Tactical storytelling and paradoxical failure: Writing, knowledge-making and the public humanities

Ariella Van Luyn and Beck Wise

Introduction

Writing is central to acts of public communication: the exchange of text transforms workplaces and communities. Despite the rise of generative artificial intelligence that threatens to automate text creation, and the ongoing devaluing of the creative arts and publishing industries, acts of writing will remain central to public life in the future. Raewyn Connell, in her history of the higher education sector, The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Change, argued that ‘universities educate the professions on which public health, public education and social services rely’.¹ These critical professions operate, as all professions do, through acts of writing. Writing is transformative for the writer as well as the reader, and it has long been recognised as a method of inquiry.² As writing studies takes a social justice turn in concert with wider social trends, acts of representation are increasingly understood as having ethical and political dimensions.

Yet within Australian neoliberal universities, writing and writing studies, as sub-disciplines of the humanities, are often characterised as purely artistic or purely remedial; the former prioritises artistic value and the perpetuation of high literary culture, and the latter the instrumental value of addressing perceived deficits in student writing that might threaten academic standards. This (mis)characterisation elides writing’s political and ethical dimensions, and reflects a demand that disciplines articulate their value and regulate their labour to conform with neoliberal paradigms. This elision is made possible by writing’s paradoxical public function: it is woven so closely into public practice, public space, public interest, that it is invisible until something goes wrong—often really wrong—allowing us to ignore writing’s relational work in favour of artistic or transactional value. At the same time, writing is a central tool by which we identify, articulate and respond to what has gone wrong. How then might writing disciplines resist neoliberal tertiary institutions’ normalising tendencies and reconceptualise pedagogy and research practices in public writing for the future? We answer this question as writing academics by constructing and thinking through stories of our work in higher education.

Perhaps this last sentence prompted you, as you read it, to think of your own story of working in higher education. Phrased like this, the word ‘stories’ invokes gossip and whisper networks, decentralised peer-to-peer practices of community knowledge-making; myth and lore, handed-down accounts of how things used to be that shape how things are; and fiction, myth and outright lies—fabulation, world-making, speculation. In universities, we both tell and hear stories. We hear the stories of classroom practice that start as anecdotes and become lore, sedimenting local standards as they are told and retold. We hear origin myths that are sanitised and institutionalised and emerge, contextless, as mission statements. We hear stories of colleagues’ successes, aspirational accounts of what might be for us, if only. At times more pointedly, we hear stories of colleagues’ failures, cautionary tales that warn us off. These narratives function to shape how we teach and how we research. Drawing on all these functions of narrative, and understanding, as Peter Brooks reminds us, that ‘the reality we experience is to a large degree constructed by narrative’,³ in this paper, we tell different kind of stories to both understand the wicked problems of working as writing academics in the humanities and to imagine different kinds of outcomes for how we might teach and research public writing. We term this approach tactical storytelling, following de Certeau’s definition of a tactic as an individual’s action undertaken to navigate systems designed with others in mind.⁴ By sharing our stories with each other, and with you, we model knowledge-making in community and propose tactical storytelling as a methodology for navigating apparent paradoxes in institutional settings.

We engage in tactical storytelling at a moment when daily life seems ripped from fiction. Apocalyptic smoke clouds North America as climate change drives record-breaking wildfires; meanwhile, COVID-19’s impact is still being felt and authorities are on high alert for the next zoonotic disease outbreak as humans and animals are forced into ever-closer living situations. Artificial intelligence, an imagined robotic consciousness, threatens to upturn labour practices across a range of industries. The UK government has announced plans to house refugees on Dickensian hulks, while rich tourists are taking essentially homemade submarines on joy rides to the Titanic, long a site of stories of aristocratic hubris. Crisis seems to be an everyday occurrence, and any imagined future grounded in this present makes crisis seem inevitable.

These crises necessitate doing things differently. As writing academics, from our positions of relative privilege, we recognise that returning to ‘normal’ or to how things were in an imagined past, is not only impossible but also actively reinscribes the practices that lead to these crises in the first place. Following Jack Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure,⁵ we begin by telling stories of our own apparent failures and recovery—paradoxical failures—to understand normalising practices in the institutional contexts that govern these lived experiences and imagine how they might be resisted, in our discipline and in other fields. In collaboratively investigating these narratives and disrupting some of the myths that underpin them, we enact writing as a transformative and relational social practice. Writing studies’ fundamental understanding of writing as at once a cognitive process and a relational act interrupts dominant narratives about how expertise is produced and circulated in contemporary research institutions. This orientation affords a more nuanced understanding of our work as scholars, including the understanding that our scholarly work is always in some sense public, always situated and relational, and promises new approaches to our disciplines’ work that need not reinscribe old and harmful norms. Tactical storytelling is one method for enacting that promise, allowing scholars to imagine and thus create new ways of thinking, writing and being—both in our disciplines and in the world.

Our stories

We acknowledge that all our stories take place on unceded Indigenous lands that have been sites of storytelling, knowledge and culture for thousands of years.

Failing to quit

Ari (they/them)—Anaiwan, Gadigal and Dharug lands

In 2020, I failed to quit academia.

The decision to quit had been a long time coming. As many early and mid-career academics are forced to do, I’d moved for work. In 2017, I’d been offered an academic job in a regional town in the cold highlands. My then-partner, who concreted pools for a living in tropical Far North Queensland, couldn’t follow me. The relationship ended. I put it behind me. I tried to make friends. I went on Tinder. Pulled together the threads to construct a new life.

Like many regional towns, this place has a high population turnover. People move through it, looking for work, a sense of purpose, and then leave when the opportunities don’t open up. Some stay for family, or because they can afford to buy a piece of land and construct a home there—put down roots. Generations of settlers. One of my friends died in a car accident, driving to another friend’s place out of town with a pub dinner in the back seat for both of them. A friend moved to Brisbane for a chance to build a yoga business. On Tinder, I matched with a Black man who apologised for having thick lips because someone in town had complained when he kissed them. I matched with Beck (lol).

Beck interjects: also lol, I think I set it up and then never opened it again. Or matched with you and noped out, town was too small. I forget.

I burnt out (not because of the thing with Beck). Managing my own breakdown, I took a year of leave without pay, moved to Sydney, enrolled in a master of secondary education, found tutoring work and took up my long neglected second novel—the kind of project without deadlines that is put down and never picked up again in fragmented academic work. Six weeks into the masters, COVID hit. The tutoring work dried up. The deadlines for teacher pracs were moved with no definite end date.

I had my resignation letter to the university drafted but unsent. Beck texted me: DO NOT QUIT YOUR JOB IN A PLAGUE (Beck’s emphasis).

The university had a small metro campus in Sydney and, fortunately, when I returned to work, I couldn’t travel to Armidale because of movement restrictions. My supervisor was based on the metro campus too and supported me to stay in Sydney. I managed a working remotely agreement, as many folk did during the campus closures. As the pandemic deepened, the vice-chancellor offered a series of voluntary redundancies. I applied for one and was knocked back. The working remotely agreement was extended. I tried to quit again when a couple of people complained to my supervisor I didn’t have their permission to work remotely. This time the head of school intervened and told me not to quit. Eventually, again with supervisor support, my contract was altered so I am now based on the Sydney campus. This was not possible without my supervisor and head of school, who worked to create for me new opportunities to do work I cared about—service, research and teaching—and valued that I could do it better when I was well-supported psychologically and emotionally. That suffering did not make me better.

I wouldn’t have been able to tell this story before the change of contract happened.

From Sydney, I’ve watched the push to return to normal. I stopped looking at the number of COVID cases because the media stopped reporting them daily.

The university has always been known for remote education. About 85 per cent of students enrol online. Still, the push to wind back the clock translates into decisions to bring staff and postgraduates back to the regional campus.

I regularly open the unsent resignation letter, knowing that, for my own mental survival, I’d quit before returning. It hovers in the background of my desktop.

Over coffee, a colleague who moved across the world for academic work, leaving behind parents who she would be unable to be with when they died because a day-long flight separated them, says: ‘Why should you get to have a life here?’ I don’t know how to answer.

Last year, a tornado ripped through the university buildings on the edge of town. One building blossoms mould, no longer safe to work in. Others, constructed with asbestos boards torn open by the wind, remain wrapped in safety tape.

Someone talks wistfully of giving a lecture to actual students in the room. Of colleges filled with people and not plague.

Beck stops me at this point to remind me of their first year teaching at the same university in 2017 and delivering to an empty room.

In committee meetings, over coffee, there is talk of the town’s failing economy and the role of the university in bolstering it. Guilt flares in my chest. I push to offer travel bursaries for postgraduates so they can visit Armidale for their conference. A small gesture.

My confidence is bolstered enough to apply for a promotion from Level B to C in 2021.

I fail to get promoted.

In the feedback interview afterwards, I was told that my pedagogy research was interesting but it was time for me to stop and move on. I haven’t.

I’ve also taken on a service role supporting higher degree researchers in humanities and arts, which has allowed me to build networks within the university and beyond. I still haven’t quit. My mental health slowly improves. In 2022, I rewrote my promotion application and submitted it.

(This time I was successful).

As I write this, I’m reminded of the stage I went through when I couldn’t stop looking at ‘nailed it’ memes, which the Know Your Meme website tells me was at its peak in late 2018 and early 2019. The memes showed the glossy magazine version of a craft or baking project and then the failed attempts tried at home. One sticks with me: an almost photorealistic hedgehog confection, intricate features sculpted from chocolate and liquorice, on a bed of green dyed coconut-grass, underneath in block text: ‘Saw hedgehog cake on Pinterest.’ The image next to it shows two circular cakes gummed together with pink icing, the tracing of knife swirls still visible, chocolate sticks stabbed into the creature’s back. Three chocolate-coated almonds make its face and underneath its nose, a set of lolly teeth, disturbingly human, protrude. I feel a bit like that pink hedgehog, gummy teeth bared in preparation and contrariness both at once. Yep, nailed it.

The secret DECRA

Beck (she/they)—Turrbul and Jagera lands

In mid-2020, I enrolled in the University of Queensland’s DECRA (Discovery Early Career Researcher Award) development workshop. I went in there with a tactical technical writing idea, looking to investigate the ways communities had stepped up to write pandemic safety materials where institutions didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t: think of the sewists who made YouTube videos demonstrating how to DIY a mask; the Black Lives Matter organisers who advocated for, and achieved, widespread masking at protests a full year ahead of any Australian jurisdiction even suggesting the practice; the refugees creating multilingual versions of public health advice for their communities; the mutual aid networks that sprung up to deliver money, food and information to folks in quarantine. (Writing it down two years later, it’s still a good idea.)

The writing faculty in the room couldn’t understand it as writing. I got buddied up with a senior cultural studies scholar who couldn’t understand why I kept talking about these examples as literacy practices, and pushed hard for cultural studies methods—‘take a material artifact’, she said, ‘I can imagine a whole book themed around the mask, around how they litter the landscape.’ I can imagine that too, but it’s a different project, a different field. I hadn’t been paying close attention to the ARC (Australian Research Council) calendar because … (gestures broadly) and when I found out that the DE22 deadline was in November, not the following March as in previous years, I pulled out. I still had eligibility and I needed more time.

In March 2021, I submitted my application for confirmation at UQ. COVID-19 had loomed over precisely half of my probation period—nominally three years, but in practice we are assessed on two years of work, and I’d had my one-year review the week before lockdowns started in March 2020. That review had been generally positive, as had my head of school’s assessment before confirmation; I was proud of the work I’d done and the application I’d submitted, and mentors had indicated I was on track. I’d thus felt confident going into the confirmation application—despite, again … (gestures broadly).

When the confirmation decision came, I texted a couple friends before I opened it—not because I was worried, but because I was apprehensive? Stressed? Nervous? And then when I opened it: a no. A two-year extension because I’d invoked COVID and the 2019 bushfires that had torn through my parents’ property and their garden fence and incredibly been stopped at their garage. But a no. (At the time, and still, I wondered how a two-year extension would help when the factors that impeded everyone’s productivity—slow peer review, teaching across multiple modes, health risk, caring responsibilities—were not going anywhere and expectations were not being changed. Two years later, I wonder how that extension helps when all of that persists, we face escalating rates of chronic illness and disability, and we’re all exhausted from nearly three years of compounding global trauma.)

My best work friend had forgotten his keys that day and couldn’t come to my office where I was sitting in shocked and angry tears—he texted me from outside the security door to my corridor for me to come collect him when I was ready. I don’t remember a lot of the immediate responses. I told a few folks. I talked to Ari for a couple hours that night. I talked to an employment lawyer I know as I started to dig into the policies around appeals. My colleagues in the writing discipline weren’t around much—indeed, it wasn’t until early 2022 that I learnt my academic supervisor, one of the most senior writing faculty at the school, didn’t know of this failed confirmation bid.

Someone told someone who told me that my situation sounded like another scholar who’d left her position in professional writing at UQ not long after a failed promotion bid. Someone else told someone that I needed to talk to that person, who dropped everything to meet with me—and told me about another lecturer in professional writing who’d left after a failed confirmation application, as well as about her own experience. I ran our staff pages through the Wayback Machine and looked at old versions of our majors. I saw the decimation of professional writing classes at undergraduate and graduate level, something that happened both before and after those faculty left.

I told my head of school that I was questioning my place at the university when she dropped by my office one evening. It was late. The office was dark and quiet, and I was tired: I had a week or 10 days to decide whether to appeal, and I’d been cramming in emergency networking and policy research around the usual demands of work and life. ‘How are you going?’ I’m questioning my place here. She handwaved it off, literally, flicking her fingers as she said, ‘Of course you do.’ She never mentioned it again.

I emailed a rhetorician at another institution interstate, then a name in a book, now a mentor and collaborator. She too dropped everything to talk to me for the better part of two hours. ‘I’ll write to your provost’, she vowed, promising a reference letter if I chose to appeal. We planned collaborations, bringing together parallel projects we both had in the early stages of development. When we got off Zoom, she immediately emailed me the project plan for a large grant she wanted me to join and notes towards a symposium. Those plans are still COVID-paused, likely COVID-cancelled, lost work that will go unrecognised.

I didn’t appeal in the end. I drafted the letter and I still have it. The day before it was due, I finally got onto HR who told me that the range of possible outcomes included ‘oh, you don’t like your two-year extension? OK, you can leave on your original timeline’. I’m using the two years to set up for the next thing. But I still feel like I might need that letter.

The next year, hot off the failed confirmation bid, I floated that earlier DECRA idea by my head of school. It’s not writing, she said, again. (It is.) She didn’t want to endorse it for the development workshop. She sent me the website for someone’s Future Fellowship on ‘the state of poetry and poetry publishing’—do this, but make it academic or professional writing, she said. I didn’t need the fight but did need to document attempting to apply for funding, so I put an in-house proposal together, ‘to show willing’, figuring I could point to getting rejected in my next review.

Shortly afterwards, I learnt that you can put in DECRA applications at other universities even if you’re in a continuing position elsewhere. It’s not that common. I still had that tactical tech comm idea on my radar, and flicked an email over to my interstate mentor to see if her institution would support it. Their expression of interest (EOI) process had long-since ended, she learnt, but they were willing to let me put in a late EOI. As that got worked out, I refined the project, coming up with a topic that traces the tactical and institutional technical communication about health, mobility and community to understand how literacy practices during the acute stages of the COVID-19 pandemic shaped our understanding of place.

I fully expected both EOIs to get knocked back—one for being very niche and not that interesting, and the other for being wildly late. When they both got accepted, I … panicked. More emergency networking. Not without apprehension, I went with the other institution—a better project, I thought, stronger support, more feasible. It’s been a secret—a few trusted colleagues know that I applied, that it went OK, that I’d resubmit, but stories of folks being punished for looking beyond their institution made me keep it quiet.

As these life events unfold, we talk for hours, analysing what’s gone wrong, imagining how things could be better. We meet to discuss the beginnings of this paper.

Story as method

In seeking to understand the subjective, quotidian experience of work in an academic institution in times of crisis, and imagining it as different, we draw on a method available to both our disciplines: story. Both creative writing and cultural rhetorics recognise that stories have epistemological value and rhetorical function.⁶ In this context, life narratives become a form of evidence. Drawing on creative writing methodology, Eugen Bacon argues that the exegesis itself is a kind of memoir.⁷ In the cultural rhetorics frame, telling stories of the past is a practice of interpreting and reinterpreting histories in relation to others.⁸ We tell stories to interpret and reinterpret our pasts and presents, to constellate our experiences and expertise with that of others, and to call into being other ways of knowing and operating in the world. Our life narratives are deeply relational. We turn to our life narratives to understand the structures that currently govern our academic work, and thus to reinscribe our attempts at creating something from what does not exist yet.

We offer these stories of not-succeeding-as-expected as a means of understanding ‘the punishing norms that discipline [our] behaviour’ and to pinpoint the moments we resisted them, either intentionally or unintentionally.⁹ As we return to these stories again in revising the article post peer review—after Ari was promoted and Beck’s job is now secure—we see in them events that are and are not failures. In documenting these moments of paradoxical failure—in telling and retelling work stories to ourselves, each other and our imagined readers—we simultaneously enact the transformative power of storytelling and reflect on the implications of the processes and products of our work. As we reflected and revised this work, some two years after this project began, we debated how best to update these stories, or even if we should. While those events of 2020 and 2021 are in some ways now ‘resolved’, the fault lines we rubbed against in those moments of paradoxical failure are still present in our 2023 lives. These stories do not have a neat narrative arc. Nor should they. Revising, Beck rings Ari: ‘I have to double-check with you: Narrative and story aren’t synonyms, right? I’m not misrepresenting a key creative writing term?’ Narrative obliges us to organise our understanding of events, to shape and mediate it into a predetermined form with a start, a middle and an end. Stories work differently: they capture and document events as they are experienced, rather than as they are understood later. Writing, as a technology, allows both stories and narratives to do work in the world; it is, as Audre Lorde teaches us, the way that ‘our hopes and dreams toward survival and change [are] first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action’.¹⁰ Writing allows our ideas and our stories a life beyond ourselves, and because meaning is made in both writing and reading, how we understand a story and what it does changes, even though the moment that story captures does not. This points to the difference between text and writing: a written document is stable, but writing is relational, always operating between people in context. Many meanings can be made from one story, as in the cultural rhetorics practice of constellating: we all look at the same stars, but connect them into symbols differently depending on our context.¹¹ We offer our stories, then, as they were experienced and written, and make meaning from them in collaboration with our past selves and each other.

We choose to share our experiences of paradoxical failure as part of this methodological commitment to story. Halberstam notes that:

There is something powerful in being wrong, in losing, in failing … to fall short, to get distracted, to find a limit, to loose a way, to forget, to avoid mastery … is to recognise that empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers.¹²

Further, Halberstam, building on Foucault’s critiques of academic disciplinarity, argues that ‘we might read failure as a refusal of mastery, as a critique of the intuitive connections between success and profit, and as a counter-hegemonic discourse of losing’.¹³ Here, we understand paradoxical failure as both a result of marginalisation and as a fissure by which norms are revealed—in the university context, specifically, disciplinary norms. Indeed, the standards we hit up against in our work narratives ‘signal a form of training and learning that conforms what is already known according to approved methods of knowing’.¹⁴ What writing and thinking about paradoxical failure narratives lets us talk about are moments of discomfort. For Ari, these moments were something they were trained to internalise as ‘something going wrong with me’. What this approach allows for is a reframing, a new narrative, in which we ask: in these moments of discomfort, what are the norms that I’m hitting up against that I have accidentally or purposefully violated? Thinking about friction in life narratives is a powerful tool for analysing structure. We recognise, however, that living to tell the tale, being able to speak at all, is itself a kind of victory: that we too are victors.

If we are to move beyond the present to imagine the future, we must also seek ways to retell the narratives we present, a way of imagining something other than what they appear to be. Our dialogue started with our individual sharing of trauma in light of systemic crisis: climate change, plague, workplace horrors etc. This project is borne out of these moments; moments that demand a response and a capacity to imagine outside what we are told is possible in order to call these imaginings into being. These stories offer a pathway into a narrative of possible futures that bubble up in the fault lines revealed in our narratives of paradoxical failure, through our conversations and notetaking. Here we enact what we perceive as the fundamental power of writing: to engage in imaginative practices with a transformative function. To create something from nothing.

Interrogating normals

Late in the process of drafting this paper, we realised we needed an extension. We drafted the email request together and as we briefly listed off the impacts of the last month that had slowed our progress, Ari said: ‘This email seems so dramatic!’ Beck responded that the circumstances were dramatic—floods, a Zoom-bombed conference with traumatised students in its wake, a colleague’s euphemistic ‘sudden death’; if the email was dramatic, it was naturally so. Writing this article, we wondered why we hedged that description, why we felt the need to treat dramatic conditions as though they are normal, even as we have centred our work on this project around the impossibility of pinning down normal. The slipperiness of normalising practices, especially in the context of our work and disciplinary training, is at play in our stories. In telling these, we must first understand the conditions that created the bodily and emotional responses they describe and what stock narratives are enacted and resisted in these stories.

The neoliberal context

Universities, as they are conceptualised and experienced by those who participate in their program of pedagogy and knowledge creation, are an ongoing site of political struggle. Connell describes the years of university workers ‘on the defensive, not only against management but also the government and corporate power’,¹⁵ workers invoking the sense that education intervenes in both the ‘ideological space … and the trajectory of identity construction’.¹⁶ Paulo Freire argues that critical education is committed to empowerment through coming to voice,¹⁷ and bell hooks notes the necessity for education to acknowledge and honour the expertise students bring from their communities.¹⁸ Yet, universities are ‘stitched into the fabric of capitalism’ and are one of the ‘indispensable nodes’ of neoliberalism.¹⁹ Under neoliberalism, academic work has intensified.²⁰ Neoliberalism, and universities as neoliberal institutions, are critiqued for being highly regulated, and regulatory: neoliberal classrooms enforce a hidden curriculum of obedience.²¹ Under the structures of neoliberalism, the university workforce is increasingly insecure, casual and fragmented, as are the workplaces students imagine in their future, creating a ‘topography of anxiety’.²² In such educational spaces, characterised by individual responsibility and regulated through metrics and grades, ongoing learning and improvement itself becomes a form of capture rather than empowerment.²³ Research, too, is highly regulated in the neoliberal institution. Carl Rhodes, Christopher Wright and Alison Pullen argue that, while both the metrics of research impact and academic activism advocate for research to intervene in public discourse, metrics function as a neoliberal mode of policing. In tension with these regulating systems, academic activism seeks to engage in acts of equity and social justice.²⁴ These documented and ongoing tensions between the regulatory conditions of academic work and its emancipatory potential are necessary context to imagining the future of writing and writing studies.

Crucially, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated and even normalised the tensions between the imagined ideal of the university and its actual manifestation. In their analysis of the Times Higher Education during the early stages of the pandemic, between March 2020 and February 2021, Richard Watermeyer, Rille Raaper and Margarida Borras Batalla document the university’s ‘crisis mode’ as leading to an acceleration of neoliberal effects in higher education, including increases in workload, marketisation, casualisation and managerialism, as well as increases in gender and racial inequity.²⁵ These are institution-level patterns that have manifested within our disciplines too: within writing studies, Janelle Jennings-Alexander and Kate Maddalena document the way that universities invoked ‘survival mode’ to retrench old norms, using the novel crisis of COVID to stall and even reverse initiatives that responded to longstanding crises of inequity and exclusion. ‘The fact that social justice wasn’t given “bandwidth”’, they argue, ‘shows that social justice is simply not central to the work of many universities’: in retreating to core business, universities reveal their priorities.²⁶

As the pandemic continues, public discourse has trumpeted a ‘new normal’ in universities and a celebratory return to campus,²⁷ despite ongoing waves of infection and the emerging impacts of long-term sequelae.²⁸ This may be because, as Liam Mayo and Shamin Miah argue, in ‘postnormal times, humans de-emphasize change and cling to traditional notions of stability and certainty: a product of our perception of what is and what is not normal’.²⁹ Following governmental leaders’ invocation of ‘personal responsibility’, universities and other institutions and workplaces have elided the health risks of the pandemic to staff and students, shifting responsibility to vulnerable community members as individuals and concentrating costs to marginalised communities.³⁰ This practice has only become more visible since Alice Wong wrote of the US in 2020 that:

When the pandemic began in this country, it was like, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only life-threatening for those who are high-risk. It’s just a bad flu for the rest of us.’ In this critical time, when scarcity is a reality, you see the hierarchy. Certain groups are valued over others. This is the world that so many disabled and chronically ill people already live in. Our lives are still seen as expendable. Now the magnitude is much greater.³¹

These practices of individualisation and marginalisation further challenge the Freirean potential of critical education by increasing neoliberal alienation. This is true across the university, but the impacts are felt heavily in writing and writing studies, disciplines whose pedagogies rely on resource-intensive evidence-based practices such as workshopping, and whose research methods depend on time-intense approaches like practice-led research—which requires composing both a creative work and exegesis, close textual analysis, and interdisciplinary knowledge building and collaboration.

The material and psychic effects of neoliberal imaginings are present in both Beck’s and Ari’s stories. For example, suffering within the system and expectations of how things should be are reinforced in interpersonal conversations—over coffee, in meetings—when someone has already given up, compromised, suffered, created a new life and a new set of practices, and they see someone else apparently avoiding that: ‘getting away with it’. Usefully, Halberstam differentiates between intellectuals who participate in maintaining hegemonies and ‘those who work with others to sort through the contradictions of capitalism and to illuminate oppressive forms of governance that infiltrate everyday life’.³²

We see this happen in both our stories too, when we are told not that we can’t perform certain kinds of research, but that we would be more successful if we stopped doing some kinds of work, particularly work focused on improving pedagogy or outside of the narrow constraints of the creative industries—and start doing other kinds. For example, the advice on Ari’s failed promotion speaks to an institutional culture that devalues teaching, even though such advice breaks the research–teaching nexus; and, as we indicated in our introduction, many stakeholders characterise writing as somehow different from other kinds of university work:³³ academic writing is remedial, professional writing is vocational and creative writing is artistic—attributes positioned as extraneous to the real work of university education, yet integral to the public functions of writing. Indeed, the institutional histories of both creative and professional writing speak to the ongoing need to justify writing’s presence in universities.³⁴ Historical reflections on writing’s disciplinary development also tend to splinter creative writing from professional writing, for example, as when Andrew Taylor states:

Professional writing can often be legitimated within universities as vocational, job-oriented, and seen as posing little threat. But Creative Writing—like the other Creative Arts generally—is a relative newcomer to the university context.³⁵

Or, alternatively, all disciplinary distinctness may be collapsed, as when David McVey claims that all writing is creative.³⁶ These perceptions of the work of writing academics constrain the kind of work both Beck and Ari are supposed to be doing (even if, as this article demonstrates, we continue to do it anyway, supported by a network of mentors).

What we also see happening in Ari’s story is an imagined past centred on the mythos of the campus—as both a classroom and a workplace—that is given the status of past normal and ‘new normal’. This stock narrative of campus life—always only ever available to some who can afford to commit to it—is invoked both as a way to attract students and enrich economies, and as nostalgia for an ideal university filled with vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge (to use Freire’s imagery of the banking model of education, where students are blank canvases waiting to be filled with knowledge). Lawrence Angus similarly describes the effect of the neoliberal social imaginary on Australian school systems (although Angus focuses on high school, the same can be said of universities). Angus understands ‘social imaginary’ as a sense of expectations that we have of each other that allow us to carry out normative practices—a sense of how things go and how they ought to go. Angus argues that the neoliberal social imaginary is most dominant in education systems, created by the conservative swing to the right, which is ‘formed and asserted by political ideologies and instantiated in repertoires of social practice’. The neoliberal mindset ‘assumes the market arrangements will always produce better outcomes’.³⁷ Neoliberal practices have constrained academic work to the point where we are asked to do more and more with less and less.

Indeed, the normalising tendencies of neoliberalism cannot be redressed without addressing the work conditions it has produced: most significantly for this kind of relational work, the chronic understaffing of universities. The kind of mentoring relationships both Beck and Ari experienced is currently highly individualised and not systematically possible without safe, diverse and sustainable staffing. Staffing is the aspect of our work we currently have least control over and is a systematic problem beyond writing and writing studies. What we do know from the current model of very small departments of permanent academic staff alongside a huge and disconnected casualised underclass, is that interpersonal work really matters. The attitudes and beliefs of one or two staff members shape the way a discipline might look at an institution and an institution at a discipline. Within a department or discipline group, the way stakeholders might label a rare-as-hen’s-teeth position—as writing, professional writing, creative writing—shapes the weight of expectations on the academic who is successful in applying for these roles. Such small departments also limit access to mentoring. Identifying the patterns in these conditions across sub-disciplines of writing likewise points to the need to collaborate and organise as a larger field, rather than allowing siloing to occlude these systemic problems.

Reconceptualising disciplinarity for the future

Clearly, enacting a new normal that looks like an imagined version of the old normal is not working nor will it redress the global catastrophes that shape our narratives and contribute to our failures. As Miller in Writing at the End of the World points out:

In a secular society, education is the most powerful resource citizens have to ensure a brighter future for themselves. But what is one to do when the future includes a radioactive wasteland in Northern Ukraine?³⁸

Miller, writing in 2005, invokes here the still-uninhabitable landscape of Chernobyl, and goes on to list other disasters to which we might add the accelerating climate catastrophe and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (and, indeed, the further devastation of Ukraine following Russia’s 2022 invasion). He argues that to talk meaningfully about the future of the humanities, we must confront these various human-made catastrophes despite how they ‘threaten to end the discussion before it begins’. Indeed, Miller asks:

Who, surveying the ruins at Chernobyl, would be persuaded either by Matthew Arnold’s poetic argument that we are ennobled by studying the best that has been thought and said in our time, or by those who maintain that work in the humanities provides the foundation for a critical engagement with the world?

Instead, Miller believes that what is missing from education is ‘training in how to bring better worlds into being’.³⁹

This speaks to us of the urgency of reconceptualising disciplinarity—and the pedagogical and research practices it may either enable or restrict—in a way that is attuned to the activist and transformative potential of academic work, and resists the inequities and inadequacies of neoliberalism. Such work calls for a conceptual framework that can both understand the cognitive, affective and lived experiences of ongoing and intersecting structural oppression, and simultaneously imagine a way out and a way of thinking about labour practices in universities that come closer to Freire’s call for agency for marginalised subjects and for a consideration of the impact of such work in public spaces. In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz conceptualises queerness as ‘a structured and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present’.⁴⁰ For Muñoz, queerness rejects the here and now and insists on the concrete possibility for another world. Here, ‘queer’ functions as more of:

a noun than a verb, signalling a critical stance–productively corrosive at times—that is sceptical of existing identity categories and more interested in the production of normativity and its queer companion nonnormativity.⁴¹

Such utopian imaginings, Halberstam warns, must also refuse ‘bright-sideness’, a version of toxic positivity that refuses to accommodate discomfort and lack of resolution.

Focusing on academic disciplinarity as part of this imagining is fruitful because it allows us to at once dismantle inherited ideas and training of disciplinary norms tied to existing power structures at the same time as salvaging what our collaboration across sub-disciplines of writing suggests is valuable about our work in professional and creative writing in an Australian university context. Foucault has critiqued academic disciplines as a mode of regulating knowledge production tied to existing power structures.⁴² More recently, Mayo and Miah, in their critique of ‘zombie disciplines’, which they define as disciplines based on ‘ideas that are dead yet continue to walk among us’, argue that:

For the subaltern, knowledge, when linked to disciplines, is not the pursuit of the greater good, neither is it linked with wisdom; knowledge is the obliteration of the cultural codings that enable agency.⁴³

Uncritical reinscribing of disciplinary standards, especially of rigour, perpetuates hegemonic power structures: disciplines are used to discipline. Yet, the intention is not to entirely dismantle disciplines. Usefully, Mayo and Miah state:

It is important to note that the key to understanding any zombie discipline lies neither in the uncritical acceptance, nor its rejection, but rather in acknowledging its ontological standpoint, its limitations, and its ability (or more pointedly, inability) to navigate postnormal times.⁴⁴

Using notions of disciplinarity to think about the future allows us to consider what qualities of our own training and experiences have allowed us to navigate the unsettling present.

Paradoxical failure

Both our narratives are characterised by paradoxical failure. It is in this reaching for something better that we might identify some of the writing and writing studies discipline’s valuable qualities for the future. We do not seek to glamourise try-fail-try-again narratives as necessary for growth, which is the trap of much toxic positivity discourse that claims bad happenings are good because they are a chance to learn. We do not condone the systems that cause some to fail. Instead, the term means for us how we do and are better, despite deviating from the expected path. For example, in Ari’s ‘failure to quit’ story, failure has freed them to build meaningful community and do meaningful work; and to understand how those freedoms are interconnected and inter-reliant. In Beck’s story, the emergency networking they did after their failed confirmation bid was something they’d felt too awkward to do for years until it suddenly felt emergent enough to do so. Beck’s mentor immediately offered concrete assistance: documents landing in Beck’s inbox even as Beck texted a friend ‘now that’s mentoring’. Beck wonders why it was that, in 2021, they once again waited for it to be an emergency before they felt like they could ask for what they needed. For what they deserved. For what they could, should, have expected. We know that our expectations shape our experience; Jessica Calarco’s research shows that white, middle-class students are more likely to ask for help because they have been taught to expect help: they expect better, so they get better.⁴⁵

We offer another short story here to understand these often-invisible acts of regulation and permission that shape our expectations of the kind of help we can ask for. Beck remembers telling a friend about teaching their entire class how extensions work, why students should request extensions when they need them, why they are documenting reasons rather than excuses for late work—about positioning this interpersonal, professional writing at the heart of an academic writing class:

I told him how overwhelmed and apologetic I was the first time I ‘had to’ ask for an extension, with no idea what was possible despite being a white middle-class kid raised in a gentrifying suburb. My friend is a queer brown man from western Sydney. He told me that after he’d had a similar experience, his white partner, now my colleague, had breezily explained that the university we were all studying at had a blanket policy that anyone could get a five-day extension just by asking.

This story turns around on itself: we offer it as evidence in this argument, and at the same time see in it the knowledge building that happens through story, to demonstrate how, as Powell et al. argue, telling stories are ways of building knowledge. Ari thinks of how it was Beck who suggested that it was possible to work at the Sydney campus, even though Ari didn’t realise it could be possible. Sharing and co-constructing work narratives allowed us to look at our discipline differently: not as a set of practices to maintain norms, rigour and traditions, but as a way of both acknowledging distinct expertise and training (e.g. the synergies established between practice-led research and cultural rhetorics in the methodology section would be impossible without this kind of acknowledgement) and of opening the door to different kinds of writing practices and teacher-scholars. In our local contexts and through our work together, we have pursued local initiatives to literally open that door (e.g. through co-teaching, collaborative research and establishing local communities of research and practice).⁴⁶

But, in recognising both our experiences as paradoxical failure, we also want to think bigger, towards a distinctively Australian field of writing and writing studies. We use the compound term writing and writing studies as way to reconceptualise the—sometimes institutionally fractured or sometimes top-down amalgamated—sub-disciplines of academic, creative and professional writing, and to capture the deep interrelatedness of research and practice, of episteme and techne, of ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’, that distinguishes our field. Stitching together these sub-disciplinary fissures and foregrounding a commitment to writing as a cognitive and social process, we suggest organising principles that might characterise writing and writing studies in the future. In suggesting these, we intend not to narrow or exclude but rather to open the door to possibilities. These qualities also suggest ways we might argue for the public value of humanities in and outside our institutions that move beyond metrics.

Relational and transformative writing

Writing practices can be understood as a set of practices that are relational: between composers, audiences, systems and cultures. Similarly, as Connell argues, ‘research is a social process, a collective undertaking that produces … an expanding, many-sided, and above all shared body of knowledge’.⁴⁷ When writing is understood this way, correctness (a colonial tool for control anyway) and artistic quality are de-emphasised. Instead, research and classes focus on investigating the ways that writing does work in the world. Questions of purpose and ethics are foregrounded via questions such as why we are writing, for whom and the possible benefits compared to the risks of harm surrounding acts of writing.

In valuing writing as relational, classrooms and research practices also foreground writing together and in conversation with diverse others. For example, where possible, learning activities embed acts of collaboration such as peer workshopping and editing texts in conversation with their authors; referencing might be reframed not as to avoid acts of plagiarism but as a mechanism for dialogue. The processes and production of texts are understood as products of a series of interactions and revisions between creators, not as the work of a sole (genius) author. The works of lone authors are decentred in classrooms in favour of the life narratives of the diverse students who attend classes. The arguments made in the history of creative writing for the value of non-traditional research outputs might also be leveraged to advocate for other kinds of knowing, including Indigenous epistemologies.

In this framework, storytelling is understood as deeply embedded in our culture; it is at the very heart of how we make meaning and make relationships and make societies. We use stories to teach folks social norms from their very earliest days (Beck still thinks of Ruth Park’s When the Wind Changed but hasn’t stopped pulling faces, so the education only partly took) but it works on adults too. Indeed, Brooks understands narratives as at once necessary and inevitable, while simultaneously calling for an understanding of the ways stories are not the sole tool for constructing the world and, if accepted unanalysed, ‘seduce us into accepting dominant ideologies’.⁴⁸ We also use stories to evoke ways of being we need but do not yet have—we know that representation matters in both our physical spaces and our imaginative ones, and that both of these contribute to increased diversity across a range of contexts. Storied acts give us both opportunity and permission to imagine other ways of seeing and being in the world, which can in turn help us see and understand and act better.

Storytelling is not limited to moments of delineated composition but also everyday interactions in work and public places. Implicated in the ethics of writing is a commitment to acts of kindness, which we define as giving space to be heard and seen, to hear and see and recognise others’ work and your own. We have in many ways enacted this process in the writing of this paper. For Ari, what’s been better since they’ve been able to see failure as something other than their fault, is that they can also recognise the work of their comrades as not a threat, but as valuable, meaningful and enriching. This recognition extends to acknowledging that students experience constellating structural marginalisation and privilege. Our work as teachers, and the research we do to improve it, is valuable because it allows us to empower students as experts through the ability to evoke their own narratives as acts of knowledge creation. For Ari, this kindness has spilled over into their own imaginative acts. It has curiously allowed them to be kinder to the characters they evoke in their fiction: they have been able to understand characters as placed in structures beyond their culture and as products of those structures. This act of kindness—this capacity for recognition and imagination—has been transformative and what we might hope to cultivate in how we teach writing and think about our own work.

Writing and writing studies have histories of unsettling norms. Writing’s ability to unsettle allows us to simultaneously study structures, communities and institutions, and to change our thinking and ways we navigate within them—indeed, to change the structures themselves—and to imagine other ways of being, with the goal of transformation. Stories are told with the understanding that they can simultaneously construct and limit knowledge. Stories are, and should be, messy and changing as they are read and re-read in different contexts. Through writing, we learn to think and to think differently, and to be different in the systems we find ourselves inhabiting—and to imagine new systems into being as we do so.

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1. 1 Raewyn Connell, The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Radical Change (London: Zed Books, 2019).

2. 2 Laurel Richardson and Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre, ‘Writing: A Method of Inquiry’, in SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Methods, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2008), 959–78.

3. 3 Peter Brooks, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative (New York: NY Review Books, 2022), 15.

4. 4 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, 3rd ed. (University of California Press, 2011).

5. 5 Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11sn283.

6. 6 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1983), doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226065595.001.0001; Malea Powell, Malea Powell, Daisy Levy, Andrea Riley-Mukavetz, Marilee Brooks-Gillies, Maria Novotny and Jennifer Fisch-Ferguson, ‘Our Story Begins Here: Constellating Cultural Rhetorics’, Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing and Culture 25 (2014), www.enculturation.net/our-story-begins-here.

7. 7 Eugen Bacon, ‘The Scholarly Exegesis as a Memoir’, New Writing 14, no. 3 (2017): 386–97, doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2017.1284245.

8. 8 Powell et al., ‘Our Story Begins Here’.

9. 9 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 5.

10. 10 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, (Trumansburg: Crossing Press, 1984), 37.

11. 11 Powell et al., ‘Our Story Begins Here’.

12. 12 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 89.

13. 13 Ibid., 24.

14. 14 Ibid., 15.

15. 15 Connell, The Good University, 2.

16. 16 Noah De Lissovoy, ‘Pedagogy of the Anxious: Rethinking Critical Pedagogy in the Context of Neoliberal Autonomy and Responsibilization’, Journal of Education Policy 33, no. 2 (2018): 187, doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2017.1352031.

17. 17 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th anniversary ed. (New York : Continuum, 2000).

18. 18 bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).

19. 19 Andrew Seal, ‘How the University Became Neoliberal’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 28 June 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/how-the-university-became-neoliberal/.

20. 20 Robyn Moore, Emily Rudling, Maria Kunda and Sebastien Robin, ‘Supporting Casual Teaching Staff in the Australian Neoliberal University: A Collaborative Approach’, Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching 4, no. 2 (4 August 2021): 54–67, doi.org/10.37074/jalt.2021.4.2.8.

21. 21 Rick Ayers and Bill Ayers, ‘Living in the Gutter: Conflict and Contradiction in the Neoliberal Classroom. A Call to Action’, Berkeley Review of Education 2, no. 1 (2011), doi.org/10.5070/B82110025; Stephen Vassallo, ‘Critical Pedagogy and Neoliberalism: Concerns with Teaching Self-Regulated Learning’, Studies in Philosophy and Education 32, no. 6 (1 November 2013): 563–80, doi.org/10.1007/s11217-012-9337-0.

22. 22 De Lissovoy, ‘Pedagogy of the Anxious’, 191.

23. 23 Ibid.

24. 24 Carl Rhodes, Christopher Wright and Alison Pullen, ‘Changing the World? The Politics of Activism and Impact in the Neoliberal University’, Organization 25, no. 1 (January 2018): 139–47, doi.org/10.1177/1350508417726546.

25. 25 Richard Watermeyer, Rille Raaper and Margarida Borras Batalla, ‘COVID-19: A Neoliberal Nirvana?’, Critical Criminology 30, no. 3 (2022): 509–26, doi.org/10.1007/s10612-022-09652-x.

26. 26 Janelle Jennings-Alexander and Kate Maddalena, ‘Fighting for Bandwidth: Prioritizing Social Justice as Essential Carework in the Age of COVID-19’, Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics 6, no. 2 (Summer 2022), academia.edu/88416130/Fighting_for_Bandwidth_Prioritizing_Social_Justice_as_Essential_Carework_in_the_Age_of_COVID_19_with_Janelle_Jennings_Alexander?uc-sb-sw=75494269.

27. 27 Universities Australia, ‘Safe Return to Vibrant, on-Campus Life’, Media Release, 18 February 2022, www.universitiesaustralia.edu.au/media-item/safe-return-to-vibrant-on-campus-life/.

28. 28 Catherine Hanrahan, ‘Australians Warned of ‘Another COVID Wave’ as Sub-Variants Take Hold’, ABC News, 3 November 2022, www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-03/australia-warned-to-prepare-for-another-covid-19-wave/101611598.

29. 29 Liam Mayo and Shamim Miah, ‘Zombie Disciplines: Knowledge, Anticipatory Imagination, and Becoming in Postnormal Times’, World Futures Review 13, no. 2 (1 June 2021): 157, doi.org/10.1177/19467567211025546.

30. 30 Tori L. Cowger, Eleanor J. Murray, Jaylen Clarke, Mary T. Bassett, Bisola O. Ojikutu, Sarimer M. Sánchez, Natalia Linos and Kathryn T. Hall, ‘Lifting Universal Masking in Schools—Covid-19 Incidence among Students and Staff’, New England Journal of Medicine 387, no. 21 (24 November 2022): 1935–46, doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029.

31. 31 Alice Wong, ‘“Normal” Was Actually Not Great for a Lot of People’, Esquire, 15 June 2020, www.esquire.com/news-politics/a32474779/alice-wong-interview-coronavirus-covid-19-lessons/.

32. 32 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 32.

33. 33 Paul Dawson, Creative Writing and the New Humanities (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2005), doi.org/10.4324/9780203401019; Anne Surma, ‘Defining Professional Writing as an Area of Scholarly Activity’, TEXT: Journal of Writing & Writing Programs 4, no. 2 (October 2000): n.p, doi.org/10.52086/001c.35837.

34. 34 See, among others, Dawson, Creative Writing and the New Humanities; Dianne Donnelly, Establishing Creative Writing Studies as an Academic Discipline (Multilingual Matters, 2011), doi.org/10.21832/9781847695918; Dominique Hecq, Towards a Poetics of Creative Writing (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2015); Trent Hergenrader, ‘Making Space for Creative Writing Research in the Academy’, Journal of Creative Writing Studies 1, no. 1 (2016): 1–7; Craig Jordan-Baker, ‘The Philosophy of Creative Writing’, New Writing 12, no. 2 (4 May 2015): 238–48, doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2015.1047854; David Gershom Myers, The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing since 1880 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo3771157.html; Rosyln Petelin, ‘Another Whack at WAC: Reprising WAC in Australia’, Language and Learning across the Disciplines 5, no. 3 (2002): 98–109; Susan E. Thomas, ‘Writing Instruction in Australia’, Composition Studies 49, no. 3 (2021): 176–81; Karen Orr. Vered, Susan Thomas and Lisa Emerson, ‘From the Margins to the Centre: Whole-of-Institution Approaches to University-Level Literacy and Language Development in Australia and New Zealand’, Across the Disciplines 16, no. 3 (2019): 1–8, doi.org/10.37514/ATD-J.2019.16.3.10.

35. 35 Andrew Taylor, ‘The Ghost and the Machine: Creative Writing and the Academic System’, TEXT: Journal of Writing & Writing Programs 3, no. 1 (1999), doi.org/10.52086/001c.36030.

36. 36 David McVey, ‘Why All Writing Is Creative Writing’, Innovations in Education and Teaching International 45, no. 3 (August 2008): 289–94, doi.org/10.1080/14703290802176204. See also Beck Wise and Ariella Van Luyn, Not “All Writing Is Creative Writing” and That’s OK: Inter/Disciplinary Collaboration in Writing and Writing Studies’, TEXT: Journal of Writing & Writing Programs, no. 59 (2020): 1–14, doi.org/10.52086/001c.23485.

37. 37 Lawrence Angus, ‘School Choice: Neoliberal Education Policy and Imagined Futures’, British Journal of Sociology of Education 36, no. 3 (April 3, 2015): 396–97, doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2013.823835.

38. 38 Richard E. Miller, Writing at the End of the World (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), ix, muse.jhu.edu/book/27077.

39. 39 Ibid., ix–x.

40. 40 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NYU Press, 2009), 1.

41. 41 Siobhan B. Somerville, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies, ed. Siobhan B. Somerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 1–15, doi.org/10.1017/9781108699396.002.

42. 42 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).

43. 43 Mayo and Miah, ‘Zombie Disciplines’, 159–60

44. 44 Ibid., 162.

45. 45 Jessica Calarco, Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

46. 46 Wise and Van Luyn, ‘Not “All Writing Is Creative Writing”’; Beck Wise, Ariella Van Luyn and Kate Cantrell, ‘“Not-So-Invisible Mending”: Developing Editing Skills in Large Online Classes through Visible Labour’, Research in Online Literacy Education 3, no. 1 (31 August 2020), www.roleolor.org/ldquonot-so-invisible-mendingrdquo-developing-editing-skills-in-large-online-classes-through-visible-labour.html.

47. 47 Connell, The Good University, 12 (original emphasis).

48. 48 Brooks, Seduced by Story, 23.