Kylie J Stevenson

In 2014, the Australian Research Council awarded funding for a Discovery Project exploring the risks and benefits 0-5s face online. One element of this research was to investigate public discourses around very young children’s (0-5) use of touchscreen technologies. Based on analysis of data collected from the public sphere and popular media over a twelve-month period (April 2015 to March 2016), the authors find that Australian parents still express confusion and guilt concerning their very young children’s media use. Many news, magazine and blogger commentaries collected were alarmist in tone and did not resonate with parents’ experiences of everyday digital life with very young children. Instead of accepting dominant discourses around zero to very little digital time for under-5s, parents are sharing and developing their practices that work for them, but this does not stop them feeling techno-guilt.

This article explores the way one mother from a disadvantaged family is rebuilding her life despite the disadvantages of poverty, domestic violence and drug dependency. It examines her determined emotional commitment to change as she explains the barriers to change that she has experienced. As she communicates her life narrative, she builds for herself and her children an understanding of a different possible future in which she and her children have access to a more independent, positive life experience. Seligman (2006) suggests that changing self-talk helps people to escape from pessimism and move from powerlessness to autonomy and hope. This mother makes powerful declarations about her life changes with the aim of providing her children with a vision of a more hopeful future. This article contributes the often-silenced voice of a welfare-reliant woman to a discussion of different worlds of communication, and opens a window on diversities of engagement with these worlds.

Photography can be a powerful tool for self-expression. For those who are less empowered in our community, such as children, photography can provide a voice through images. It is a form of creativity that can provide a new way of seeing. This article examines the potential of photovoice as a meaningful way to develop critical thinking and communication approaches. Photovoice is a method of participatory action research that is innovative in the ways by which it enables participants to identify and represent their surroundings. Photovoice has been used in anthropology, public health, social work and education, and is associated with empowerment and valuing subjective experience. For this article, we draw upon the outcomes of photography workshops held with children whose families are the recipients of welfare support, and who have agreed to participate in the Hand Up: Disrupting the Communication of Intergenerational Poverty Linkage project. We examine the processes of photovoice, in which every child’s perspective is valued. The children are active participants, empowered through capturing images through professional cameras, selecting and editing their work and, importantly, talking about their photographs, all of which encourage engagement in critical consciousness. There was also a focus on the directness of communication, in the way personal thoughts and ideas were handwritten alongside the photographs produced. In particular, we were interested in the significance for the children of creating a photo album. In our age of digital images, which are viewed on screen, the children were given photo prints, and had a new tactile experience as well as a lasting reminder of their personal photographs, which could be shared and discussed.

This paper introduces the qualitative doctoral study, ‘Creative River Journeys’, conducted by the author at Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Western Australia. The study investigated case studies of six artist-researchers engaged in practice-led research in higher degrees at ECU. Central to the research was a data capture tool called the Creative River Journey, based on in-depth interviewing and visual mapping of an artist’s critical moments during their creative practice. A diagram or ‘map’ of practice was co-constructed with the research participant as part of the interview process, using the metaphor of a river. Mapping the creative process via the Creative River Journey identified critical moments concerning how the artist-researchers related to key concepts in practice-led research such as research, practice and theory. Using one of these cases as an exemplar, this paper explains the study in order to illustrate how the metaphor was co-constructed and the rich data that this mapping produced. This paper demonstrates the benefit of the Creative River Journey as part of a repertoire of emerging practice-led research methodologies for individual artist-researchers, including the usefulness of reflection in identifying critical moments in their practice-led research. For the purposes of this paper, the participant has been de-identified.

This chapter arises from the intersection of two research projects conducted at Edith Cowan University (ECU): the practice-led PhD research project by Dr Rashida Murphy, and the qualitative PhD study of practice-led artist-researchers by Kylie Stevenson in which Rashida was a participant. This paper takes two perspectives, an insider’s view and an outsider’s view, in order to construct a ‘narrative of practice’ about Rashida’s PhD research. The insider view sees Rashida document her research investigating the experiences of women from India and Iran who migrated to Australia, which resulted in her exegesis ‘Monsters and Memory’ and her creative component, the recently published novel ‘The Historian’s Daughter’. This insider view will discuss how Rashida exploited the unique potential of practice-led research to generate personally situated knowledge, both about her migrant women subjects and her own writing practice. The outsider’s view by Kylie Stevenson will illustrate how this knowledge can be conceptualised as a ‘narrative of practice’ (Murphy 2012,21) that was co-constructed through structured reflective practice with Rashida in Stevenson’s project ‘Creative River Journeys’ and how it can serve as a new way of modelling knowledge in practice-led research.

Professor Cat Hope, along with colleague and collaborator Tos Mahoney, is one of Australia’s leading proponents of New Music, and the instigator of the Western Australian New Music Archive (WANMA), launched on 20 May 2015, at the State Library of Western Australia. As co - curator of WANMA, alongside Mahoney, Hope was a key determinant of its contents. Consequently, Hope’s working definitions of new music and of the role and function of an archive were critical areas of interest and key to realising the communicative vision of this project which was also sponsored by Tura New Music, the State Library of Western Australia, the National Library of Australia and ABC Classic FM. Using guided reflection, this paper interrogates the principles and purpose of constructing a digital archive and the ways in which it is designed with future users in mind. It considers the challenges posed by an archive that captures and contains an art form which is often site - specific or ephemeral.

The Parents and Peers project set out to investigate key influences of peers and parents on the online experiences of young people aged 13 - 17. Specifically, the project sought to explore the family constructions of learning, support and management systems that operate in the informal context of the domestic space of the family home (Silverstone & Haddon 1996). It became apparent through interviewing several sets of older siblings that there was benefit in interviewing a wider age range of siblings who were engaged in online activity within individual families. Therefore, the interview participants’ age range was extended to age 9 - 17. This paper utilises sets of interviews from three families in which 3 or 4 siblings agreed to participate in the research. What became clear from these multiple interviews in each of the three families was that any consideration of influence upon these young people’s online activities needed to expand from parents and peers to include the influence of siblings and cousins. This paper examines the various influences operating within larger families, particularly on the youngest members of these families, aged 9 - 10, whom we have called ‘young gamers’. It also considers how influence might be exchanged within the sibling/cousin network operating in these families.

2010 to 2012 saw Dr Kylie Stevenson deeply immersed in designing and enacting a doctoral research project, Creative River Journeys. The project involved her working with a group of nine artist-researchers who, like Kylie, are also completing their PhDs (or research Masters) at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia, and for whom creative practice was a key component of their projects, some identifying as practice led researchers and others not. The co-author of this paper, Dr Sue Girak, was one of those artist-researcher participants. Prior to engaging in the Creative River Journey project, Sue had elected to use the methodology a/r/tography that Kylie also used. Sue was completing an Education doctorate with a studio practice component. Other artist-researcher participants came from the disciplines of visual arts, performing arts and creative writing. This paper demonstrated how, through conversation and reflection, Kylie and Sue worked together to document the critical moments – that is, moments of significance or change – in Sue’s creative and research practice using a reflective practice tool called the Creative River Journey. Kylie was particularly driven by her deep interest in identifying meaningful methodologies for practice-led researchers. In this paper, Kylie provides a brief overview of the PhD project including Sue and Kylie’s chosen methodology, a/r/tography. Kylie outlines the theoretical foundations of the project that, like a/r/tography, involve the conceptual terrains of art practice, research and teaching. Using Sue’s practice as a case study, Kylie and Sue illustrate how the Creative River Journey acted as reflective practice to document the creative process, thus facilitating connections for the artist-researcher between practice and research. Kylie and Sue proposed, with reference to this artist-researcher’s Creative River Journey, that the reflective practice is a method of facilitating and documenting practice-led research.