Reading & Writing Futures Research Group
Growing critical and creative constellations
Research that illuminates the dynamic relationship between the creative and the critical, and between literature and social change.
Our research areas
The School of Communication and Creative Arts is a leader in socially engaged and impactful research. Our researchers produce high-quality research outcomes across a traditional and non-traditional research spectrum, partnering with multiple stakeholders from government, industry and the not-for-profit sector. Led by our group convenors, the Reading Writing Futures group has seven current research streams:
- Australian writing,
- Children’s literature,
- Genre fiction,
- Life writing,
- Poetry and poetics,
- Writing gender and sexuality,
- Writing the body, writing machine.
HDR Seminar Series 2024
(under redevelopment)
September – Simon Gluskie and Cecilia Rogers
Simon Gluskie – Hyperconnected Distance
The primary research concern for the PhD project “Hyperconnected Distance” was to articulate (via various writing modes and activations) how technology use fundamentally alters the ways in which we relate to one another and understand ourselves. Through creative writing practice, the project sought to identify and interrogate scenarios in which cyborg couplings of user and machine coax a relinquishment of agency (willingly, surreptitiously or subconsciously), removing friction in the crossing back and forth between “virtual” and “actual” spaces.
Dr Simon Gluskie recently completed his PhD titled “Hyperconnected Distance: Kaleidoscopic Narratives of the Human and Surveillance Capitalism.” His research and writing interests include simulation, surveillance and paranoia. Outside of academia Simon is a father, a teacher and a musician.
Cecilia Rogers – Dark Topographies: Young Adult Gothic Fiction and the Natural World
This thesis explores how Gothic spatiality, constructed within natural spaces such as the forest, beach, islands and the bush, informs young adult identities. While the forest and bush can be benign spaces within which young adults can become agential, the beach and islands undermine young adult agency, restricting their growth and development of selfhood. However, the inherent ambivalence of the Gothic can discombobulate these kinds of binaries such that it is difficult to delineate good and bad. This duality also occurs in each of these spaces, challenging the young adult protagonists as they journey towards maturity.
Dr Cecilia Rogers has been teaching in literary studies since 2008, mostly in children’s literature. She sometimes moonlights as a learning skills advisor at other institutions. She obtained her undergraduate degree in English literature from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne and recently completed her PhD at Deakin.
ARCHIVE Program 2023
This is a research group which is composed of approximately 30 researchers from all three schools of the Faculty of Arts and Education and NIKERI. There are upwards of 80 Higher Degree by Research students with some form of connection to this area of research.
From 2023, Reading and Writing Futures Research Group aims to:
- Grow and enhance research culture
- Develop cross-level engagement, especially through HDR involvement and mentoring
- Develop excellence in Literary Studies (field of research 4705) and Writing (field of research 3602) discipline areas and publications
The mini-symposia series 2023:
There is raw footage of the day here: https://aawp.org.au/footage-from-the-ania-walwicz-symposium/ along with some further reflection on 3CR: https://www.3cr.org.au/spoken-word/episode/ania-walwiczs-writing
A digital representation of this symposium is currently underway – further details will be provided here.
This session has been recorded – please contact Andrew Dean ([email protected]) for details…
Other topics may include: Fantasy Fiction, Children’s Literature, Romance Fiction, Australian Literature, Experiments in Life-Writing…
Each seminar will be detailed via posts when confirmed.
RWF-University of Melbourne Public Lecture and Readings 13 June 2023
Public Lecture – Keston Sutherland, “Capital’s Dithyramb”
Poet and Marxist scholar, Keston Sutherland, Professor of Poetics at the University of Sussex, is a leading figure in English radical writing today. His poetry is a dazzling critique of the relations of capital. …
Reading MC: Ann Vickery
Keston Sutherland, Evelyn Araluen, Alice Bellette, Justin Clemens, Abigail Fisher, Elena Gomez