Abstract:
In this discussion, we will explore the narratives of seven higher degree and early career researchers in education who are using collective storytelling to reflect on the value, necessity, and possibilities of creating and sharing counterspaces in the academy. With a co-created, multimodal artefact as a provocation, we will explore how counterspaces shape our critical praxis, and what it allows us to do differently within and beyond the academy. We will explore how our coming together as a reading group to engage with topics at risk of academic censorship is a form of shared refusal to belong to silos that shape the academy, and a collective imagining of an otherwise that embodies temporal and spatial place-based consciousness. Our account seeks to recognise that whilst a critique of the academy’s colonial traditions are necessary and worthwhile, an exploration of the generative possibilities of shared refusal of, and resistance to academic traditions are integral to anti-colonial and anti-capitalist futures in education.