This volume focuses on individual and collective practices of creativity, embodiment and movement as acts of self-care and wellbeing.
Creative Expression and Wellbeing in Higher Education positions creative expression as an important act for professionals working in higher education, as a way to connect, communicate, practice activism or simply slow down. Through examples as diverse as movement through dance and exercise, expression through drawing, writing or singing and creating objects with ones hands, the authors share how individual and collective acts of creativity and movement enhance, support and embrace wellbeing, offering guidance to the reader on how such creative expression can be adopted as self-care practice. This book highlights how connection to hand, body, voice and mind has been imperative in this process for expression, fl ow and engagement with self and wellbeing practices.
Self-care and wellbeing are complex at the best of times. In higher education, these are actions that are constantly being grappled with personally, collectively and systematically. Designed to support readers working in higher education, this book will also be of great interest to professionals and researchers.
1. Poetic inquiry: Transformational representations of wellbeing and
self-care in higher education Section 1: Making and creating as a
representation of self-care
2. The feeling of doingthinking and thinkingdoing
of making processes
3. Journaling Right and Left
4. Meditative Math-Making
Section 2: Collaborative expression, embodiment, and the power of
relationships
5. Stepping off the Edge: Circles of Connection and Creativity
for Wellbeing in the Academy
6. Running, Writing, Resilience: A Self-Study of
Collaborative Self-Care Among Women Faculty
7. Making mindful moments: Made
artefacts as a form of data visualisation to monitor and respond to self-care
and wellbeing Section 3: Creative practice as interruption
8. Using
arts-based and feminist methodologies to slow the wear and tear/s of academic
work/life
9. Playing with pictures to make sense and interrupt the
hurly-burly university game.
10. Self-Care in the Time of Crisis: An
a/r/tographic conversation to explore self-care as academics, that took an
unexpected turn Section 4: Mind, body, and movement as acts of self-care
11.
Kia krero te tinana katoa (The whole body must speak): Mori early career
academics and performing ones cultural self for hauora
12. Cycling as a form
of self-care: Incorporating and sustaining purposeful movement practices to
support wellbeing
13. Anatomy of a burnout: Walking, reading and journal
writing as practices of self-care to support intellectual life
Narelle Lemon is an interdisciplinary researcher in the fi elds of education, positive psychology and arts, holding the positions of Associate Professor in Education and Associate Dean (Education) for the School of Social Sciences, Media, Film and Education at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.
