The Making Academic

By showcasing the experiences of making academics, this book advocates for higher education professionals to integrate creative practices into their lives, recognising the potential to facilitate personal growth, self-discovery, and alternative ways of knowing. Higher education contexts can be demanding, challenging, and rewarding and this book shares the practices of scholars who intertwine their intellectual pursuits with hands-on creative activities to support both their scholarly work and their wellbeing. Presenting visual narratives and describing their experiences, the authors inspire readers to consider how creative expression can support fulfilment, meaning, purpose, and wellbeing in academic work and life. The chapters focus on the arts, making, creating, and creativity, highlighting the crucial role these making practices play in the embodiment of knowing and exploring the self. Ultimately, this book contributes to a broader conversation about the importance of valuing and nurturing various forms of creativity within the higher education sector, as a means of promoting wellbeing, self-care, and a more holistic approach to scholarship. This is an essential read for individuals working in higher education at various career stages, as well as higher degree research students.

Narelle Lemon is a Vice Chancellor's Professorial Research Fellow and Professor of Education in the School of Education at Edith Cowan University, Australia. Sharon McDonough is Associate Professor and Teacher Educator in the School of Education at Federation University, Australia. Mark Selkrig is Associate Professor in Education and the Arts at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Section One: Playing with identity and place 1. Making as Wellbeing: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Academic Maker Identities in Higher Education 2. Constructing myself as an academic: states of flow and multi-membership to balance vulnerability with creativity 3. When having a meltdown is a Good Thing 4. Answering The Craftsman's Call To Be Academic 5. Finding my place in academia through mixed-media embroidery practice 6. Finding Me in the Midst of Chaos Section Two: Developing, growing and maintaining self-care and wellbeing 7. Knitting and spinning: How fibre craft can support you as an HE professional 8. Crafting academic connections across time and disciplines 9. Rediscovering the self: Music for wellbeing, aesthetic, and making 10. Sanctuary in spice: The kitchen as a space of wellbeing for a migrant woman in academia 11. Mapping Terrain: Stitching Gariwerd 12. A Proximal Conversation Section Three: Thinking, telling and sharing stories 13. Thinking through and speaking to: A daily stitching story 14. Made to Measure 15. Creative carding: 'Life giving and receiving in the academy' 16. Patterns of Wear: Wardrobe Research and Self Care Through A Daily Hand Sewing Practice 17. Making time for making: The complexities of a creative practice-led PhD through 3,500 hexagons Section Four: Developing and informing scholarly inquiry 18. Making friends: creativity as a catalyst for conneciton and community 19. Unravelling Researcher Bias through Doodling 20. Everything you don't have to do: how fostering individual creative practice enables others to create 21. Musical flourishing as a music teacher educator 22. Attuning to jazz in the process of becoming a 'making academic' 23. The Power of a Pinchpot: Embracing Imperfection and Spontaneity in our Academic and Artistic Lives Section Five: Power, aesthetics and knowing 24. The Promise of Creative Education in Neoliberal Times: Ideology, Sensibility, and Natality 25. The Craft of Academic Podcasting: Creating and Curating Connections and Living Knowledge 26. Re-representations of self: A turbulent journey towards Honan's (2007) swinging rope bridge 27. Creativity through blogging: A duet in an academic key 28. The Interplay of Artistic Practice, Academic Identity, and Aesthetic Considerations: A Personal Journey 29. I am out with lanterns: a printmakers' path to academic authenticity 30. Making shimmers 31. Cultivating Safety, Connection, and Emotional Regulation: Insights from the Intersection of Art, Education, and Research