Un-knowing expertise in the time of pandemic: Three teaching perspectives

This article frames three individual perspectives on the experience of unsettling disciplinary and institutional subjectivities through teaching and learning practices in Creative Writing and Literary Studies. At the centre of this experience is a common engagement of teaching and learning with sovereign knowledges. More specifically, the accounts in the article are drawn from experiences in 2020, when the forces of extra-academic life – especially lockdown during COVID-19 in Victoria – intensified the objectives and the means of challenging the boundaries of settler colonial expertise. The authors find that collaborative and iterative sharing of teaching experiences and methods not only supported them during a time of acute change but also empowered them to take risks that challenge disciplinary authority. In seeking to un-learn their privilege together and with their students, the authors reflect here on a set of new pedagogical contexts and approaches that are perpetually in-process. © 2021, Australasian Association of Writing Programs. All rights reserved.

Creation, destruction, and COVID-19: Heeding the call of country, bringing things into balance

On Gumbaynggirr Country (mid-north coast New South Wales, Australia), an act of violence against the sacredness of life and Country resulted in Wirriiga, the Two Sisters, making the sea. When the waters rose, the people made their way back to their homeland by following a gut-string bridge made by Dunggiirr, the Koala Brothers. While the people were on the bridge, mischievous Baalijin, the eastern quoll, threatened to chop it down and made waves that nearly washed them off. Baalijin challenges complacency and forces change, and on that understanding in this article we consider what it means to be living this present time of instability and changes wrought by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19);ours is a perspective grounded in story and Gumbaynggirr Law/Lore. We write as Yandaarra, a research collective guided by the Old Fellas (ancestors) and led by Aunty Shaa Smith, storyholder for Gumbaynggirr Country, and her daughter Neeyan Smith, a young Gumbaynggirr woman. Learning from a Gumbaynggirr-led understanding of COVID-19—as one manifestation of Baalijin and relationships fallen out of balance—re-situates the pandemic in wider and longer histories of colonisation and destructive patterns of existence and broken agreements. Those learnings prompt us to call for Juungambala—work involved in setting things right as a way to heal. Let Baalijin and COVID-19 be the wake-up call that forces the change that Country (and we) need. © 2020 Institute of Australian Geographers