This paper reports on the Poetry for Wellbeing and Recovery program at the University of Canberra Hospital. Patients in rehab have been attending weekly sessions focused on reading and writing poetry. Reading poetry often evokes powerful memories and strong emotions, as poems seem to open outwards when the reader’s own experience is engaged, and events from the distant past are revisited and articulated. But for some participants memory is less accessible and writing about present lived experience becomes more important. Some participants have difficulty in writing, for various reasons, sometimes physical, sometimes cognitive; we often scribe for them and create ‘dictation poems’, with fascinating results. This presentation shares anecdotes and findings from the program, including examples of participant writing.   

Bio  

Owen Bullock has published four collections of poetry, five books of haiku, a bilingual edition of tanka and a novella. A new book of haiku, titled The Scuppered Lily, will be launched in August 2026, and an academic book, How to Write Haiku, in 2027. His research interests include creative arts and wellbeing; haikai literature; poetry and process; semiotics and poetry; prose poetry; and collaboration. He is Discipline Lead for Creative Writing and Literary Studies at the University of Canberra. His other interests include music, juggling and chess.   

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to Owen Bullock_Presentation.pptx 

Why do political slogans so regularly resort to rhyme? Why does alliteration play the prominent role it does in advertising? According to one study, ‘Two T-shirts for $21’ clearly outsells ‘2 T-shirts for $19’ (Davis, Bagchiand Block 2015). The presentation starts by considering social science explanations for the emphasis accorded to such seemingly childish devices in our public communications. Ideas to do with fluency of cognitive processing, and the gains these lead to in liking and perceived trustworthiness, are considered and then supplemented with notions from the field of poetics. The connection long mooted in that field (e.g. Attridge 1995) between rhythmic language and the sense of collective utterance is evoked and connected to ideas of social proof, viz. the principle (Cialdini 2009) that the more people who seem to be acting / speaking a certain way, the more reasonable their conduct will appear. That such collectivist intimations can pertain to even the most idiosyncratic of lyric utterances provides an interesting counter-angle on the forms of majoritarian behavioural modification tracked in political and commercial fields so far in the paper. Might Emily Dickinson’s strangest thoughts become—for the very fact that they are couched in musical form—thereby more thinkable, reasonable, assumable?   

Bio  

Paul Magee studied in Melbourne, Moscow, San Salvador and Sydney. He writes poetry and has published extensively on the history, ethnography and philosophy of poetic composition, the links between orality and writing, and the relationship between creativity and traumatic thought. Paul's involvement in socially-impactful deployment of Creative Arts workshops for wellbeing and repair includes his decade-long role as a Co-Investigator on the Defence ARRTS Programme, which helps ill and injured service people to find a creative voice, and his work with Indigenous communities as a member of the Story Ground team, which is dedicated to Writing on Country. Paul’s latest monograph is Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought (Bloomsbury, 2022). His second book of verse, Stone Postcard, was named in Australian Book Review as one of the books of the year for 2014. Paul is Professor of Poetry and Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research (CCCR) at the University of Canberra.  

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to PaulMagee_Presentation.pptx 

This presentation reintroduces robotic musicianship as a way of understanding human–AI interaction through musical practice and performance. It begins with Savery’s recent work with Jen Music, a generative music start-up exploring ethical dataset construction, attribution, and transparency in AI training. It then turns to a DECRA project on robotic musicianship, which investigates long-term interaction, group dynamics, and trust in human–AI collaboration. From this broader agenda, three recent projects are presented: failure and ambiguity in creative AI, AI understanding of expert saxophone practice, and agency in AI-assisted lyric writing. Together, these projects position music as a testbed for more human-centered AI.  

Bio  

Richard Savery develops AI and robotics, using music and creativity to design richer interactions between humans and machines. He is currently an ARC DECRA Fellow (2026–2028) at the University of Canberra, researching robots and AI for long-term use and group interaction. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at Macquarie University, where he built robotic musicians that could rap and drum with human performers, and later worked at Jen Music on high-fidelity, ethically trained AI music systems. His work has attracted $3.8 million in funding and been featured by Scientific American, BBC Radio, and Disney+.  

Dr Savery is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Australian Discovery Early Career Award (DE250100275) funded by the Australian Government.  

Interested audience can see examples at www.richardsavery.com   

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to RichardSavery_Presentation.pptx 

During the Second World War, the Australian military relied on a sizeable contingent of Asian workers who were already present in Australia to fill labour shortfalls and key gaps in combat expertise. At the end of the conflict, the Commonwealth government sought to deport these workers under the framework of the White Australia Policy, to uneven levels of success. This paper maps the experiences of Australia’s Asian troops during and after the Second World War, and how their plight intersected with a gradual but noticeable erosion of public support for White Australia in the postwar period.  

Bio  

Ernest is an historian with the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra. Originally from Singapore, he has previously held research fellowships at the University of Washington and Beijing University, and is the author and editor of several books, including Diaspora at War, Oral History and Memory in Southeast Asia, and The Pacific War. He has also helped write and produce several documentaries, including the Emmy-nominated programme The Exiles (with Tom St John Gray).  

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to ErrnestKoh_Presentation.pptx 

This seminar explores the rapidly developing field of virtual production, a form of filmmaking that combines live-action and computer-generated elements on set, enabling real-time interaction between performers and digital worlds. Drawing on several years of practice-led inquiry and professional experience as a freelance motion capture technician, it examines the lived experience of performance within these hybrid spaces. The discussion will focus on how actors and other creative practitioners navigate the perceptual, spatial, and social challenges of working in digitally mediated environments, offering new insights into immersion, embodiment, and the evolving relationships between people and technology in contemporary screen production.  

Bio  

Joel Bennett is a Lecturer in Digital Media and Game Development at UC. He is a designer and technology enthusiast with a background in games, animation, and creative media. His work explores how people engage with emerging technologies in screen-based and interactive environments, with a focus on virtual production, extended reality, and digital performance. He is the author of Facilitating an Immersive Performance Environment in Virtual Production (Routledge, 2025), and his current research and teaching support innovative approaches to practice-based learning in digital media and game development.  

The practice of organising creative works into genres emerged (at least) as early as Aristotle’s classifications in the Poetics, though more recently its value has been questioned. This presentation suggests we explore the concept of genre in terms of operations: of how writers create new works, and how critics might understand how a work of writing can function to create literary experiences.  

Bio  

Jen is Professor Emerita of Creative Practice in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra. Her most recent poetry collections are the sole-authored The Daily News (2024; shortlisted for the 2025 ACT Literary Awards), and the multiply-authored Grief: Five Sequences (2025). Jen is also an editor of various genres of writing, having published 11 scholarly collections and 11 creative collections. She is co-editor of the scholarly journal Axon: Creative Explorations, and the literary journal Meniscus.  

This presentation was NOT accompanied by slides.

From the rediscovery of the ancient Roman catacombs in 1578, until Pope Leo XII’s prohibition in 1881, the bones of men, women, and children – now known as catacomb saints – were exhumed from these subterranean cemeteries and widely distributed across Europe and the Americas. Unlike medieval reliquaries, these more recent simulacra were crafted to appear as richly adorned human bodies. In this talk I use the concept of the relational biography to think about the lived lives of these human beings, as well as the complex afterlives of the simulacra, and their entanglements in everyday social contexts. These assemblages of human remains, art and religious mystery, are vibrant agents that continue to generate networks of relations between people, things, narratives and beliefs; despite hundreds of years of religious, social and political upheaval.  

Bio 

Tracy Ireland is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Heritage at the University of Canberra. An archaeologist and heritage practitioner, she is known for her research on heritage ethics, significance and social value which has influenced practice and public policy in Australia and abroad. She leads the Australian Research Council funded projects Heritage of the Air, Everyday Heritage and Nuclear Nation. Tracy is the immediate past President of Australia ICOMOS, Editor of Historic Environment, Honorary Fellow in the Department of Archaeology, University of York, UK, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, London.  

Supports and fundings: Fundacão para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal  

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to TracyIreland_Presentation.pptx 

Each of us – whether we choose to embrace, deny or ignore this knowledge - is uniquely positioned within a shared colonial history. The question of positionality is a central theme for this seminar, to be explored through a comparison of two books that confront Australia’s colonial past and present from different starting points. In ‘Unsettled’, beloved author Kate Grenville examines the spread of white settlements beyond Sydney Cove, by injecting stories and imaginings about the region’s First Peoples into her own family history. In her memoir ‘The Chosen Son’, Leanne Weber grapples with her own experience of growing up in 1960s Adelaide with an Aboriginal foster brother placed by white authorities into her non-Indigenous family. Both books, in their own ways, depict voyages of discovery that draw on historical records, personal memories, empathy and imagination to uncover important truths about our settler colonial society.   

Bio  

Kate Grenville, AO is one of Australia’s most fearless and celebrated writers. She is best known for her novel The Secret River which ignited debate about how Australia should tell its foundational story. She has written across multiple genres, having published 10 works of fiction, three books about the writing process, a biography (of her mother), a memoir (about the writing of The Secret River) and a work of non-fiction she describes as ‘science-y’. Her latest book Unsettled was published in 2025.  

Leanne Weber is a former academic who is now an Adjunct Professor of Criminology in the Canberra Law School. She has published 11 academic books on the policing of minorities, human rights and border control and has twice been awarded the Christine M Alder Book Prize by the ANZ Society of Criminology. The Chosen Son is her first book intended for a wider readership. Leanne lives with her partner and dog on unceded Ngarigo land overlooking Lake Jindabyne.   

Professor Kim Rubenstein is an Australian legal scholar, legal practitioner, professor, who is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. From 2006 to 2016 she was Professor and Director of the Centre for International Law and Public Law at the Australian National University, from 2011-2012 she was the inaugural Convenor of the ANU Gender Institute and from 2020-2022 she was Co-Director, Academic of the 50/50 by 2030 Foundation. She is currently an Adjunct Professor at the University of Canberra and the University of Technology Sydney and an Honorary Professor at The Australian National University.  

This presentation was NOT accompanied by slides.

Bio  

Russell Smith lectures in Modernist Literature and Literary Theory at the Australian National University, Canberra. He has published widely on Samuel Beckett, including the collection Beckett and Ethics (2009) and numerous articles and book chapters, as well as on various topics in modernist and contemporary literature, theory and visual art. His current research examines James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in terms of the transformation of the idea of communication by wireless and radio in the first half of the twentieth century. He is convenor of the Canberra Finnegans Wake Reading Group, which has been holding readings and performances since 2019.  

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to RussellSmith_Presentation.pptx 

Bio 

Rahmatollah Amirjani is a Lecturer in Architecture at the School of Design and Built Environment, University of Canberra. With a focus on the dichotomy between tradition and modernity, Rahmatollah’s research examines recent developments in housing provision in Australia, as well as in developing countries, investigating the impacts of inappropriate housing policies and design approaches on communities. 

Milica Muminovic is a Senior Lecturer (Architecture) in the School of Design and the Built Environment at the University of Canberra. Her research focuses on capturing and understanding the complex aspects of the built environment transformations that maintain place identities. Taking a case study approach, coupled with lived experience from Europe to Southeast Asia, with a focus on Japan and interdisciplinary collaboration, she aims to understand ways of mapping slippery and hard to measure aspects of the built environment. 

Support and Funding:

1. DVCR & E – Cross Faculty Seed Funding 

2. FAD Research – Emerging Researcher Development Grant Funding 

3. Sahar Masoudian [Research and Innovation Service – RIS] – Data analysis 

4. Dr Suzanne Carroll for her collaboration and contribution 

5. Others: Anupa Ranasinghe, Louise Nicole Viduya, Courtney Walmsley, and Paulo Sembrano. 

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to RomAmirjani_Presentation.pptx

Bio 

Kerry is a visual artist and researcher, and this year’s recipient of the Donald Horne Creative and Cultural Fellowship at the University of Canberra’s Centre for Creative and Cultural Research. Her research explores how art can act as a platform or catalyst for the continuation of conversations about some of our country’s most shameful social histories. 

Acknowledgements 

This research is funded by the CCCR Donald Horne Research Fellowship and the PhD was funded by RTP Stipend. 

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to KerryMartin_Presentation.pptx

Bio 

Wendy is a Jerrinja woman from the South Coast of NSW. She is the inaugural First Nations Post-Doctoral Researcher with the CCCR. 

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to WendySomerville_Presentation.pptx

Bio 

Julia is a postdoctoral research fellow specialising in the application of laser technologies for the conservation of cultural heritage materials. She completed her PhD at University of Canberra in 2023, focusing on the use of femtosecond pulse lasers to clean the granite cladding of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Following her doctoral studies, she undertook a laser cleaning fellowship at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where she worked closely with conservators to integrate laser cleaning into routine treatment practices. Julia has since returned to Canberra, where her research will explore the application of laser cleaning to Aboriginal rock art. 

Acknowledgements 

This fellowship was funded by Ed and Anne Teppo. 

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to JuliaBrand_Presentation.pptx

Bio 

Manuela de Barros is Assistant Professor in philosophy, aesthetics and theory of arts at Université Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis. Her research concerns the aesthetics of contemporary art and new media ; relationships between arts, sciences and technologies; the biological, anthropological and environmental modifications brought by technosciences; the passages between sciences and fictional constructions (in art or in literature); feminism and gender. She is the author of several publications including Magie et technologie (UV éditions). 

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to ManueladeBarros_Presentation.pptx

Bio 

Owen Bullock’s most recent poetry collection is Pancakes for Neptune (Recent Work Press, 2023), following three previous poetry titles, five books of haiku, a bilingual edition of tanka, and a novella. His research interests include arts and health; haikai literature; poetry and process; semiotics and poetry; prose poetry, and collaboration. His scholarly work has appeared in Antipodes, Journal of Creative Arts Therapies, Axon, Journal of New Zealand Literature, Ka Mate Ka Ora, Medical Humanities, New Writing, Qualitative Inquiry, Social Alternatives, TEXT and Westerly. He is Discipline Lead for Creative Writing and Literary Studies at the University of Canberra. 

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to OwenBullock_Presentation.pptx

The first concept is of the ‘fourth-person singular’ which denotes a perspective beyond first, second and third perspectives common to narrative writing and understandings of subjectivity. The fourth-person singular is the perspective of the event, in its eternity and expression. Other perspectival positions are arrayed in the multiplicity of the event as a dimension of the event. The challenge is to think the fourth-person singular of any given event. The second concept is of the ‘fifth dimension’ that helps us imagine a cosmic realm of pure multiplicity where causality is in flux. Causality is fixed as events are actualised into states of affairs and correlating finite perspectives. The challenge is to think causality in its full recursive blossom. The third concept is of the ‘adventure’, borrowed from Whitehead, which helps situate us in the turbulence of human finitude that unravels in the midst of events. An applied mechanics of the event will necessarily be an adventure of perspective and causality. We have myriad techniques of adventure – from affect to aesthetics – for helping us implicate sense from chaos, and ‘fix’ perspective and causal relations. 

The paper ends by arguing a critical event mechanics needs to be vigilant for those dark masters who manipulate events to discipline (human) finitude in exploitative causal traps. 

Bio 

Glen is a professor of communication and media. He has published across a range of topics and fields, including cultural studies, communication and media studies, and gender studies. 

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to GlenFuller_Presentation.pptx

Bio 

Jen Webb is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Creative Practice at the University of Canberra. A poet and cultural theorist, she has published a number of books on key concepts in culture. Her recent poetry collections include Moving Targets (2018), Flight Mode (2020); and The Daily News (2024). 

Her current scholarly work focuses on creative practice and/for wellbeing; her poetry focuses on material poetics, and questions of being. 

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to JenWebb_Presentation.pptx

Bio 

Paul Magee is Professor of Poetry at the University of Canberra, where he directs the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research (CCCR). His most recent books are Later Unearthed (Puncher and Wattman, 2025), in verse, and the monograph, Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought (Rowman and Littlefield / Bloomsbury, 2022). 

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to PaulMagee_Presentation.pptx

Bio 

Ben is a Senior Lecturer in Design at UC. He has spent many late nights turning messy cultural heritage data into (mostly) functional web-based interfaces. His broader practice spans data visualisation, interface design, digital storytelling and user experience. He has contributed to research projects for the National Gallery of Australia, British Council, ACT Government, and the ARC-funded Heritage of the Air, among others. 

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to https://uni.beneb.com/cccr

Bio 

Lucy Neave is the author of the forthcoming monograph, Infrastructures of Crisis in Global 21st-Century Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). Her most recent novel, Believe in Me (UQP, 2021) won the ACT Book of the Year. She teaches English and Creative Writing at the ANU. 

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to LucyNeave_Presentation.pptx