A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Meaningful Irreverence and other Hahas in the Hallowed Halls

Join the non/fictionLab for the final event in the 2021 public forum series.

The unpanel, the stand-up lecture and performative essay are part of a new wave of alternative approaches through which research is shared. A rhetoric of engagement and impact underscores these playful attempts to reach broader and more curious publics. In this forum we hear from scholars using maverick modes of discourse to expand methods and worldviews, while bringing much-needed levity to the academy.

David Carlin, Francesca Rendle-Short, Peta Murray, Wil Polson, Stayci Taylor. Image by Linda Mickleborough. LIT, performed at nonfictioNOW, Phoenix, Arizona. L-R David Carlin, Francesca Rendle-Short, Peta Murray, Wil Polson, Stayci Taylor.

Panellists

  • Denise Chapman, Ed.D. is a storyteller, spoken word poet, critical autoethnographer, and teacher educator who lectures in children’s literature, early literacy, and inclusive children’s media at Monash University, Australia. Her research explores the use of storytelling, poetry, children’s literature, and digital images as counternarrative windows for social change.

  • Emily Gray is a Senior Lecturer in Education Studies. She is interested in questions of gender and sexuality and with how these identity categories are lived and experienced within social institutions. Emily also writes on popular culture, public pedagogies and audience studies, online fandom and media and popular culture as pedagogical tools. Emily is co-founder of #FEAS Feminist Educators Against Sexism, an international feminist collective committed to developing arts-based interventions into sexism in the academy and other places. 

  • Ceri Hann is a multidisciplinary arts practitioner who develops participatory art forms intended to enhance the conditions for collective idea generation. Ceri has presented work at Melbourne Comedy Festival (2017), Liquid Architecture (2015), RMIT Project Space (2014) and is one half of Public Assembly, an art and design practice focused on the dynamics of social space.

  • The Jolly Good Fellows are Peta Murray and Stayci Taylor - bona fide doctors (of philosophy), and Lecturers in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT. They use comedic and theatrical devices to puncture stereotypes and find funny bones beneath the serious world of academia and the scientific parlance that attends research. Queering the gendered connotations of their titles as former Fellows, they use doctoral robes as vestimentary semiotics and the medium of bad PowerPoint to expand notions of academic impact and engagement beyond conventional channels while foregrounding performance as a viable alternative means of publication and research translation.

The non/fictionLab is supported by Writing and Publishing @ RMIT.

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RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Luwaytini' by Mark Cleaver, Palawa.

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aboriginal flag
torres strait flag

Acknowledgement of Country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business.

More information