Edge/Centre Research Program
- Education - Human Services - Arts - Imagination - Research - Practice -
Introducing the Edge/Centre Research Program
The Edge/Centre includes over 25-years of research and social action
collaborations that have transformed into the productive research
program that we now call the Edge/Centre. Aspects of the history of this
work are documented and includes hosting conferences, community
development activities, facilitation of workshops, lobbying, delivery of
art-based sessions, participation on steering committees, activism,
conference presentations, providing professional development, writing
submissions, research projects, and writing, e.g., Crowhurst and Emslie,
2020, 2018, 2014, 2003, 2000a, 2000b.
The Edge/Centre is a space of collaborative scholarly endeavours and
creatively designed intellectual pursuits. The Edge/Centre maintains a
key focus on investigating and deploying creative research methods and
innovative knowledge practices to generate and enhance the possibilities
for imaginative ethical professional practice in human services,
education and the arts.
What do we mean by the Edge/Centre?
In Crowhurst and Emslie (2018, p. ix) we describe the Edge/Centre as;
‘…an idea and a location where the values of collaboration, emergence, dialogue and creativity drive the generation of…[the] text.’
The Edge/Centre is an idea and a space we inhabit intellectually,
emotionally, affectively and physically to think, research, read, play,
dialogue, reflect, diffract, squiggle, collaborate, compost, analyse,
and write.
The Edge/Centre involves intentionally locating intellectual,
emotional and physical labour on the margins. For example, we situate
our research and writing as being on the edge of what is typical,
prevailing, mainstream, aligned, assumed and expected. Our work is
deliberately done on the margins, not in the centre of things, and does
not seek to follow mainstream agendas because we find many aspects of
these problematic.
’We think we write from an edge, an edge that is quirky and different and where our marginality allows for, generates and affords other interesting kinds of connection…[One thing our work] is about storying edges and the generative possibilities that marginality can offer (Crowhurst and Emslie, 2020, p. 6).
The Edge/Centre is an alternative space, a place of difference, that
is ‘out there’, edgy, that involves doing edginess, pushing boundaries,
and doing things in unexpected and not what is expected or assumed ways.
The Edge/Centre also functions as a form of support where edgy work is
validated and celebrated.
The Edge/Centre is a ‘pleasurable non-normative space’ that we claim,
occupy, inhabit, are captured by, are drawn to and purposefully build as
an alternative to the existing middle or neoliberal centre (Crowhurst
and Emslie, 2020, p. 23). An example of the effects generated on account
of inhabiting the Edge/Centre is the form that our writng takes.
‘This edginess is reflected in the texts’ style and in its eclecticism, in its tone, and in its voice and register’ (Crowhurst and Emslie, 2020, p. 6).
Storying the Edge/Centre’s recent research projects and future
initiatives
Our first book (Crowhurst and Emslie, 2018) outlines a series of
methods to work creatively with stories, to open up possibilities in
understanding and thinking about stories, and to open up possibilities
in stories for generating understanding and meaning in our lives.
‘Working Creatively with Stories and Learning Experiences: Engaging with
Queerly Identifying Tertiary Students’ explores how we can work
creatively with stories and we used the stories of queerly identifying
tertiary students to demonstrate this. In the book we describe and
deploy a range of methods to analyse the stories of the students. We
make the case that the stories, and the subjectivities they capture are:
* (ch 2) discursively produced (or an effect of discourse in
context)
* (ch 3) performative (or performed, enacted and embodied)
* (ch 4) multiple (or consisting of an assemblage of elements)
Then (ch 5) we argue that the elements of these discursively produced,
performative and multiple/fragmented stories/subjectivities can at times
be contrary and sit in tension. We argue there is a tendency to ignore,
overlook, deny, minimise, and erase such tensions. However, we make the
case that such tension, ambiguity, diversity, and complexity in
stories/subjectivities has productive potential and is generative of
other possibilities. In (ch 6) we make the case that ‘reading aloud like
a playscript’ is a way to engage with these possibilities. We argue that
these methods can be used to analyse the generative potential of any
story whether they be about people, practice, policy, institutions, or
contexts.
Praise for ‘Working Creatively with Stories and Learning Experiences: Engaging with Queerly Identifying Tertiary Students’:
‘At a time when gender and sexual diversity are high on the
agenda, this book marks a timely intervention in the tertiary education
context. It will be of interest and value to a wide range of
professionals working to support LGBTQ students in colleges and
universities.’
- Prof Peter Aggleton, University of New
South Wales, Australia
‘This is a very useful guide not only in support of LGBTIQ issues
but also a very accessible academic overview of using, analyzing and
creatively engaging with narratives in many disciplines, with many
communities, and in multiple settings.’
- Dr Maria
Pallotta Chiarolli, Deakin University, Australia
Our second book (Crowhurst and Emslie, 2020) turns to our stories and
we deploy a critical/collective/auto/ethnographic approach to engage
with these accounts. Then using the methods from our first book and
introducing a series of arts-based research methods we work with our
stories to generate possibilities for understanding and thinking about
stories in different ways. ‘Arts-based Pathways into Thinking: Troubling
Standardization/s, Enticing Multiplicities, Inhabiting Creative
Imaginings’ extends the ideas from our first book. In this book (ch 1)
we argue that the beginning of the 21st century has seen a marked
interest in creative research methods and novel knowledge practices. At
the same time, we make the case (ch 2) that we are living in
increasingly standardized times that feature systems that specify
objectives ahead of time, demand compliance, and narrow the
possibilities for human action. It is this contradictory set of
conditions that incited and generated this book. In the book we describe
and deploy an assemblage of theoretically informed, creative, art-based,
and creative/critical/collective/auto/ethnographic methods that aim to
trouble and resist standardizations and normativities and provoke
multiplicities and the inhabitation of creative imaginings. We provide
accounts and analysis of the incitement and inhabitation of
multiplicities of knowing, sensing and doing generated by analysing
knowing frames (ch 3), poetry (ch 4), reading aloud (ch 5), combinings
(ch 6), fable-ing (ch 7), and other creative ways of working with
experiences and stories. We argue that the generation and inhabitation
of these multiplicities sheds light on the cultural conditions that
support and enable diversity and creativity. The book takes readers on
an arts-based journey designed to enhance the opportunities for
imaginative and ethical professional practice in education, human
services and the arts.
Praise for ‘Arts-based Pathways into Thinking: Troubling Standardization/s, Enticing Multiplicities, Inhabiting Creative Imaginings’:
‘Offering creative and nuanced arts-based pathways into thinking
and practices, this pioneering book engages us in a variety of ways and
at all levels…This is simply stunning. Stunning to read. Stunning to
view…’
- Prof Pam Barnard, University of Cambridge,
Cambridge, UK
‘Crowhurst and Emslie offer a compelling and scholarly model of
collective, arts-based autoethnography in action. They challenge the
reader to interrogate relationships with students and colleagues,
deconstructing the forces of standardization to reveal a multiplicity of
understandings and narratives.’
- Dr Andrea Kantrowitz,
State University of New York, USA
‘On
Pedagogical Spaces, Multiplicity and Linearities and Learning: Before,
Between, Beyond’
The third book authored by Michael Crowhurst (2022) with three
chapters co-authored with Michael Emslie builds on our previous work of
thinking, researching and writing in edgy and novel ways. This book’s
focus is on researching and learning from teaching, something the
authors have over sixty years of combined experience. ‘On Pedagogical
Spaces, Multiplicity and Linearities and Learning: Before, Between,
Beyond’ introduces a research method called ‘auto-teach(er)/ing-focused
research’ that the author(s)/researcher(s) apply within the pedagogical
space that is the teaching of a course and the pedagogical space that is
the writing of a book to generate knowledge about learning and teaching.
The book documents key understandings that emerged about educative
spaces (ch 2), teaching and learning events (ch 3), learners (ch 4),
learning across shorter and longer times frames (ch 5 and 6), assessment
practices (ch 7), designing pedagogical spaces for learning and learner
expansivities (ch 8), learner subjectivities as involving multiplicity
and linearities (ch 9), and the generative potential of the complex
relations between educative spaces, learning events, learners and
learning (ch 10). In the book we make the case that pedagogical spaces
in which teaching and learning takes place can be physical sites such as
schools as well as teaching and learning events and activities. We argue
that subjects/learners inhabit, navigate and are constituted within
pedagogical spaces in a multiplicity of ways that include affective and
temporal dimensions. Learners can know, be challenged, and have no idea,
as well as feel comfort, discomfort, and strange, before, during and
after inhabiting, negotiating, and being produced in pedagogical spaces.
The book calls for thinking about and designing pedagogical spaces in
complex ways that enable various possibilities for learners and learning
to take place, mingle, and generate opportunities for expansive
thinking, doing, sensing, and being.
‘Work in progress…’
Our next book (which is in progress), continues to explore and
describe more inventive, playful, scholarly and theoretically informed
methods for working creatively with stories, generating possibilities,
and thinking stories in different ways. At this point this new book
focuses on different modalities of thinking - the analytical, the
attuned, the diffractive and the imaginative.
In ‘Philosophy and the Event’ Badiou suggests that change doesn’t
happen in monolithic ways but rather it happens when people realize
where they are, decide that this place is problematic, think into a
somewhere else that is better and then decide to take small steps
towards or into this better somewhere else. The Edge/Centre is about
making such small steps and about somewhere else-ing.
Look at me Christmas! A poetic critique on the use of shiny surfaces in education
In December each year
The children would line up
Toffee
apples and smiles
Gifts for miles and miles
Chorus:
So much Christmas!
Shiny, shiny Christmas!
Look at me Christmas!
Christmas, we become
All anticipating Christmas
It couldn’t come fast enough
Only 25 sleeps to go
Oh Rudolph, elves, sleighs and snow
(Chorus)
The Christmas windows sparkled
All green and white and red
And Santa loved the way they
drew attention to his furry furry head
(Chorus)
Further information / Contact us:
Have a question? Want to learn more? Interested in getting involved? Like us to deliver a professional development workshop or research seminar? Please contact us:
Dr Michael Crowhurst
michael.crowhurst@rmit.edu.au
Dr Michael Emslie
michael.emslie@rmit.edu.au