As speakers address the important contribution of the arts and humanities to communities in crisis or facing disaster and extreme weather events, they consider case studies that can teach us about best practice. Artists and scholars who collaborate with communities under duress recognise the need for careful consideration of the methodological approaches they use in circumstances that involve lived experience. The choice of methodology can ensure the effectiveness of a project. Therefore, it is crucial to ask: what are the most ethical methodologies that can be used in particular circumstances? In theatrical performance, for example, practitioners may recommend group development of verbatim and documentary modes when working with a community that has experienced trauma. In designing an online dictionary of family law terms for those with low reading skills, the conventional alphabetical access is replaced by a thesaurus-like front end. Common concepts are foregrounded by means of graphics and audio recordings as the focus and context for groups of terms.
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Speakers
Emeritus Professor Peta Tait FAHA (Chair)
Peta Tait is Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She has authored and edited 12 books and 75 articles and chapters including: the authored: Forms of Emotion: Human to Nonhuman in Drama, Theatre and Contemporary Performance (2022); Theory for Theatre Studies: Emotion (2021); the co-edited Feminist Ecologies: Changing Environments in the Anthropocene (2018) and the edited The Great European Stage Directors volume one (2018); and the authored Fighting Nature (2016). She co-edited The Routledge Circus Studies Reader (2016). Her recent published plays include Eleanor and Mary Alice (2018) about Eleanor Roosevelt, and in two languages Retrato de Augustine/Mesmerized (Brazil: Praxila 2024) about Charcot and performing hysteria. She is co-author of the forthcoming book, Ecology and Climate in Theatre and Australian Performance.
Scientia Professor Jill Bennett FAHA
Jill Bennett is Scientia Professor and Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow at UNSW. She is Founding Director of The Big Anxiety Festival; the Big Anxiety Research Centre [BARC]; and the Felt Experience & Empathy Lab [fEEL] at UNSW, where she is also a co-lead of the Ageing Futures Institute. She is a director and co-founder of Skilled Companions, a spin-out company advancing AI-companionship and psychosocial support.
Her research is predominantly in the area of trauma, psychosocial design and creative practice, encompassing collaborative design/production of virtual reality/immersive media. Her outputs include award-winning VR and public engagement projects, exploring the role of creativity and trauma-informed design in supporting mental and emotional health, as well as curated exhibitions and festivals. Her books include Empathic Vision (2005), Practical Aesthetics (2011), Curating Sydney (with Saskia Beudel, 2014) and The Big Anxiety: Taking Care of Mental Health in Time of Crisis (2022). Ageing and the Machine: Psychosocial aesthetics, design and technology (with L. Froggett and G. Kenning) will be published in 2026. Current projects include Transforming Trauma (MRFF funded), developing VR with 5 regional/remote Aboriginal communities.
Abstract: Designing creative VR experiences and AI companions with communities
Abstract: Designing creative VR experiences and AI companions with communities
Jill Bennett will talk about the process of collaboratively designing creative VR experiences and AI companions with communities, addressing issues of trauma, loneliness and psychosocial wellbeing. This will include a focus on two projects with Ngangkari (traditional healers) in the APY Lands: Waumananyi (2019) and Tjulpu and Walpa (2025).
Dr Tamara Borovica
Tamara Borovica is a researcher and creative practitioner whose interdisciplinary work explores the intersections of health, embodiment, and social justice. Currently a Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at RMIT University, Dr. Borovica draws on critical theory, affect studies and arts-based methodologies to investigate how young people experience and respond to planetary and mental health challenges. Her research foregrounds lived experience and creative methods — including dance, visual art, and storytelling — to generate new insights into trauma, grief, and resilience. She has led and contributed to ARC and industry-funded projects, with outcomes influencing public mental health initiatives. Her work supports the development of training strategies for health organisations, emphasising empathy, connection, and equity. She has been recognised by two major research awards, including RMIT’s Research Excellence Award (2024) for her contributions to creative research into experiences of health and illness.
Abstract: Grief, Mourning, and Creative Practice Approach: Reflections from The Mourning After
Abstract: Grief, Mourning, and Creative Practice Approach: Reflections from The Mourning After
Grief is both personal and collective, shaped by cultural, ecological, and social forces. The Mourning After (2025), an exhibition and public program co-curated with Dist. Prof. Larissa Hjorth and Dr. Kate Gerber, investigated how interdisciplinary creative practice can serve as a methodology for engaging with grief, resilience, and hope in the context of climate crisis and cultural loss.
Building on my broader work in creative and embodied research methods—including performance, participatory body mapping, and arts-based approaches to mental health—the program developed process-based methodologies that centre emotion, listening, and collective reflection. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of ‘grievability’ (2009), we extend this framework to include more-than-human loss and complex emotional terrains, exploring who and what is deemed grievable, and how grief is expressed both individually and collectively.
Creative practice workshops—imagined as a collective method, an approach, and action research to address grief as a social practice—included poetry as catharsis for the “grieving non-poet,” somatic mapping of climate emotions, and speculative rituals for digital afterlives. These practices treated grief not as a state to be resolved but as a dynamic, socially embedded process. This presentation reflects on the ethical, practical, and affective dimensions of using creative practice as a methodology for exploring grief and resilience. It argues for the arts and humanities as critical spaces for developing reparative, non-extractive frameworks and methods that centre emotion, connection, and embodied knowledge in ethically grounded ways—methods capable of responding to collective ruptures with care, imagination, and relational depth.
Professor Helena Grehan FAHA
Helena Grehan is Vice Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow at Edith Cowan University. Her research deals with the intersections of art, technology, politics and spectatorship in the contemporary context. She has published four scholarly books and two co-edited books, as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Several of her publications have won prizes for research excellence. She has also led major ARC funded collaborative grant projects. She has held leadership roles including Dean of Research, Associate Dean of Research, Deputy Dean and Acting Executive Dean in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Murdoch University.
She has a passionate interest in mentorship and supporting the sector to adapt to meet the challenges of the contemporary context. As such, she speaks at international fora on collegiality and care, adjudicates promotions and fostering the development of staff as well as running conferences, examining theses, participating in award panels, and assessing grant applications from a range of disciplines internationally. She has supervised over 20 Research Higher Degree candidates to completion. She is the Deputy Editor of Performance Research.
Abstract: Performance and ethics in dark times: the case for ‘slow listening’
Abstract: Performance and ethics in dark times: the case for ‘slow listening’
In this presentation I argue for the power of ‘slow listening’ (Grehan, 2020), as an ethical practice that requires the listener to pause and pay attention or tune-in to the mode of address, the scene, gesture and tone, the language use and the broader political or social context within which the speaking or performing occurs. It is a practice in which the listener is bodily attuned to the performer in a way that makes room for a range of responses – the possibility of deep understanding and agreement, for partial acceptance as well as for dissonance or disagreement. As such, it is not a panacea but rather a practice through which spectators sit with the often confronting and uncomfortable ideas that contemporary politically informed performance negotiates, so that they might consider both their response to and responsibilities for the world rendered in and through the work.
By analysing Cut the Sky, a ‘riveting pre-apocalyptic odyssey of dance theatre, song and storytelling [that] questions the inevitability of climate collapse’ (2025) by the Australian Indigenous Intercultural performance company Marrugeku, I aim to show how ‘slow listening’ can open spectators up to new ways of thinking and feeling about the dark times we currently inhabit. A ‘slow listening’ process, can, I argue, return much needed complexity to debates and discussions – negotiated in this work – about what our ethical responsibilities might be as we prepare for difficult and unstable climate futures.
Emeritus Professor Pam Peters FAHA
Pam Peters is an Emeritus Professor at Macquarie University — where she held a Personal Chair in Linguistics until retiring in 2007. She was Director of Macquarie University’s Dictionary Research Centre (2001-07), and a member of the Editorial Committee of the Macquarie Dictionary (1986-2006). She continues on the editorial boards of English World-Wide, English Today, and the ICAME Journal. In other professional roles, she served from 1996-2024 on the ABC’s Language Committee (formerly SCOSE), as a Distinguished Editor of Australia’s Institute of Professional Editors, and contributed six chapters to the Australian Government Style Manual (6th ed. 2002). She led the compilation of reference corpora of Australian English (ACE, ICE and ART) for researching Australian English usage. Her major monographs are Cambridge Guide to Australian Style (1996), Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage (2007), and their international counterpart, her Cambridge Guide to English Usage (2004) – its revised second edition to be published in 2026. Her current research interests are varieties of English in the Indo-Pacific (the VEIP project endorsed by the Union Academique Internationale), and the readability of health messaging for the general public, along with creating online termbanks in cancer medicine (HealthTermFinder), family law (LawTermFinder), and building and construction (ArchiTermFinder).
Abstract: An online dictionary in Family Law to meet the needs of Australians with limited reading skills
Abstract: An online dictionary in Family Law to meet the needs of Australians with limited reading skills
This paper presents a creative response to public need for accessible information on the terminology of specialized fields such as medicine and law. The TermFinder platform is an online user-oriented dictionary, making the most of the digital medium to address the needs of disadvantaged Australian citizens. They include second-language users of English, and others with limited reading skills in English including Indigenous Australians. Their access to specialized medical or legal information in dictionaries may be frustrated at the start, by not knowing exactly what word/term to search for, and inability to understand the dictionary entry when they find it. The LawTermFinder online termbank in Family Law has “fuzzy” search systems for nonstandard spellings, plain language definitions and infographics, and translation equivalents in 8 Australian community languages. It also offers an “easy read” interface for Indigenous users and others with low reading skills in English. Their access is supported by radical re-engineering of the law termbank according to onomasiological (thesaurus-like) principles, using generic concepts like “court’ and “safety” as entry “cards” with simple graphics and voice-overs by Indigenous voice actors to help users’ recognition. The entry cards are linked to other terms/termcards with the same supporting features. Extended voice-recordings go with all definitions and user information about each term. The “easy read” termbank represents a creative and compassionate redesign of the standard dictionary structure and interface to meet the needs of particular user groups.
