Axon: Creative Explorations, the journal of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra, is named for the axon, the primary point of transmission within the nervous system and the means of communication between neurons.
Axon: Creative Explorations is an international, open access, peer reviewed journal that publishes works that express or are about creativity and the creative process, including:
- the methods and techniques of artists and other creative professionals
- approaches to creative-led research and the theorisation of creative practice
- the ways in which creative works are made and function
- creative interventions and explorations of contemporary matters of concern
- poetics and poetry, and
- the cultural contexts and theoretical frameworks informing creative practice.
NB: Axon does not accept unsolicited poetry, and the editors will not read unsolicited poems.
Axon publishes two general issues a year, and occasional special or capsule issues.
Call for abstracts
The 28th annual conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs is hosted by the University of Canberra’s Centre for Creative and Cultural Research.
The event will be held on Ngunnawal Country; we acknowledge with gratitude that we have been welcomed to walk on this unceded land, and pay our respects to their elders, past and present, and emerging.
We invite proposals for conference papers, panels, or performances that focus on issues that demand personal, social and institutional attention; and we are very interested in proposals that are collaborative, dialogic, improvisational, and/or performative.
Please consider the following list of starter-topic areas as you construct your abstract/proposal:
Orality – e.g.
- Spoken word forms
- Writing/improvising for performance
- Song / chant
- Script/screenplay
- Audio and transdisciplinary storytelling modes
- Yarning Circles
- Podcasts
Poetry – e.g.
- Performance poetry
- Transformative practice
- Collaborative work
- Ecopoetry
- Poetry of resistance
Essay – e.g.
- Intimacy
- Lyrical or dialogic essay
- Writing as conversatio, or collaboration
- Reading as intimacy
- Manifesto / diatribe / rant
Sustainability – e.g.
- The environment and living in the more-than-human world
- Traditional ways of knowing, being and storying
- Economic and political engagement in writing/by writers
- Object writing
- Alternate knowledge systems
- Umwelt
Queering Writing – e.g.
- Decentred and diverse voices
- Indigenous stories
- Neglected art forms
- Queering forms
- AI / Chat GPT – implications, limitations, possibilities
- Gatekeeping
Arts/Health – e.g.
- Writing, reading, and wellbeing
- Transdisciplinary practice for health
- Creative interventions and trauma
- Working beyond the academy (outreach, communicating research)
- Silences in academia
- Care for the author
(or other topics, though we do ask that you aim to accommodate the theme of the conference in your work)
The deadline for submission of abstracts is 28 July 2023, 11:59PM (AEST).
Proposals should include:
- your name
- your university or other institutional affiliation
- your e-mail address
- the title of your proposed paper
- your abstract (250 words max)
- identify whether it is for a paper, a panel, or a performance
- a short bio (100 words max).
Queries to jen.webb@canberra.edu.au
NB: while everyone is welcome to attend the conference, only current AAWP members are eligible to present. You can find membership details, prices, and online sign-up options here.
We invite submissions from all delegates to the Out of the Ordinary: On Poetry and the World conference held at UC in late 2022.
The presentations were so remarkable that we wanted to ensure a record of the conference would be preserved and more widely distributed. This issue of Axon: Creative Explorations, will therefore comprise the conference proceeding.
All submissions selected for publication will have been through a double-blind peer review process, and made available on the journal's open access platform.
To ensure sufficient time to apply good academic publishing standards, we ask you to submit your work by 30 June.
Please upload your work for peer review; options include:
- academic essay of between 4,000 and 7,000 words;
- lyric or experimental essay of up 7,000 words;
- a suite of (up to 10) poems accompanied by a 500 word contextualising statement (editors will select 5 – 7 of the poems for publication);
- a sequence of (up to 10) images accompanied by a 500 word contextualising statement (editors will select 5 – 7 of the poems for publication);
- a short film or audio submission accompanied by a 500 word contextualising statement.
Please contact Jen.Webb@canberra.edu.au with any queries.
The growing momentum behind portmanteau terms like Arts-Health suggest the value inherent in approaches that integrate diverse ways of knowing and doing. Interdisciplinarity is considered valuable because some problems require insight from multiple disciplines, and because diverse knowledge, perspectives and methods produce creativity (Strober 2011).
With their practical expertise in working with ambiguity and multivalent meaning, artists and creative practitioners are crucial players in the future of public health and other parts of the social realm. Arts-based interventions can be considered adaptive systems (Springs & Baruch 2021) capable of engaging with complex and unpredictable challenges, such as pandemic and climate emergency.
What concepts inform the expert knowledge of collaborating artists? This edition of Axon is interested in submissions that attend to the value of personal interactions, relationships, environmental and other contexts. These priorities focus our attention on epistemological and ethical matters in collaborative practice across divides, including: what is it to know? Who knows? How do we translate knowledge, and are there limits to knowledge translation?
We are calling for a broad interpretation of the theme and submissions which explore, challenge and respond in a multitude of ways: including those that illuminate points of connection within collaborations across disciplines, their productive frictions and generative integrations.
Points for consideration may include but are not limited to the following:
· Art-science (or other) collaborations that move past cross-disciplinarity into interdisciplinarity and beyond, through integration of information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives and concepts.
· Transdisciplinary collaborations in which researchers from a range of disciplines and stakeholders work with greater interdependence and cooperation than is usual.
· Creative practice that engages with access and inclusion techniques and knowledge (such as Audio Description, AUSLAN interpretation).
· Translation and interpretation across practice domains in writing, speech and performance.
· Knowledge translation in public health and public understandings of science.
· Communication in community-engaged and participatory research, in the field and in the literature.
We invite submissions of:
· scholarly essays up to 6,000 words
· visual essays incorporating a contextualising statement (1000-1200 words). Send 6-12 images and the editors will make a selection from these
· creative essays incorporating images, sound, poetry, short fictional prose up to 4000 words; attach a contextualising statement of up to 750 words
DEADLINE for submissions: 18 November 2023
Publication date: April 2024
Please contact Vahri McKenzie v.mckenzie@ecu.edu.au with any queries, or to discuss suggested contributions.
Springs, Stacey and Baruch, Jay (2021). Artists on the Research Team: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Team Science, Research Rigor, and Creative Dialogue, Health Promotion Practice Vol. 22, Suppl 1: 83S–90S.
Strober, M. H. (2011). Interdisciplinary conversations. Challenging habits of thought. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Submissions are invited on a continuing basis to Axon: Creative Explorations.
What to submit:
Submissions of articles, essays, interviews, papers and photo essays are welcome. The editors also welcome submission of creative work, other than poems, when accompanied by a 250-word statement that indicates the research aspects of the creative piece. Expected length of submissions is between 500 and 6,000 words, as appropriate to the form.
- All poetry published in Axon will be solicited by the journal’s editors. Unsolicited contributions of poetry will not be read or acknowledged.
How to submit:
• Visit the journal website at http://axonjournal.com.au, and acquaint yourself with the focus and content of previous issues;
• Read information about the journal and the submission and review process at http://axonjournal.com.au/contribute;
• Upload your submission, along with an abstract (max 200 words), a biographical note (max 150 words), your institutional affiliation (if relevant), up to 5 keywords and, for photo essays and other creative work, a 250-word research statement.
Submissions should be between 500 and 6,000 words, depending on the nature of the submission.
Please contact the editors with any queries about length, form and content.