Daniel X. Harris

• PHD 2010
• Research Professor at RMIT University

Relational education design advocates for whole-person exchange between teachers, students, facilitators, and participants. In this essay, we discuss what an emphasis on the relational allows and provide suggestions for its conditions including, space, time, authenticity, trust, dialogic development, and institutional support. The co-authors demons...

Telepresence robots (TPRs) have a transformative potential in education, bringing about the fusion of human and non-human elements in education. Three case studies delve into TPR implications. The first retelling examines communication dynamics and gender-based variations. The second focuses on TPRs’ role in hybrid learning during COVID-19, address...

This paper draws together academic and policy literature around the value of a culturally, linguistically and racially diverse (CLRD) teacher workforce in Australia. While Australia’s population is becoming more diverse, the teaching population is significantly less so, with far fewer teachers born overseas and/or speaking a language other than Eng...

This essay draws on empirical research from two studies examining creativity, activism, and education in Hong Kong. We use a decolonizing and deimperializing approach to centering creativity as a lever for social change, and demonstrate the ways in which the specifics of culture, region, time, and place uniquely produce forms of creativity, as has...

This article draws on the power of creative methods to call for a more collaborative, ecological approach to awareness, education, and research analysis of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Drawing on affect theory and empirical research using a co-creation methodology, we advocate for the power of peer-directed support provision for those exp...

This editorial introduces the 15 articles in this special issue entitled “Creative Ecologies: Designing Sustainable Futures” and contextualizes them against a rapidly expanding field of climate and ecological studies, creative and affect theoretics, and a burgeoning array of creative relational methods and methodologies extending 21st century quali...

This paper presents a study examining how pre-service teachers understand and experience the limit(s) of classroom creativity in a Canadian higher education class. Participants first completed a modified version of the Harris Creativity Audit to assess their preliminary understandings of creativity policies and practices, as well as perceptions of...

The authors detail the profound impact that Tami Spry has had on their lives and their work, but through her words and embodiments. The essay/performance uses Spry’s own words in part to elevate their documentation of her influence.

This performative piece considers human–animal relations in pandemic and post(?) pandemic times, in particular the exponential increase in pet adoptions during the COVID-19 lockdowns and the subsequent spectacular rise in pet relinquishments and abandonments following the easing of lockdowns and restrictions. We consider Jack Halberstam’s argument...

In this short essay I draw on the works of Maxine Greene, Donna Haraway and Anna Craft to reject traditional dualisms and binaries, in favour of proposing a possibility studies that is driven by an activist creative agency, in which thinking and doing are entangled and activated across multispecies contexts, and across multiple temporalities. I cal...

This chapter explores the ways in which establishing and maintaining creative ecologies requires a synthesising of ‘online’ and ‘offline’ practices, across diverse cultural, regional human and cultural lifeworlds. Braiding posthuman and creative ecology theoretics, this chapter argues that sustainable teaching, learning and living in speculative cu...

This book sits in the transdisciplinary space between digital ethnography, autoethnography, arts-based research and creative pedagogies. It contributes to the growing body of literature responding to the COVID-19 pandemic (Mathiyazhagan in Overcome COVID-19: Creative expressions of young people 2020), and centres around a 21-day digital autoethnogr...

The truth-telling in his piece is sin quo non to the unmasking needed to forge pathways to new gendered possibilities in troubled times toward transformative futures. I explore the affective embodied experience of living as a non-binary transmasculine person in a binary world. Drawing on the work of Jack Halberstam, Tami Spry, and Bryant Keith Alex...

In this poetic autoethnographic essay, we explore how the object of the caravan is a site and home for the creation of queer subjectivities and relations with the more-than-human world. As a queer object of resistance, the caravan opens us up to both the beautiful and the monstrous in our worlds and ourselves.

This editorial lays the groundwork and context for this special issue addressing a range of posthuman ecological approaches to the study and theorization of creativity, and its potential to transform understandings of 21st-century learning events and environments, including cities, schools, museums, parklands, digital environments, wild places, and...

This chapter explores the urgent relevance of posthumanist theory and practice for democratizing creative educational experiences in 21st-century schools, universities, and informal learning environments. Posthumanism challenges the myopic centering of the human in creative education in an age of climate change, artificial intelligence, and zoonoti...

COVID-19 is provoking us to think differently about the self, others, and the human and more-than-human world around us. This chapter explores our responses to Prompt 6 from the Massive/Microscopic Sensemaking experiment, which asks "How has COVID made you or someone you know be better than you were?” and “How has the desperation of COVID 19 become...

This article advances a manifesto for a posthuman creativity studies that highlights the emergent, collective, and ecological aspects of creativity, offering propositions that problematize any individualist or human-exceptionalist approach to the field. We attend to a range of extra/ordinary affects, encounters, and modalities for expanding creativ...

In early 2020, as the first of many COVID lockdowns began across Australia, a collective of feminist and queer performance scholars and artists embarked on the research project Staging Australian Women’s Lives: Theatre, Feminism and Socially Engaged Art. Our aim was to document contributions of womxn theatre makers, while conducting a feminist anal...

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified existing inequalities and highlighted multiple apocalyptic conditions affecting many different people and other-than-humans. At the same time, the pandemic has made it difficult to mobilise and make visible collective action in public, which has required artist-activists to devise new and diverse strategies to id...

In this chapter, we argue for a new vision for teacher professional learning based on the diverse creativities as practice which catalyzes educational change in whole-school contexts. We argue that it is possible (and preferable) to expand improvements to teacher education and professional development beyond neoliberal notions of “workplace readine...

This chapter explores multiple sides of Sydney, focusing on the water which is such a central element in this landmark city. Focusing on the Indigenous and environmental histories and features of the area, Chap. 5 highlights the strong site-identity of Sydney both creatively and naturally, and draws connections between its international focus and i...

Sydney is a city known for its harbour. The Harbour Bridge, the Sydney Opera House, Darling Harbour, the ferry to Manly Beach—for most visitors and many locals, it is these manufactured elements of the site that are most iconic. But it wasn’t always this way, and for many, the water itself is still the most important focus. Since 2017 though, a new...

Eno Yim established and runs the School of Everyday Life in Tai Po, a district of Hong Kong. Eno is well known here as a creative and activist trailblazer, a visionary. Ka Lai says, I simply have to meet her, so we go. She takes me up up up to the school, which sits at the very northern part of the New Territories, at Tai Po (market) station. It is...

This chapter opens the book by establishing the autotheoretical mode of writing, and the creativity ecologies framework for thinking about creativity research during the time of early COVID. By combining autotheory writing, an ecological approach to thinking about creativity, and a posthuman theoretical approach to opening up the study of creativit...

Of the five natural elements, space is the most subtle. In yogic and Ayurvedic teaching, the other four elements are said to telescope out from space. Space gives rise to wind, which gives rise to fire, and so on. The element of space, sometimes called aether, is the place where everything happens. In its most subtle form, it is the place before ev...

One of the odd things about time (like creative flow) is that it accumulates in ways that don’t feel like accretion until hindsight puts them altogether. The year 2020 will go down in global history as a pivotal year, but like all watershed moments or periods, it does not have shape while it’s happening. While it’s happening we just focus on surviv...

To close the book, “Chapter 6: Creative Agency: A Manifesto for Posthuman Creativity Studies” traces the origins of the term creativity in the Western (mostly philosophical) canon, culminating with an argument for a more expansive, collective, and ecological posthuman creativity manifesto. The arrival and early months of puppy Hazel, the progressio...

Hong Kong is an intersectional place by nature, culture, and history, a fact reflected in this chapter’s snapshots of the people and places encountered by the author during two visits across 2018–2019. Just preceding the anti-China protests, the performance of Hong Kong creativity narrated here says much about the character of the Hong Kong that is...

Singapore shows its creative side in this chapter where detailed interviews with a series of artists share their experiences of life in Singapore and the power of censorship as creative constraint, as well as the rich cultural ecology that sustains both mainstream work and a lesser-known subculture of experimental art.

In this chapter, Melbourne sets the scene for the changing experiences of COVID, American political unrest, and dog beginnings and endings. Creativity is explored through walking meditation, attention to the natural elements, and solitude. Devising online as part of the project highlights different opportunities and challenges in doing research dur...

One-third of Singapore, including the central business district, is less than five metres above sea level—not as low as the Netherlands, one-third of which lies below sea level, but low enough to worry the city-state’s famously foresighted urban planners. Singapore’s plans to defend against rising seas include building sea walls, polders, and new i...

This article considers the idea of activist affect, or when things—bodies, ideas, energies, even objects—come together, connected in what Gregg Seigworth and Melissa Gregg term “forces of encounter.” Kathleen Stewart argues that affect offers us broad-ranging ways of exploring “what happens to people, how force hits bodies, how sensibilities circul...

The idea of doing a self-guided series of prompts for a largescale project in the midst of a global pandemic emerged as a solution to the twin problems of distance and distraction. The goal of a “21-day autoethnography challenge” set of self-guided prompts was to build embodied sensibilities toward the material we study, practice autoethnographic f...

How does this pandemic moment help us to think about the relationships between self and other, or between humans and the planet? How are people making sense of COVID-19 in their everyday lives, both as a local and intimate occurrence with microscopic properties, and a planetary-scale event with potentially massive outcomes? In this paper we describ...

This essay uses several of the prompts from the Massive::Microscopic experiment as a jumping off point for considering how affect theory and critical autoethnography offer us a framework for understanding, creating, and acting together in the time of COVID. Through stories of cloud-watching, mindfulness meditation, and other encounters with atmosph...

This essay considers what viewing performance as an affective encounter—an embodied experience of sensations and intensities—might mean for applied theatre. Using auto-theory, which joins personal narrative with theories of affect, new materialism and post-humanism, we write an affective encounter that catches up people and objects in relations of...

The power of theatre and performance lies in its ability to address something beyond the form itself, and this editorial contextualises and introduces this themed issue which is concerned not only with the practicalities of theatre and performance, but that demonstrate how theorising performance is a socially engaged and affective practice. The wor...

This article explores the loss, legacy, and liberatory possibilities of addressing adoption through collaborative autoethnographic writing. We invite readers, through critical autoethnographic narratives and scholarship, to engage with our lived experiences as both cultural and familial histories. The return to the pre-adoption place of origin will...

The power of the small can be seen in Jonathan Wyatt's articulation of creative-relational and its institutional embodiment at the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry at the University of Edinburgh. This short essay explores some ways this embodiment of the small has large repercussions for those of us who need and wish to have creative space ma...

Written in the spirit of Maggie Nelson's “autotheory,” this essay takes up José Esteban Muñoz's notion of “ephemera as evidence” to explore how the body-as-object (i.e., the body-as-book) might reformulate understandings of materiality as an ephemerality of “traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things.” Bodies-as-books are distinctly material,...

Ethnographic video requires the makers to grapple with the idea of 'constituting a compositional present' (Stewart 2007), rather than a static notion of truth or representation. This audio/video performance project sits at the intersection of affect theory, feminist and performance studies, and extends these discourses into new materialist consider...

The challenge to foster greater creativity in education systems represents a range of diverse and complex affordances and constraints. Creativity research in education spans policy, teaching, learning and assessment, as well as environments within and beyond the school that promote creative encounters. Worldwide, creativity, critical thinking, and...

This essay creatively evidences the materiality of a story and its ability to migrate and evolve. It does so by critiquing the non-human limitations of binary onto-epistemologies, especially visual/discursive ones. Here stories and words have lives, bodies, and agency and as such they matter, but that matter is not material. The mattering of storie...

For thousands of years, human beings have been creating monuments to people, to places, and to events as performances of the human need for both ritual and aesthetics. However, monuments are not fixed symbols that stand in isolation from the cultures that bring them into material being, unmovable in time and space, metal and stone. Rather, monument...

This brief essay considers what new materialist thought and affect theory in particular might bring to activist politics, particularly the need to sustain the energy and power of public assembly in the form of political marches into a movement that persists in and through time. We consider the site of both terrorist and activist acts not only as a...

While developing and nurturing creativity is increasingly a centerpiece of economic, cultural and arts policies, notions of what creativity is in an educational sense remain problematic to both policymakers and to the educators who seek to define, measure, and nurture it in their environments. In this chapter we use current research on creativity i...

Schools' administrators and teachers feel the necessity to apply creative education within their learning environments, despite grappling with understandings of what creativity is and how best teachers can foster it in their students. This qualitative international study spanning the USA, Canada, Singapore, and Australia investigates teachers' perc...

How creativity in education is applied by teachers to secondary school contexts is dependent on how the term ‘creativity’ is grounded, politicised, and practised. This paper reports on an international study of secondary schools in Australia, USA, Canada, and Singapore investigating how creativity is understood, negotiated, valued and manifested in...

Harris reviews how their recent research has led to the establishment of Creative Agency, an interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral research lab at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Creative Agency is what Barad has described as the kind of creative intra-action (“the mutual constitution of entangled agencies,” [Meeting the universe halfway: q...

This opening chapter orients the book in the field of creativity education today.

This book examines the gaps in creativity education across the education lifespan and the resulting implications for creative education and economic policy. Building on cutting-edge international research, the editors and contributors explore innovations in interdisciplinary creativities, including STEM agendas and definitions, science and creativi...

The significance of creative ecologies and acknowledging existing creative partnership research is an expanding field of interest both in Australia and the United Kingdom. This chapter reflects on a contemporary range of creative engagement practices, creative partnerships and emergent ecologies as new ways of working in the cultural sphere. Propos...

Current educational policy is dominated by a discourse of transferability, scalability and innovation, within a climate politicised by ‘creative industries’ and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education in Australia. STEM has been promoted as an authentic and engaging approach to education, particularly as Australia tries to...

Native Americans from the Amazon, Andes, and coast regions of South America have a rich cultural heritage, but have been genetically understudied leading to gaps in our knowledge of their genomic architecture and demographic history. Here, we sequenced 150 high-coverage and genotyped 130 genomes from Native American and mestizo populations in Peru....

Creativity in education is currently dominated by discourses pertaining to both a neo-liberalisation of arts education and a more widespread attention to the economic potential of diverse creativities. This study applies new thinking regarding creative educational advancement that is adaptive and critically reflexive to the tasks of reconciling the...

Creativity in education is currently dominated by discourses pertaining to both a neo-liberalisation of arts education and a more widespread attention to the economic potential of diverse creativities. This study applies new thinking regarding creative educational advancement that is adaptive and critically reflexive to the tasks of reconciling the...

This essay considers what we are calling queer terror, an affective condition not limited to LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) or other minoritarian subjects, and its relationship to fear, hate, and factionalism (or isolationism). That is, queer terror is both terror against queer subjects and a queering of terror culture itself. We as...

This study investigates and compares elements of creativity in secondary schools and classrooms in Australia and Singapore. Statistical analysis and qualitative investigation of teacher, student and leadership perceptions of the emergence, fostering and absence of creativity in school learning environments is explored. This large-scale internationa...

Background The metabolic conversion of dietary omega-3 and omega-6 18 carbon (18C) to long chain (> 20 carbon) polyunsaturated fatty acids (LC-PUFAs) is vital for human life. Fatty acid desaturase ( FADS ) 1 and 2 catalyze the rate-limiting steps in the biosynthesis of LC-PUFAs. The FADS region contains two haplotypes; ancestral and derived, where...

As creative economies and industries continue to impact emerging markets and cultural conversations, creative education seems no more central to these conversations than it was a decade ago. Two recent Creativity Summitsmarked a collaborativemilestone in the global conversation about creative teaching, learning, ecologies and partnerships, signalin...

This femifesta, based in the lived experience of adoptees, calls for an autoethnography that moves beyond humanist and evaluative concerns.

Genderlessness or postgendered orientations are not the same as genderqueer affect/s, yet Donna Haraway's figure of the cyborg helps imagine what a genderqueer affect might be. Genderqueer experience (including affect) can help us move beyond the limitations of gendered as well as epistemological dualisms. Affect transcends the reductive notions of...