathing and sighs; we riffed off each other’s movements and gestures. Our processes were iterative, relational, affectively responsive: tightly bounded understandings of citation fail to recognise the ubiquity of the indirect citational practices in which we all are continuously involved. In this paper we draw from and inquire into these practices, thinking with Deleuze and Guattari as we become-monstrous in our collaborations. Citing all the while.

This layered account of an inquiry into ‘red’ emerged out of a collective biography workshop. In the middle of the Wiltshire countryside, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars gathered together to write and make other things and marks on paper that asked questions of, and into, the spaces between words, people, things and their environments. We did not set out to workshop or write into or paint ‘red’ but, rather, it was red that slipped in, uninvited, and painted and wrote us. Red arose as a blush or a stain seeping amongst us that became referenced obliquely by material objects, metaphors and fairytales. The stain spread, became noticeable through our weekend together and beyond it, creating another (bright red artery) vein of connection to write with.

As the incoming editorial team of Gender and Education we write this at an interesting moment for global gender politics. People in the UK have recently taken a vote to leave the EU with serious, a...

In this paper we explore the very particular forms and productive possibilities of collaborative writing that are generated in collective biography workshops, focusing in particular on the collaborative generation of memory stories. Drawing on conceptual resources from Deleuze and Barad we work our way through the paradox of working with intensely felt evocative memories within the poststructural conceptual space of the deconstructed -of-thought. We analyze a story told in a collective biography workshop on writing, and work with it in relation to the concepts of being as emergent within the encounter, intra-action or the entanglement of agencies, the significance of matter, the movement from perception and affection to percept and affect, and diffraction as concept and practice.

In this paper, we examine The Daring Book for Girls and its follow-ups for their constructions of gender. We suggest that, as examples of how neo-liberalism finds its way into notions of proper girlhood, the books provide intentional and unintentional “lessons” to their readers in how to perform themselves in these times. In both the American and the Australian edition of the initial text, girls are instructed in complex ways to be the right kind of girl: enterprising with a do-it-yourself (DIY) attitude, tolerant of diversity, and nature-loving. Through the constructions of girls as “good citizens” by rules and strict boundaries, the books present to readers a highly nostalgic version of girlhood while simultaneously serving as a pedagogical manual for neo-liberal times.

This paper describes a poetic response to the school-based practicum for beginning secondary teachers. Following their first practicum experience, in their English Method class back at the university, students pooled sensory details and memories of the week they had just spent in schools to write their own poems.The paper includes one of the poems and some thoughts about the complexity, ambivalence and embodied knowing that poetry opens up space for in reflecting on initial school experiences for beginning teachers.

This paper describes how works created in a visual arts workshop enable the author to work obliquely with stories about teaching Aboriginal children generated in a collective biography. The deconstructive work is framed by Prime Minister Rudd’s 2008 “sorry” speech to Aboriginal Australians and Mazzei’s work on silence with white teachers. The visual arts methodology allows a shift from narrative logic and literal detail to metonymy and symbolism while the materiality of artefacts and art equipment invite particular representations and interpretations to emerge. For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry. To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry…. To the Stolen Generations, I say the following: as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the Government of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the Parliament of Australia, I am sorry. (Rudd, 2008, italics added)

This paper examines the media and political landscapes within which “whole language” is currently constituted in Australia. Through surveying the themes and rhetoric deployed in media texts over recent years, we consider how “whole language” has been taken up as part of a wider media campaign around education generally. We consider how this campaign has been instrumental in constructing a moral panic around literacy education in particular. We begin with an overview of how the literacy standards of Australia's young people compare on international measures with young people elsewhere. We consider how the media has bundled these with populist concerns about literacy pedagogy and other educational issues to create a sense of national crisis about education. We argue that the sociological concept of "moral panic" provides a useful and systematic theoretical framework for reading these discursive tactics of the media. Finally, we examine how a National Inquiry into literacy responded to this panic by reinscribing a familiar – and unhelpful - binary between “whole language” and phonics-based instruction. In the title and in the body of the paper we keep “whole language” in quotation marks to remind the readers that use of the term in the media texts that are analysed differs widely from its usage by literacy specialists.