NiTRO + Creative Matters

Perspectives on creative arts in higher education

Practice: Queer Representation Matters

BY NATALIE KRIKOWA — This research critically examines the evolution of queer representation in screen media and interrogates whether meaningful progress has been made.

Queer Representation Matters (2023) is an interactive, online documentary that responds to ‘The Seeing Ourselves: Reflections on Diversity in TV Drama Report’ (Screen Australia 2016), which details the deficiency of inclusive storytelling in Australian scripted TV.

The methodological approach, resulting artefact/s and discussions stimulated by the project not only advance scholarly discourse but also demonstrate innovative approaches to scholarly research that engages with audiences outside the academy, and thereby enriches the research and its impact. 

Through a curated selection of video clips, interviews, and textual examples spanning decades, users are invited to traverse the historical trajectory of queer representation in media. The i-doc transcends traditional academic boundaries, leveraging participatory digital media to democratise access to discussions of media representation. By engaging media professionals, students, and wider audiences in interactive dialogue, this project fosters greater understanding and empathy for the importance of representation in media narratives.

GO TO Queer Representation Matters (Krikowa, 2023)

Dr. Natalie Krikowa (she/they) is a media scholar and creative practice researcher at the University of Technology Sydney. Natalie holds a Doctor of Creative Arts in media and cultural studies and currently teaches in digital media and screenwriting. Natalie’s research focuses on issues surrounding LGBTIQA+ representation in screen studies, popular culture, and transmedia. Natalie’s queer-focused creative works include The Newtown Girls (2012), All Our Lesbians Are Dead! (2017), and Queer Representation Matters (2023), underscoring her commitment to amplifying LGBTQIA+ voices and narratives through storytelling.

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Palimpsest Series

BY PATRICIA AMORIM — In my Palimpsest Series, I explore cultural identity from a feminist perspective through self-portraiture, drawing inspiration

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Practice.

BY EMILY WOTHERSPOON – This piece is a reflection on how life, research, and creative practice become blurred and intertwined

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A Gathering.

BY DANI NETHERCLIFT – This work, in alignment with the topic of my creative arts PhD regarding the elegiac lyric

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Insanity Helps

BY INDYANA HOROBIN – This is a short experimental article that engages with how life subsists within PhD study. It

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Art and Australia’s Climate Disaster
GUEST EDITOR JANE W. DAVIDSON — Extreme weather events have been experienced in so-called Australia for millennia. This settler painting shows the terror and chaos captured by William Strutt in a depiction of Black Thursday, February 6th 1851 (painted in 1864 and now part of the State Library of Victoria’s Pictures Collection). From records of the time, around five million hectares burnt, which amounts to a staggering quarter of Victoria, and on the same day, with temperatures over 43 degrees Celsius in the shade, large swathes of western Tasmania also burnt.
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From psychological and social recovery to radical reimagining: Reviewing studies of arts, culture and disasters
BY CLAIRE HOOKER and ANNA KENNEDY-BORISSOW — It is well recognised that one of the hallmarks of climate change is an increase in the frequency and severity of disasters (IPCC, 2023). The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR, 2007) defines disasters as a ‘serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society,’ and these disruptions result from interactions between hazards and human systems (Peek et al., 2021; Perry, 2018).
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Creative Arts and the Climate Emergency:  Building Collective and Resilient Futures
BY SUSANNE THUROW, HELENA GREHAN AND JANE W. DAVIDSON — In this short paper, we aim to explore the potential role creative arts might play in fostering community preparedness in view of the increasing extreme weather scenarios playing out across the globe.
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Confronting Fire and Disaster in Theatrical Performance
BY PETA TAIT — This article outlines ARC funded research about the representation of ecological damage and climate change in Australian drama, theatre and contemporary performance. The project summary is followed by a brief discussion of artistic depictions of fire and disaster that refers to a community-based play based on the lived experience of its audience, and a performative work in which participants rehearse for a future disaster.
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Youth theatre and the climate crisis: Performing resistance and survival
BY SARAH WOODLAND AND LINDA HASSALL — The escalation of ecological crises and climate-related disasters is impacting individual health and community wellbeing globally. The World Health Organization has highlighted that 3.6 billion people now live in regions highly susceptible to climate change, and the health impacts will cost economies US$2-4 billion per year by 2030 (WHO 2023).
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Fire Aesthetics: Film and Television in the Pyrocene
BY BELINDA SMAILL — This essay explores how screen aesthetics have been deployed in our new era of fire. In Australia this era is marked by Black Saturday in 2007 and the Black Summer fires of 219/20. As both public knowledge and fire events have evolved the filmmaking community has responded with a largely documentary focused body of work. Examining this new turn in film and television’s narrative and visual interest in fire, I couch this study within Australia’s cinematic history of fire, recognising its intersection with the environmental history of fire and this new phase: the Pyrocene.
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A micro-opera as a tool for creative sharing in response to an extreme weather event:  Some preliminary reflections
BY JANE W. DAVIDSON, SARAH WOODLAND AND GILLIAN HOWELL — This short paper investigates the potential use of opera for enabling sharing and recovery from extreme weather events. Opera, which might be conceived of as storytelling using a combination of words, music, acting, costumes, and set, has a European origin dating back to 1600 (Davidson, Halliwell & Rocke, 2021).
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The Aesthetic Visualisation of Climate Uncertainty to Enhance Preparedness
BY DENNIS DEL FAVERO, SUSANNE THUROW, MAURICE PAGNUCCO, URSULA FROHNE — The climate emergency presents an existential global crisis resulting from the combined processes of global warming, atmospheric, hydrospheric, biospheric and pedospheric degradation. The IPCC report of 2023 found that extreme climate events are rapidly increasing around the globe, with projections indicating that they will become more frequent and severe, with impacts intensifying and interacting.
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Editorial
BY Carina Böhm, Didem Caia, Clare Carlin, Emilie Collyer, Ruth Fogarty
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practice research
BY JOSHUA IP – The interrogation of practice is a common task faced by practice-based researchers. As a PhD candidate the Practice Research Symposium programme in the School of Media and Communications at RMIT, focusing on the discipline of Creative Writing, I have attempted to interrogate my wide-ranging practice as poet, editor and literary organiser for the past six years.
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How life gets in: poem and essay
BY ANNE M. CARSON – Disrupting, interrupting and sometimes derailing study in both welcome and unwelcome ways; life gets into PhD projects in a plethora of ways, so much so that there often seems to be no hard boundary between them. This essay uses the example of synchronicity as one way that ‘life gets in’.
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Palimpsest Series
BY PATRICIA AMORIM — In my Palimpsest Series, I explore cultural identity from a feminist perspective through self-portraiture, drawing inspiration from the concept of a palimpsest and the work of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta.
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A Beginner’s Mind: From Ball-Hating HDR to Basketball Coach
BY JENNY HEDLEY – In this reflective essay, a time-poor single mother and PhD candidate accidentally takes on the role of basketball coach as she seeks to achieve balance between scholastics and life.
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Between – Cabbage Tree Creek, April-July 2023
BY MICHAEL DONEMAN – Between is a reflection on loss and renewal. It interweaves personal, cultural, and environmental stories near the country where I live, by a waterway at the edge of the Boondall Wetlands called Cabbage Tree Creek.
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Write, stitch, unpick
BY CLAIRE WELLESLEY-SMITH – The use of textile as a creative recording method alongside my PhD (2023, The Open University) extended a practice I began in 2013. Stitch Journal is a long length of linen cloth, pieces added in sections.
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‘Where a language is opening’
BY SUSIE CAMPBELL – Before an unexpected brush with serious illness, the journey of my PhD research project seemed clear. I set out to engage with the avant-garde Modernist poetry of Gertrude Stein in order to draw on her experimental approach to language for my own processual model of poetic practice.
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Practice.
BY EMILY WOTHERSPOON – This piece is a reflection on how life, research, and creative practice become blurred and intertwined through the process of undertaking PhD creative writing practice research.
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A Gathering.
BY DANI NETHERCLIFT – This work, in alignment with the topic of my creative arts PhD regarding the elegiac lyric essay, is written with the conventions of the lyric essay, utilising white space, non-linearity, image, archive, fragment, association and braiding.
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Insanity Helps
BY INDYANA HOROBIN – This is a short experimental article that engages with how life subsists within PhD study. It is styled as an interview with the self and is punctuated by interactions between the interviewers which descend into hostile conversations.
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My Life IS my PhD Research
BY JENNY HICKINBOTHAM – Life didn’t GET IN to my PhD research, my life IS my PhD research.
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