NiTRO + Creative Matters

Perspectives on creative arts in higher education

APPLIED COMPASSION with Pearl Tan, Catherine Kolomyjec and Claire Tonkin

PEARL TAN—This edition of Creative Matters is all about leadership and thriving. Leadership has many models, we have transformational, authentic, situational the list goes on, and we can also put this in the context of our increasing awareness of First Nations values and knowings such as valuing process and relationships and deep listening.

And if we’re talking about thriving… the screen industry has poor mental health. Studies from Screen Well show that the Australian Entertainment industry has 10 times higher symptoms of anxiety than the general population, 7 times higher symptoms of sleep disorders and 5 times higher symptoms of depression.

My questions today are, can something like Applied Compassion help us when it comes to leadership and thriving, and how might we go about applying compassion in both education and screen production. To answer these questions, we’ll be speaking with two people. Catherine Kolomyjec, a Stanford Ambassador for Applied Compassion and founder of The Kindness Challenge, and her sister Claire Tonkin, Head of Drama at CJZ and former Network Drama Executive at Network 10.

LISTEN TO PEARL’S INTERVIEWS WITH CATHERINE AND CLAIRE

Read the transcript

Pearl Tan is the Discipline Lead in Directing at AFTRS. She is completing her PhD in Creative Practice at UNSW, focusing on the experience of diverse creatives in the screen industry. As part of her PhD, she has released a fictional podcast entitled Diversity Work, that features a diverse television writers’ room trying to tick all the diversity boxes at once. You can listen to Diversity Work on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Main image L to R: Claire Tonkin, Catherine Kolomyjec and Pearl Tan

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IN THE PRACTICE OF MAKING CHANGE
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REVOLUTIONARY DYNAMICS IN CREATIVE PRACTICE RESEARCH AT THE CONVERGENCE OF CRITICAL, CREATIVE, THEORETICAL, AND ACADEMIC SPACES
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METHODOLOGIES IN FLUX
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NAVIGATING CULTURAL TRANSLATION IN PHOTOGRAPHIC PRACTICE RESEARCH — This paper examines the methodological tensions and transformations in my practice-led research exploring photographic representation of gendered bodies across Brazilian and Australian cultural contexts. Through analysing my evolving methodology, I demonstrate how convergence of feminist epistemology, decolonial theory, and photographic practice generates new knowledge at the intersection of theory and creative production.
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RECALIBRATION OF THE PĀLI JĀTAKAS THROUGH SPECTER AND SAMSARĀ
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This paper reflects on a methodology within a Creative Writing PhD that recalibrates selected Buddhist Pāli Jātakas through a parallel reading of Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Buddhist texts on samsarā (rebirth). This cross-cultural dialogue provides a nuanced context for rearticulating the Jātakas. The project’s ‘middle-way methodology’ avoids privileging either Western or Buddhist frameworks and adapts Smith and Dean’s (2009) ‘iterative cyclic web’ through oscillations across creative writing, cross-cultural reading, and critical inquiry.
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PROLIFERATING VOIDS
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GENDER’S PRESENCE IN GENDERLESS NARRATIVES — In an experimental attempt to avoid all gendered markers while writing my unpublished novel, Static Sun, Phantom Breath, traces of gender seemed to still appear and, in turn, complicate the presence/absence binary. Inspired by Anne Garréta’s novel Sphinx and her exploration of how genderless characters expand understands of love and writing form, this paper reflects on the logocentric restrictions and aporetic opportunities that come from textually avoiding gender.
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REHEARSING THE INSTITUTION: ARTISTIC LABOUR AND PEDAGOGICAL TRACE
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'The past inside the present' (2023) begins with surfaces: inscribed, weathered, and imbued with pedagogical significance. The research involves reconsidering reclaimed art school studio tabletops as artefacts of accumulated gestures. It focuses on investigating how artistic labour and the relational custodianship of educational practices become systematically blurred within contemporary institutional frameworks of higher education.
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WHEN AI MEETS CYBERPUNK
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CREATIVE EMPOWERMENT OR CRITICAL DISSOLUTION? — This paper investigates the pronounced tension between 'creative empowerment' and 'critical dissolution' at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cyberpunk, a genre defined by its critical engagement with technology. Grounded in my reflexive practice of generating cyberpunk transmedia (images) using AI, this study analyses how these tools – despite affording creative efficiencies and expanded visual capabilities – may undermine cyberpunk's intrinsic critical spirit, DIY ethos, and narrative depth.
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BODY OF RESEARCH, BODY OF WORK
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GENERATIVE TENSION IN THE CREATIVE WRITING PHD — Scholars such as Professor Nigel Krauth (2011, 2018) argue that there is an inherent tension between the ‘radical experimentation’ required to innovate in the discipline of creative writing, and the standard exegetical models, orthodoxies and conventional positions of the PhD thesis. In response, this essay looks to the role of structure in the creative writing PhD thesis, asking how experimenting with standard exegetical models can be generative for practice and research.
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As a creative researcher-in-the-making, I am exploring how to practice accountability in the unresolved cultural context of the environmental crisis and ongoing intersectional colonising injustice. To address this, I have developed a sidewise ethics of practice that begins with my own unresolved settler cultural understanding of the foreshores of the city of Wollongong on the New South Wales South Coast.
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BECOMING THROUGH COMPLEXITY 
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DEVELOPING THE TRANSDISCIPLINARY INQUIRY MODEL IN CREATIVE PRACTICE RESEARCH — This article reflects on the development of the Transdisciplinary Inquiry Model (TIM) as both a methodological framework and a record of my becoming as a creative researcher. Developed during my doctoral research through practice-led inquiry, TIM integrates imagination, embodiment, and relationality to navigate the tensions of knowledge production across disciplines.
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POPULAR GENRE FICTION IN THE CREATIVE WRITING DOCTORATE
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COMMERCIALLY VIABLE, ACADEMICALLY FOCUSED, OR BOTH? — Nicola Boyd (2009) declared there is a strong chance of publishing a creative work developed from the creative writing doctorate. But how does this work when the creative output is deeply entwined with academic methodology, especially when the output is popular genre fiction with its own rules and industry expectations for commercial publication?
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GIVING IT A NAME
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INTEGRATING FAMILY ADDICTION TRAUMA THROUGH EMBODIED CREATIVE RESEARCH — This article explores how the phenomenon of ‘affective ambush’(Maguire & Deller 2024), influenced the creative practice as research involved in the production of my creative artefact 'The Lighthouse: Personal Essays on the Transgenerational Haunting of Addiction'. Affective ambush occurs when a scholar experiences an unexpected emotional reaction to their academic research.
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SUPPORTING WOMEN TO CLAIM THEIR VOICES POST-VIOLENCE — Can creative self-expression support women to gain or claim their voices? This research explores the dialogic nature of self-reflective questions in oracle cards as provocations for theatre and investigates if and how these provocations can assist women with self-expression. A sample deck of oracle cards – including self-reflective questions – were crafted and then tested as provocations for playwriting.
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IS THERE ENOUGH SCIENCE IN THIS FICTION?
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REFLECTIONS ON GENRE WRITING AND CREATIVE PRACTICE RESEARCH — Nearly three years into my creative practice PhD in which I wrote multiple fat and queer science fiction short stories, my supervisor asked: Is there enough science in them? This question has since underpinned my understanding of the ‘perennially revised’ (Latham 2017, p.8) genre borders of literary science fiction, and the ‘validity and rigour of practice-led research’ (Gandolfo 2012, p. 64) in academic institutions.
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Bent Nails Trace Risk: Lessons from an Adventure Playground
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BY FIONA HILLARY, CAMERON BISHOP and DAVID CROSS — Since the pandemic further upended certainties about what a university should do to build culture, our once bustling campuses have increasingly come to resemble empty husks – hollowed out not just by lockdowns and the attendant absence from campus, but by decades of neoliberal corporatisation.
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