This is Not a Seminar is a multidisciplinary forum established in 2012 at Edith Cowan University in Australia to support practice-led and practice-based Higher Degree by Research students. The Faculty of Education and Arts at ECU includes cohorts of postgraduate research students in, for example, performance, design, writing and visual arts. We established the TINAS programme to assist postgraduate research students in connecting their creative practices to methodological, theoretical and conceptual approaches whilst fostering an atmosphere of rapport across creative disciplines. (...) The pilot programme conducted for six months in 2012 comprised dialogues with experienced creative researchers; critical reading sessions on practice-led theory; and workshops in journaling, ethics and copyright. This article is a reflection on the strengths and limitations of TINAS and future projections. More than an additional teaching and learning service, the programme has become a vital forum for creative dialogue. (shrink)

The ancient aesthetics of yijing has played a crucial role in traditional Chinese philosophy, literature and art since the eighth century CE. Defined variously by early and contemporary writers, yijing links an artist's emotional domain to objects in the world. This article conceptualises yijing as an ecological aesthetics and distinguishes it from an environmental aesthetics. In particular, two aspects of yijing render it an eco-aesthetics: subject-object correspondence (or 'engagement'); and empathic identification with the environment (or 'bio-empathy'). Three brief case studies (...) from urban planning, environmental conservation and the creative arts demonstrate the contemporary importance of yijing to ecological issues. (shrink)

Plants have been—and, for reasons of human sustenance and creative inspiration, will continue to be—centrally important to societies globally. Yet, plants—including herbs, shrubs, and trees—are commonly characterized in Western thought as passive, sessile, and silent automatons lacking a brain, as accessories or backdrops to human affairs. Paradoxically, the qualities considered absent in plants are those employed by biologists to argue for intelligence in animals. Yet an emerging body of research in the sciences and humanities challenges animal-centred biases in determining consciousness, (...) intelligence, volition, and complex communication capacities amongst living beings. In light of recent theoretical developments in our understandings of plants, this article proposes an interdisciplinary framework for researching flora: human-plant studies. Building upon the conceptual formations of the humanities, social sciences, and plant sciences as advanced by Val Plumwood, Deborah Bird Rose, Libby Robin, and most importantly Matthew Hall and Anthony Trewavas, as well as precedents in the emerging areas of human-animal studies, I will sketch the conceptual basis for the further consideration and exploration of this interdisciplinary framework. (shrink)

In his opening address, Dershowitz only dealt with the issue obliquely, and devoted most of his time to berating the Palestinians, Chomsky, and professors who criticize Israel, and challenged Chomsky to form an alliance with him to work for peace in the area-- a seemingly worthy proposal but totally off topic. Chomsky began by saying that the only thing Dershowitz said that he couldn't take issue with was that the two of them had once been in some summer camp together. (...) Chomsky then proceeded to provide background to the crisis and pointed out that the current Israel -USA policy and any proposal emanating from it would lead to only further disaster. The Palestinians are not prepared to accept a non-contiguous Bantustan "state" which is what is being offered. Instead he clearly stated that it was the Geneva Accord that provided a basis for meaningful future negotiations. Dershowitz, on the other hand, only at the end, when pressed on this matter, said that the new Sharon-Peres party would "offer" the Palestinians a "proposal"--which the Palestinians should not refuse! This was his answer to "where do we go from here." So much for substance by Dershowitz. Debate score? (shrink)

Since the Romantic era in Europe, walking has shifted from an obligatory activity tied to livelihood, through mobility, to a recreational pursuit of life quality, engaging the landscape on foot. 2 In the above quotation from the FABC, one of the earliest confederations of independent bushwalking or- ganisations in Australia, three elements make it germane: the bushwalker, the bush itself and the appreciation of the bush. As a therapeutic get-away from the city, bushwalking is amenable to “the mind and the (...) body” and remedies the effects of urban stressors like “hustle and bustle.” Through walking, the urban dweller assumes the persona of an early European explorer − say John Eyre or Alexander von Humboldt − who charted terra nullius “where no man has trod before,” or at least no European human. Most significantly, the recreational bushwalker, who would have typically been a male member of the upper-classes, experiences a transformation of values, realising that the bush looms largely beyond the horizon of city life, and its urban, suburban and rural spheres of organisation and commerce. (shrink)

Botanical illustration combines scientific knowledge and artistic technique. However, whereas illustrated botanical images record static visual qualities, such as form and color, written botanical narratives supply crucial sensory, ecological, historical, and cultural contexts that complement visual representation. Understanding the text-image interface—where images and words intersect—contributes to humanities-based analyses of botanical illustration and illustrators. More specifically, a process philosophy perspective reveals the extent to which botanical representations engage the temporality, cyclicality, and contextuality of the living plants being illustrated. This article takes (...) up these themes through a comparative theoretical study of three female Western Australian botanical illustrators, Georgiana Leake, Emily Pelloe, and Philippa Nikulinsky, whose lives together span the 183 year history of the Swan River Colony and the state of Western Australia. I apply a processist framework to examine the text-image interface of their works. All three illustrators use some form of textuality: marginalia, annotations, written accompaniments, introductory statements, and other narrative materials. In examining their written commentaries and traces, I identify the emergence of a process mode of botanical illustration that represents plants as ecological, historical, cultural, and temporal organisms. (shrink)

As an arts-based research approach, poetic enquiry has been theorised and applied recently in the social sciences and in education. In this article, I extend its usage to eco-critical studies of Australian flora and fauna. The Southwest corner of Western Australia affords opportunities to deploy arts-based methodologies, including field poetry, for celebrating the natural heritage of a region of distinguished biodiversity. I suggest that lyric practices in places such as Lesueur National Park and Anstey-Keane Damplands in southern Perth can catalyse (...) embodied engagements with flora. The outcome of these practices is the invocation of the multiple senses— including the proximities of touch and taste—towards senses of place involving physical interactions with plants and their habitats. I will discuss poetic enquiry in relation to the limitations of landscape aesthetics. Visual aesthetic modes tend to frame botanical environments as a succession of images. In contrast, an embodied aesthetics closes visual distance towards sensory intimacies and experiences of ecological processes as sensations. Throughout the article, I use an interlude structure that shifts between theoretical elaborations, narrative vignettes that contextualise the poetic practice, and the poems themselves initiated in the field. A continuum between visuality and multi-sensoriality emerges and potentially deepens human appreciation of flora. Poetic enquiry into flora is a means for exploring this continuum towards an understanding of what intimacy with plants in a place entails. (shrink)

Bearing witness is complex, and haunted by the past and the present. It takes place through and within a web of power relations attested by truth telling. This essay suggests that ghosts have the c...

Unbraided Lines offers a foray into environmental writing—an emerging literary genre that engages the current ecological crisis through poetry, creative non-fiction and other textual forms.