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Reimagining the Academy
ShiFting Towards Kindness,
Connection, and an
Ethics of Care
Edited by
Alison L Black · Rachael Dwyer
Reimagining the Academy
 Alison L Black • Rachael Dwyer
Editors

Reimagining the
Academy
ShiFting Towards Kindness, Connection,
and an Ethics of Care
Editors
Alison L Black Rachael Dwyer
School of Education and Tertiary Access School of Education and Tertiary Access
University of the Sunshine Coast University of the Sunshine Coast
Sunshine Coast, QLD, Australia Sunshine Coast, QLD, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-75858-5    ISBN 978-3-030-75859-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75859-2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
­transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
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claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © PeopleImages / Getty

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Preface

Acknowledgement of Country
We, as editors, acknowledge and honour the Gubbi Gubbi people, on
whose land we live and work every day. We pay our respects to elders—
past, present and emerging—and acknowledge that our livelihood is
earned on land that was never ceded. We acknowledge the traditional
custodians who continue to care for the land, skies and waterways. Their
stories, knowledge and learning have been shared here for thousands of
years. It always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.
We acknowledge that the work represented in this book was written on
lands with a colonial legacy and recognise that many of us have benefitted
from the privilege bestowed by the colonial apparatus of the academy. We
acknowledge that this privilege has been afforded at the expense of Black,
Brown and First Nations people. We seek to listen, hold space and stand
in solidarity.
We acknowledge the scholarly contributions to this book by Black,
Brown and First Nations women. This volume is richer for your knowl-
edge and wisdom.
Academic life is changing—with neoliberal agendas and ways of work-
ing and counting driving much of what we do, demanding so much of
us. The academy compels us to compete, to work on our own, to over-
work, to count narrowly. This book pushes back.
v
vi Preface

With this book we are imagining and holding space for a different way
of being in academia. We are shiFting the conversation towards a future
that is hopeful, kind and inclusive. Using an expansive lens, we are valu-
ing and exploring women’s ways of knowing and being, and bringing
women’s voices to discussions about academic experiences, workplaces
and cultures. Please note, we are using an inclusive definition of ‘women’,
‘woman’ and ‘female’ to recognise trans-women, genderqueer women
and non-binary people. We also want to avoid essentialising, homogenis-
ing or erasing differences in relation to women’s experiences knowing
that, even when cisgendered, women’s experiences are radically different
across social class, race, geography and disability.
The words between these covers make space for the stories and experi-
ences of 44 women from eight countries and a wide range of disciplines—
women academics engaging with creative and personalised research
processes and using storied, aesthetic and autoethnographic assemblages
to draw attention to what is possible when we privilege conversation, eth-
ics of care (including self-care), contribution, connection, collaboration,
creativity and community. These are women academics who are engaging
with each other through collaborative research, mentoring, networking
and thought leadership—women academics committed to enacting and
envisioning revolutionary change and care in their workplaces and world.
The seeds of this book began as co-editors Ali and Rachael created and
enacted Making shiFt Happen—a playfully named, pre-COVID fully vir-
tual conference that sought to create a welcoming and caring space for
Feminist lenses, methodologies and ways of knowing, and a supportive
space for women in academia. The conference focused on building cul-
tures of listening to and learning from women’s lived experience through
conversation and collaboration, and reimagining academic experiences
and futures.
Making shiFt Happen emerged from our lived experiences, from our
conversations and observations of how women are typically positioned
within contemporary academia. It was, as this book continues to be, a
place of gathering together, a place and space intentionally created and
underpinned by an ethic of caring and care. Ideas of slow scholarship
permeated, both then and now, our conceptions of what shiFting entails:
taking time to think and contemplate, building communities of kindness
 Preface vii

and care, honouring the lived experiences of women, and reimagining

broader conceptions of and for an academic life.
We believe there is great value in giving time to creating caring and
supportive gathering spaces, global spaces, spaces for women to talk
about what matters, about what inspires them and about what might be
possible. Our personal and professional lives are changed as we gather
together through words and conversations across pages and time zones,
and as we create and generate new ideas through being with each other in
ways that are not normally possible in academe. We believe that through
these kinds of thoughtful gatherings—through our caring interactions,
our meaningful and enterprising non-traditional and traditional research
contributions, our creative works and collaborative writing projects—we
can shiFt the academy towards kindness, connection and possibility.
In our early thinking, we played with ‘definitions’, creatively identify-
ing meaningful phrases—phrases that captured our longings to ‘do aca-
demia differently’, phrases that felt spacious and offered us life-giving
options. In too many institutions, women continue to be an underused
and undervalued knowledge resource. So many precariously juggle fam-
ily/carer/career responsibilities at the expense of their own wellbeing and
advancement. This knowledge infused our thoughts and feelings about
what transformative shiFt in the academy might involve.

ShiFt
1. a new beginning
2. to create, to transform, to transport, to delight
3. to take care of oneself and others, to flourish and to engage in slow
scholarship
4. promoting ideas, sharing stories, finding connection, collaboration
and friendship
5. creating meaning together, supporting and celebrating each other, lift-
ing each other up
6. like [the pleasure of wearing] a loose-fitting garment—finding liberat-
ing and enabling ways to wear an academic life
7. activating personal and professional alchemy, kindness, movement
and change in the academy
viii Preface

Inspired by connection and activism, the authors in this book have

engaged in reflection and research, many with a trusted circle of writers,
to explore some of these resonating ideas and ‘definitions’, locate possi-
bilities in their personal and professional contexts, articulate hopes and
dreams, and activate desired ways of being and becoming in academia.
The original research we present in this book discusses, and is informed
by, a collective desire for shiFt and by relevant scholarly and theoretical
literature which has advanced our philosophical pondering, positioning
and practices. Chapter authors attend to ‘conceptual and philosophical
sparks’, to ideas connected to contemporary methodologies and scholar-
ship, such as ‘Feminist, contemplative and autoethnographic research
approaches’, ‘slow scholarship and acts of resistance’, ‘ethics of care’ and
‘the infinite game’ (see Chap. 1 for more).
These sparks support authors’ conceptualisation, communication and
application of core values and commitments—such as kindness, care and
self-care in the academy—imbuing our collective work in the academy
with revolutionary potential.
Alchemic potential is also released through our research and writing—
research that has storied, creative, responsive, personal, poetic, contem-
plative and aesthetic elements, and writing that responds to the symbolic
nature of ‘shiFt’. These autoethnographic and arts-based approaches pro-
vide evocative conceptual content which recognises and values the experi-
ences, differences, multiplicity and subjectivities of women academics.
And so, throughout this book we use our stories to call out intensified
work cultures, harmful workloads and the competitive working condi-
tions and games that jeopardise our personal health, wellbeing, family
lives, collegiality, connection and pleasure in the academy. Our contem-
porary and relational ways of understanding academia are used to create
research which disrupts the patriarchal structures defining many women’s
lives and work in the academy. All too familiar with how neoliberalism
and neoliberal agendas position knowledge production and exclude
women, the research we present shiFts the focus to champion women’s
perspectives and to explore what care and kindness can mean and how
they can be used to resist and reject neoliberal academia and more than
this—to offer renewal, regeneration and radical hope.
 Preface ix

Core Themes
Core themes facilitate the book’s primary narrative of activating positive
change in the academy:

• Theme I: Holding space for story, struggle and possibility

• Theme II: Building caring communities and enacting an ethics of care
• Theme III: ShiFting, renewing and reimagining the academy.

In the first chapter, ‘Reimagining the Academy: Conceptual, Theoretical,

Philosophical, and Methodological Sparks’, we make clear the book’s
intentions: the building of a kinder values-driven academy—a kinder
and inclusive academy that is responsive to women’s knowledges, ways of
working, and experiences. We use this introductory chapter to explore
the conceptual frame and foundations for our valuing of women’s lived
experiences and lived visions, our drawing on the work of feminist schol-
ars, our emphasis on ethics of care and the core ideas and concepts we
have found helpful in supporting both the reimagining of the academy
and our imagining of revolutionary futures. Identifying the foundational
theoretical, philosophical and methodological underpinnings of our
research collection, and using aesthetic and responding highlighter
poems, we foreground in this chapter the ‘conceptual sparks’ our chapter
authors are exploring and describe how these situate and support feminist
efforts to inhabit the academy differently—to move the academy closer
to the one we want, rather than the one we have.

 heme I: Holding Space for Story, Struggle

T
and Possibility

This scene-setting theme offers an invitation to readers to remember and

connect to ‘the beginning’ of knowledge and story. We seek here to hon-
our the lived experience and wisdom so often silenced in academia, to
respect and privilege the knowledge, contribution and struggle of First
Nations women academics and women from marginalised groups—
women who are given a seat at the leadership table. We hold and create
x Preface

space for their experiences, stories and voices, recognising that care-full
listening is needed if we are to reimagine the academy in ethical and
meaningful ways.
Tracey Bunda, Kathryn Gilbey and ‘Mabokang Monnapula-Mapesela
are generous scholars who, in responding to this first theme, use their
chapter to invite contemplation and connection. In ‘Black Warrior
Women Scholars Speak’ they consider that contemplative beginnings—
with First Nations peoples, knowledge systems, and through relation-
ships—promise hopeful possibilities. If these possibilities are to be
realised, however, there are complexities to be untangled, tight hard knots
to be undone, a rawness to be exposed. This chapter—an open letter to
white women in the academy—commences a dialogue that speaks into
some of these complexities by drawing on the lived experiences of First
Nations and black academic women. Tracey and Kathryn as Aboriginal
scholars in Australia and ‘Mabokang, a South African scholar, speak to
the realities of being black women in the academy. This is a dialogue for
and with white women—those who would collectively locate themselves
through platforms of ally-ship. Tracey, Kathryn and ‘Mabokang consider
that solutions may not be easily found, but that efforts to find solutions
should remain and that we must respond.
‘Mabokang continues this conversation in ‘My Journey of a Thousand
Miles’, writing reflectively about her journey and interrogating her
thoughts and feelings about her academic life, decades of discrimination
and her hopes for the future. Exploring values, upbringing, learning and
mentorship, ‘Mabokang highlights how essential it is to find oneself, to
find one’s voice and to defy the boundaries that others construct for
women, and black women. She reminds us that moving beyond ‘long-­
established comfort zones’ does not happen by default, but by design,
and often as part of a lengthy, carefully crafted journey.
Ruth Behar’s autoethnographic essay ‘How Does a Woman Find Her
Voice and Not Lose Her Soul in Academia?’ explores how she has worked
to answer this question. Carving out a space of freedom within academia,
Ruth’s aim has been both to feel fulfilled and to produce writing that is
evocative and inspiring. Sharing her lived experiences as an immigrant,
anthropologist, poet, creative writer, mother and professor, Ruth describes
how she drew upon her personal history to carry out meaningful
 Preface xi

scholarly writing that provided both self-knowledge and knowledge of

the communities she studied ethnographically. Ruth explores how as an
immigrant and first-generation scholar she had to struggle against patri-
archal limitations to obtain a college education and how the intersection-
ality of her life and work led her to find ways to weave the two together
in her writing. Noting that we are living and working in a time of extreme
uncertainty, Ruth implores us to ‘find our voices and hold on to our
souls’, to ‘do the work we care about’ because ‘every moment counts’!
These chapters highlight why it is important to shed light on women’s
lived experiences, to talk about what it has felt like, and feels like, to be
an academic woman. They ask us to reflect on the complexity and uncer-
tainty of women’s academic work/lives. We ask readers to take these mes-
sages of vulnerable and powerful selves and sit awhile, bear witness and
hold space and souls.

 heme II: Building Caring Communities and Enacting

T
an Ethics of Care

With this theme we consider what it means to build caring academic

communities, and we look to the ways those among us are building a
kinder culture of possibilities that allow us not only to do our best work,
but to be our best selves. We use this theme to explore what it might
mean to live/work well and to contemplate where women academics
need support and might give support. In this section, authors share sto-
ries from their lived lives and trouble the intensification of academic
work by corporate techniques and finite games. Authors also remember
the importance of relational and heart-spirit-mind-body connections,
ethics and values—they remember ‘the infinite game’. Notions of care
(including self-care), slow scholarship, flourishing and community per-
meate the chapters in this theme, and the next, with authors sharing
methodologies, possibilities and imaginings for enriching academic work.
In ‘Mentoring Beyond the Finite Games: Creating Time and Space for
Connection, Collaboration and Friendship’, Vicki Schriever, Sandie
Elsom and Ali Black share autoethnographic accounts as they describe
how they are rewriting the rules of the finite career games that permeate
xii Preface

the academy. At different points in their academic careers, Vicki, Sandi

and Ali are reimagining academia through their relationships with one
another and speaking back to the mentoring discourses and career games
that objectify outputs and outcomes and magnify hierarchical power dif-
ferences. Through the cultivation of their co-mentoring relationship as ‘a
time of friendship’ Vicki, Sandie and Ali are disrupting the hierarchy of
‘mentor’ and ‘mentee’ and creating a shared space for authentic connec-
tion, vulnerable conversation and collaboration. Their chapter shows
how academic companionship offers sustenance, inspiration, care and
strength.
Katarina Tuinamuana and Joanne Yoo’s chapter, ‘A Collective Feminist
Ethics of Care with Talanoa: Embodied Time in the ShiFting Spaces of
Women’s Academic Work’, considers the institutional structures of
Australian universities—structures increasingly characterised by unsus-
tainable practices of accelerated time and work intensification. Katarina
and Joanne use their chapter to locate and analyse what a collective ‘ethics
of care’ might look like as a response to these practices. They do this by
narrating micro-stories of the embodied social practices of women-­
academic workers, drawing on experiences of time spent at an off-site
group retreat. The stories within the chapter are carried by Indigenous
Fijian talanoa ways of knowing and critical autoethnography. The use of
talanoa brings a relationality to ‘self-care’, shiFting it away from the indi-
vidual experience towards a more collective movement. Doing this recap-
tures the pleasure and purpose of ‘timeless time’, positively influencing
everyday cultures and practices in higher education.
‘Emotional Labour Pains: Rebirth of the Good Girl’ is written from
the perspective of three women who share a past, present and future
within and without academia. Brought together through the experiences
of motherhood, study, career and mentorship, Marguerite Westacott,
Claire Green and Sandie Elsom are working as early-career academics in
the enabling sector of higher education. Their roles demand a high level
of emotional labour. Compassion and empathy guide their practice yet
are rarely extended into their own self-care. Through contemplative writ-
ing processes, Marguerite, Sandie and Claire meet the ‘good girl’ they
each embody and realise her influence on their attitudes and behaviours.
Through their collaborative writing they recontextualise what it means to
 Preface xiii

be good and reject the assumption that caring work is feminine. They call
for the academy to value a pedagogy of care.
In ‘More than Tolerance: A Call to ShiFt the Ableist Academy Towards
Equity’ Melissa Cain and Melissa Fanshawe consider the juggle of balanc-
ing the mothering of a child with a disability and an academic career.
Their work requires long days teaching, marking and preparing content,
and nights answering emails, researching and connecting with online stu-
dents. Amongst this intense schedule there must be time for attention to
a partner, children and friends—and ideally recreation and self-care.
Melissa and Melissa examine their personal and professional identities
and share their stories of straddling worlds of academia and disability, the
unpredictable nature of disability and the unforgiving expectations of the
university. These intersecting autoethnographies highlight that the acad-
emy requires not just a shiFt but a ‘shove’ into the realities of ableism.
Academics face many challenges throughout their careers and ongoing
reflection is crucial. In ‘Arts-Based Reflection for Care of Self and Others
in the Academy: A Collaged Rhizomatic Journey’, Marthy Watson and
Georgina Barton share their use of arts-based practices to create spaces for
reflection and exploration of the competitive and demanding cultures
they experience as female academics in higher education. Engaging in
‘embodied living inquiry’, Marthy and Georgina make a collaged artwork
and write poetry and show how reflective artmaking supports reflection
on academic challenges and successes, enhancing mindfulness, contem-
plation and feelings of stability in academy.
The notion of slow scholarship is gathering momentum as educators
look to counter the influences of increasing surveillance and control, not
only in tertiary institutions, but also across the education sector. These
influences impact what may be accomplished by academics in their teach-
ing roles. In ‘Slow Pedagogies and Care-Full, Deep Learning in Preservice
Teacher Education’, Joanne Ailwood and Margot Ford explore how slow,
care-full and deep pedagogies can create caring pedagogical communities
for academics and preservice teachers. Rather than focusing on ways of
resisting the diminishing of their work, Joanne and Margot use their
chapter to re-focus on slowing down, being care-full, practising slow ped-
agogy and creating deep learning opportunities. They intersect ideas of
slow scholarship with ideas of feminist ethics of care, valuing a relational
xiv Preface

ontology and deep and lasting shiFts in professional identities not only
for academic staff, but for preservice teachers’ experiences and students’
experiences of learning.
In ‘Women Navigating the “Academic Olympics”: Achieving Activism
Through Collaborative Autoethnography’, Susanne Garvis, Heidi Harju-­
Luukkainen, Anne Keary and Tina Yngvesson draw upon game-related
metaphors and share how they have sought to create supportive spaces for
women in the academy. Engaging in activism through collaborative auto-
ethnography, they reflect on their personal stories and struggles through
four vignettes of being academic women located in different countries.
Susie, Heidi, Anne and Tina propose that through respecting and valuing
the diversity that women bring to their work in the academy, universities
can be nudged towards infinite possibilities: valuing connection and col-
laboration and creating networks that foster the creation of supportive
cultures.
Madeleine Dobson and Samantha Owen, in ‘Envisioning Caring
Communities in Initial Teacher Education’, use autoethnographic reflec-
tion, their own and their colleagues’, to explore how academics in initial
teacher education envision care in the neoliberal university. Attending to
attitudes, behaviours and strategies for teaching and relationship-­building
in university contexts, Madeleine, Samantha and fellow academics con-
sider questions about how academics create caring communities, experi-
ence recognition for their caring work and resist the individualising
impulses of a neoliberal society.
Yuwei Gou, Corinna Di Niro, Elena Spasovska, Rebekah Clarkson,
Chloe Cannell, Nadine Levy, Alice Nilsson and Amelia Walker use their
chapter, ‘Writing, Playing, Transforming: A Collaborative Inquiry into
Neoliberalism’s Effects on Academia, and the Scope for Changing the
Game’, to engage in a collaborative creative writing–based inquiry.
Together they explore problems of injustice in neoliberal academia, espe-
cially injustices based on gender and intersecting axes of marginalisation/
privilege. Asserting that change is both necessary and possible, their
game-themed excerpts of creative writing create spaces for reflecting on
ways to resist and remake unliveable scenarios of the neoliberal academy
and highlight the value of connecting and imagining alternatives
with others.
 Preface xv

Theme III: ShiFting, Renewing and Reimagining

the Academy

The final theme draws upon all that has gone before—our own stories
and struggles as women in academia, our heart for kindness, care, inclu-
sion and hope, and our efforts and dreams to realise our potential as con-
nected people living and working together in and beyond the academy.
This final theme calls readers to join with us as we organise ourselves and
our research methodologies towards reimagining and recreating a kinder
more connected academy, a kinder more connected world.
Exploring this final theme, readers are invited to make room for imag-
ining, planning and enacting small creative acts of kindness, care, hope
and disruption of neoliberal agendas, and to discuss and enact these in
the company of others. Let us each commit to finding and practising
ways of keeping the infinite game in play.
Helen Grimmett and Rachel Forgasz’s chapter, ‘The In/finite Game of
Life: Playing in the Academy in the Face of Life and Death’, serves to
wake us from our slumber to remember the ‘the infinite game’—in the
end—is the only one that matters. Helen and Rachel utilise drama improv
games as both a structural device and a methodological approach for nar-
rative reflection on personal catalysts that have caused shiFts in the way
they are choosing to play the games of life/work. As in most improv
games, their aim is to take joy in the process of playing and creating
‘together’ rather than in point scoring or knocking each other out. Helen
and Rachel’s improvised product unfolds through this collaborative work
and is presented as a potential catalyst for others to consider their own
engagement in sustaining the ultimate infinite game—the only one that
really matters.
In ‘Beyond Survival: The ShiFt to Aesthetic Writing’, Cecile Badenhorst
and Heather McLeod offer their strategies for engaging in practices of
renewal—practices that offer freedom from, and run counter to, neolib-
eral discourses. Their chapter writing takes place during their travels to
academic conferences in Hiroshima, Japan. Cecile and Heather under-
stand that conferences are pockets of mobile identity-formation occur-
ring outside the normal life of universities; they can perpetuate discourses,
xvi Preface

particularly hierarchies and power-plays. Conferences can also provide

the opportunity to break free of the neoliberal university and for academ-
ics to see themselves with fresh eyes. Describing their experience of the
latter, Cecile and Heather show how identities are open to decomposi-
tion and re-composition through activities and connections. They use
renga poetry and miksang photography as a methodology for noticing
experiences in a new culture and for cultivating slow tiny acts of resis-
tance and renewal.
Susan Walsh and Barbara Bickel are Canadian-born female professors
of European settler heritage living on the traditional lands of the
Indigenous peoples of Treaty 6 and 7, and Metis Region 3 and 4. Susan
and Barbara have been living/working in the transitional spaces of leaving
the academy for the past two years. Their chapter, ‘The Gift of Wit(h)
nessing Transitional Moments Through a Contemplative Arts Co-inquiry’,
focuses on their personal and social commitment to engaging with con-
templative arts practices in relational ways in their daily lives, as well as in
their teaching and research. The purpose of their co-inquiry was to wit(h)
ness one another as they reimagined their lives and work. In their chapter,
Susan and Barbara create and share visual and textual offerings that
embody wit(h)nessing as a creative, contemplative, relational and recip-
rocal act—showing how contemplative arts inquiry practices can lead us
‘towards a greater sense of connectedness in our lives, to one another, to
nature, and to the cosmos’.
Catherine Manathunga and Agnes Bosanquet, two feminist scholars,
use their chapter, ‘Remaking Academic Garments’, to reflect upon the
ways they have remade academia into a comfortable garment. Academic
garments have, for centuries, privileged white, male, able, cisgender,
middle-­class bodies—the mortar board, floppy PhD hat and cape, the
suit and tie, the tweed jacket with elbow patches all designed with the
white male body in mind. Catherine and Agnes offer a collective autoeth-
nography of the ways they wear academic life and engage in collective
activism. They argue that remaking an academic life creates the condi-
tions for ‘radical hope’ in the academy for women and members of inter-
sectional groups.
In ‘Canon, Legacy or Imprint: A Feminist Reframing of Intellectual
Contribution’, Trina Hamilton, Roberta Hawkins and Margaret
 Preface xvii

Walton-­Roberts reflect on the origins, inspirations and outcomes of their

collective work on ‘slow scholarship’. Four years ago, they, with eight
other women, collaborated on a paper advocating for collective, feminist
engagement with the pressures and consequences of the neoliberal acad-
emy. Inspired by that work and now as mid-career scholars, Trina, Roberta
and Margaret are increasingly thinking about how to create lasting
imprints for a better future inside and outside the academy. They ask
what difference a shiFt in thinking towards ‘imprints’ and away from
‘canons’ and ‘legacies’ can make? They imagine future retirements from
the academy not in terms of ratified inclusion in the canon and its indi-
vidualistic and patrimonial inferences, but in terms of imprint, and the
idea of leaving a lasting impression on other scholars and scholarly com-
munities through ‘being-in-relation’ with others and a diverse set of
scholarship.
Our book, our stories, highlight all too clearly that universities are
overrun with competitive finite games, games that can obscure possibili-
ties for transformation. These games draw academic players into an oscil-
lation between pride and shame and encourage them/us to mistake
winning the game at hand for a more radical challenge to the competi-
tion itself. Niki Harré’s essay is a fitting final chapter. In ‘Beyond Shame
and Pride: The University as a Game of Love’, Niki reminds us that the
‘infinite game’ is a metaphor for an alternative playing field in which
players/we occupy a hermeneutics of love. As a would-be infinite player,
Niki encourages us to create a university network with love at its centre.
She challenges us to consider what might happen if academics tried, or at
least pretended it was possible, to stay true to love.

Reimagine with Us
Dear reader,
Thank you for joining this journey of reimagination and hope. As you
engage closely with the chapters that follow, we invite you to reflect on
the symbolic nature of shiFt for you, your relationships, your research and
your workplace. We invite you to listen care-fully to yourself and your
own longings. We encourage you to think about your own lived
xviii Preface

experiences, the lived experiences of your colleagues. How might you

elevate, amplify and make space for your voice, and the voices of all
women, in the academy? How might you use research methodologies in
deliberate, activist and celebratory ways to unearth and raise individual
and collective voices and stories? How might you change your work situ-
ations and workplaces to support an ethics of care and caring and infuse
your research and scholarly contributions with imagination, hope and
inclusion?
We believe that our work in the university can be reimagined through
a feminist politics, where together, we #ChooseToChallenge and move
the academy towards kindness, connection and an ethics of care.
In solidarity, Ali and Rachael.

A Thank You to Reviewers

Each chapter of this unique collection of new, creative knowledge and
research has been subject to thorough editorial scrutiny and extensive
double-blind peer review processes. We thank the reviewers for valuing
creative forms of research that contain aesthetic and evocative descrip-
tions of experiences, feelings, stories and meanings—and for recognising
the importance of contemplative, creative and new methodologies
focused on privileging multifaceted stories of experiences. Reviewers’
provision of considered and scholarly feedback has extended the quality
and rigour of author contributions and supported chapter authors’
grounding of their ideas in the work of relevant authorities, scholarship,
theories and theorists. Narrow, limiting and patriarchal way of under-
standing research tends to prevail in academia. However, through their
collegial assistance, generosity of time, thoughtful critique and recogni-
tion of alternative approaches, reviewers have enabled high-quality, use-
ful and meaningful research processes and products to be brought
into being.

Maroochydore, QLD Alison L Black

Maroochydore, QLD  Rachael Dwyer
 Contents


Reimagining the Academy: Conceptual, Theoretical,
Philosophical, and Methodological Sparks  1
Rachael Dwyer and Alison L Black

Theme 1 Holding Space for Story, Struggle and Possibility  17

Black Warrior Women Scholars Speak 19

Tracey Bunda, Kathryn Gilbey, and ‘Mabokang Monnapula-Mapesela

 Journey of a Thousand Miles 29

My
‘Mabokang Monnapula-Mapesela


How Does a Woman Find Her Voice and Not Lose Her Soul in
Academia? 39
Ruth Behar

xix
xx Contents

Theme 2 Building Caring Communities and Enacting an

Ethics of Care  53


Mentoring Beyond the Finite Games: Creating Time and Space
for Connection, Collaboration and Friendship 55
Vicki Schriever, Sandra Elsom, and Alison L Black

 Collective Feminist Ethics of Care with Talanoa: Embodied

A
Time in the ShiFting Spaces of Women’s Academic Work 79
Katarina Tuinamuana and Joanne Yoo


Emotional Labour Pains: Rebirth of the Good Girl 97
Marguerite Westacott, Claire Green, and Sandra Elsom


More than Tolerance: A Call to ShiFt the Ableist Academy
Towards Equity119
Melissa Cain and Melissa Fanshawe


Arts-Based Reflection for Care of Self and Others in the
Academy: A Collaged Rhizomatic Journey135
Marthy Watson and Georgina Barton


Slow Pedagogies and Care-Full, Deep Learning in Preservice
Teacher Education157
Joanne Ailwood and Margot Ford


Women Navigating the ‘Academic Olympics’: Achieving
Activism Through Collaborative Autoethnography175
Susanne Garvis, Heidi Harju-Luukkainen, Anne Keary, and Tina
Yngvesson


Envisioning Caring Communities in Initial Teacher Education195
Madeleine Dobson and Samantha Owen
 Contents xxi


Writing, Playing, Transforming: A Collaborative Inquiry into
Neoliberalism’s Effects on Academia, and the Scope for
Changing the Game219
Yuwei Gou, Corinna Di Niro, Elena Spasovska, Rebekah Clarkson,
Chloe Cannell, Alice Nilsson, Nadine Levy, and Amelia Walker

Theme 3 ShiFting, Renewing and Reimagining the Academy 239


The In/Finite Game of Life: Playing in the Academy in the
Face of Life and Death241
Helen Grimmett and Rachel Forgasz

Beyond Survival: The ShiFt to Aesthetic Writing259

Cecile Badenhorst and Heather McLeod


The Gift of Wit(h)nessing Transitional Moments Through a
Contemplative Arts Co-inquiry283
Susan Walsh and Barbara Bickel

Remaking Academic Garments305

Catherine Manathunga and Agnes Bosanquet


Canon, Legacy or Imprint: A Feminist Reframing of
Intellectual Contribution327
Trina Hamilton, Roberta Hawkins, and Margaret Walton-Roberts


Beyond Shame and Pride: The University as a Game of Love349
Niki Harré

Afterword367

Index395
 Notes on Contributors

Joanne Ailwood is an associate professor at The University of Newcastle,

Australia. She has published in the fields of history and policies of educa-
tion, early childhood education and teacher education. Joanne’s research
is qualitative and is underpinned by the theoretical perspectives of Michel
Foucault and Rosi Braidotti, making use of document analyses, case stud-
ies and ethnographies.
Cecile Badenhorst is a full professor in the Adult Education/Post-­
Secondary programme in the Faculty of Education at Memorial
University, Newfoundland, Canada. She engages in qualitative, arts-­
based and post-structural research methodologies. She values collabora-
tive writing projects that include art elements, and compassion in the
academy.
Georgina Barton is Professor of Literacies and Pedagogy at the
University of Southern Queensland, Australia. She is Associate Head of
School—Research. Her areas of research are English and literacy educa-
tion and the Arts. She has over 120 publications including her latest
book: Developing Literacy and the Arts in Schools.
Ruth Behar is an acclaimed scholar and writer of ethnography, memoir,
poetry and children’s fiction. Born in Havana, Cuba, she grew up in
New York. She has lived in Spain and Mexico and returns often to Cuba.

xxiii
xxiv Notes on Contributors

Her pioneering books explore vulnerability and the search for home. She
is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and a John Simon
Guggenheim Fellowship and was named a “Great Immigrant” by the
Carnegie Corporation. She is an anthropology professor at the University
of Michigan in Ann Arbor (USA).
Barbara Bickel is an artist, researcher, writer and educator, and is
Associate Professor of Art Education, Emerita at Southern Illinois
University, USA. She co-founded Studio M*: A Collaborative Research
Creation Lab Intersecting Arts, Culture and Healing in Calgary, Alberta,
Canada. Her research interests include arts-based inquiry methods, a/r/
tography, collaboration, socially engaged art, connective aesthetics,
matrixial theory, feminist art and pedagogy, and restorative and transfor-
mative learning. To assist shiFt to happen, her work strives to create path-
ways for a compassionate relational paradigm.
Alison L Black is a narrative, arts-based and educational researcher at
the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. Her research and schol-
arly work fosters connectedness, community, wellbeing and meaning-­
making through the building of reflective and creative lives and identities.
Her storied and visual research re-presents the lived life and highlights
the transformative power of collaborative and relational knowledge
construction.
Agnes Bosanquet is Director, Learning and Teaching Staff Development
at Macquarie University, Australia. Her research focus is critical univer-
sity studies and changing academic roles and identities. She blogs about
academia; raising children, one with a chronic illness; and reading dysto-
pian fiction at The Slow Academic.
Tracey Bunda is a Ngugi Wakka Wakka woman, mother, educator, pro-
fessor and Academic Director/Director Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Studies Unit at The University of Queensland, Australia. Her
career in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander higher education has
occurred over three decades. Tracey’s most recent publication Seeing the
Aboriginal Sovereign Warrior Woman can be found at https://www.thelift-
edbrow.com/current-­issue/. Tracey desires to have acknowledged the
double labours sweated by Aboriginal peoples in being in the academy, in
 Notes on Contributors xxv

the forever educating of white people and in our agentic efforts for sys-
temic change.
Melissa Cain is Lecturer in Education at the Australian Catholic
University in Brisbane, Australia. Her research covers inclusive education
and creative arts education with a focus on hearing the voices of students
with vision impairment in mainstream schools. Melissa was a school-
teacher and Head of Department for 22 years and has received several
higher education teaching awards and the Callaway Doctoral Award.
Chloe Cannell is a writer and PhD candidate at the University of South
Australia. Chloe writes and researches on queer young adult literature,
collaborative writing and researcher wellbeing. From 2018 to 2020 she
worked on the organising committee for the South Australian Gender,
Sex and Sexualities Postgraduate and ECR Conference.
Rebekah Clarkson is the author of Barking Dogs (2017). Her short sto-
ries have appeared in publications including Griffith Review, Best
Australian Stories and Something Special, Something Rare: Outstanding
Short Stories by Australian Women. She coordinates the Writing Centre at
The University of Adelaide and teaches fiction writing in Australia and
overseas.
Corinna Di Niro has been performing and teaching theatre interna-
tionally since 2004. Corinna completed her PhD in Commedia dell’Arte
in 2016 and became a TEDx Speaker in 2019 for her innovative research
into VR in theatre. Corinna is co-editing a forthcoming volume on
Commedia in the Asia-Pacific.
Madeleine Dobson is early career academic, senior lecturer, Director of
Student Experience & Community Engagement, School of Education,
Curtin University, Australia. Her research interests include social justice,
children’s rights, digital technologies and resilience and wellbeing within
educational contexts. Her teaching focuses on social justice with a vision
of educators as advocates and activists.
Rachael Dwyer is Lecturer in Curriculum and Pedagogy in the School
of Education and Tertiary Access, University of the Sunshine Coast,
Australia. Prior to entering academia, Rachael was a music specialist
xxvi Notes on Contributors

teacher in primary and secondary schools and is a strong advocate for

music and the arts as part of the educational entitlement for all children.
Rachael’s research interests include teacher education, music and arts
education, critical pedagogy and narrative inquiry.
Sandra Elsom is a lecturer who teaches ICT and other foundational
learning skills in the School of Education and Tertiary Access at the
University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. Her research focuses on the
integration of games into the higher education curriculum. She is inter-
ested in the potential for alternate reality games to create an engaging and
effective social learning experience.
Melissa Fanshawe has 20 years’ experience in schools as a teacher, advi-
sory teacher, deputy and principal. Melissa is a trained teacher for stu-
dents with vision impairment. She is completing her PhD in the field of
vision impairment and enjoys her volunteer roles in the blind and low-­
vision community.
Margot Ford is a senior lecturer at The University of Newcastle,
Australia. She has published in the areas of race and racism, Indigenous
education, early childhood and tertiary teacher education. She specialises
in qualitative research methods drawing on case study, narrative inquiry
and ethnography. She is interested in cross-disciplinary research in racial,
ethnic and cultural diversity as they intersect with class in the contempo-
rary educational Australian landscape.
Rachel Forgasz works at Monash University, Australia, where her teach-
ing and research about teacher professional learning focus on the influ-
ence of emotion, agency and embodiment. Rachel’s latest project,
Climate7.com, is a framework to support climate change education and
activism in school and community contexts.
Susanne Garvis is Professor of Education (Early Childhood) and Chair
of the Department of Education at Swinburne University of Technology,
Australia. Her research has made significant contributions to policy and
quality improvement work within early childhood education and care.
Kathryn Gilbey is an Alyawarr woman and senior lecturer at the College
for Indigenous Studies, Education and Research, University of Southern
 Notes on Contributors xxvii

Queensland, Australia. Kathryn is a Fulbright Scholar and her forthcom-

ing book, A Living Mudmap: Beyond Borders and Binaries, is a gathering
of stories from Australian and American First Nations women and radical
women of colour who live and work at a grassroots level. The book is
born ‘of a politics of necessity’ and the elder knowledge within models
and gives guidance for the change we want to happen and become.
Yuwei Gou holds an MA degree in English Literature from Guangdong
University of Foreign Studies. From 2016 to 2018, she was an English
teacher at Leshan Normal University (China). In February 2018, she
came to Adelaide, Australia, and started her PhD research about Irish
female writer Anne Enright’s novels.
Claire Green is a sessional tutor in the School of Education and Tertiary
Access at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. She is passion-
ate about education and social justice. Her research examines the devel-
opment of self-efficacy in students from low SES backgrounds and other
equity groups.
Helen Grimmett is a teacher educator in the Faculty of Education at
Monash University, Australia. Her teaching is mostly in the creative arts
and generalist primary curriculum and pedagogy areas. Her research
interests include teachers’ professional development, initial teacher edu-
cation, dialogic teaching, creative pedagogies, music education and pro-
fessional experience.
Trina Hamilton Trina’s research focuses on corporate and urban sus-
tainability politics. She is co-director of the Center for Trade, Environment
and Development at State University of New York at Buffalo (UB), and
a member of the Great Lakes Feminist Geography Collective. She recently
published (with Winifred Curran) Just Green Enough: Urban Development
and Environmental Gentrification (2017).
Heidi Harju-Luukkainen (Nord University, Norway) holds a PhD in
education, special education teacher qualification and a qualification in
leadership and management from Finland. She has published more than
150 international books, journal articles and reports as well as worked on
xxviii Notes on Contributors

multiple international projects. She leads an international research group

called Social Justice and Diversity in Education at Nord University.
Niki Harré Niki’s research focuses on sustainable communities and
schools, values and political activism. She teaches community psychology
and is the coordinator of an interdisciplinary three-course module on
sustainability. Her two most recent books were published by in 2018: The
Infinite Game: How to Live Well Together and Psychology for a Better World:
Working with People to Save the Planet.
Roberta Hawkins is a feminist geographer whose research examines
how everyday mundane practices are linked to global justice and environ-
mental change. She recently published “Gender, Nature and Nation:
Resource Nationalism on Primary Sector Reality TV” with colleagues
Kendal Clark and Jennifer Silver.
Anne Keary Anne’s research, teaching and engagement work enhance
the provision of socially just education in a range of educational settings.
She teaches early childhood education courses at Monash University,
Australia. Her research employs a qualitative longitudinal approach to
explore social and educational changes and how they shape transitions to
education, work and community life.
Nadine Levy is a social researcher whose work examines spiritual com-
munities, gender and notions of healing and transformation. She is teach-
ing in the area of mindfulness and compassion at a Buddhist Higher
Education Institute in Australia. She holds a PhD in Feminist Sociology
and has a background in community law.
Catherine Manathunga is Professor of Education Research in the
School of Education and Tertiary Access, University of the Sunshine
Coast, Australia. She is the co-leader of the USC Indigenous and
Transcultural Research Centre. Catherine is a historian who draws
together expertise in historical, sociological and cultural studies to bring
an innovative perspective to higher educational research.
Heather McLeod is a full professor, Faculty of Education, Memorial
University of Newfoundland, Canada. She engages in arts-based, narra-
tive and post-structural research methodologies. She has previously served
 Notes on Contributors xxix

as associate dean and as editor-in-chief of the Canadian Review of Art

Education. Heather has received national, university and faculty awards
for excellence in curriculum development and teaching.
‘Mabokang Monnapula-Mapesela is Deputy Vice-Chancellor
Academic and Student Affairs at Rhodes University in South Africa. She
previously worked as a senior director and associate professor in the
Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching, at the Central University
of Technology, Free State. ‘Mabokang began her academic career at the
University of the Free State, where she rose through the ranks from a
research intern to an associate professor. Prior to this she was a deputy
principal and a biology and chemistry teacher.
Alice Nilsson is a philosopher based in Tandanya (so-called Adelaide,
Australia). Their research interests range from value-form theory, Marx
and Left-Communism. They have been published in An Alternative
Geology of the World, VORE Zine and Writing from Below, and has given
talks and performed at 4S, Format Systems and Diffractions Collective.
Samantha Owen is Early-Career Academic, Master of Teaching Course
Coordinator, Curtin Gender Research Network Lead and Humanities
and Social Sciences Lecturer, School of Education, Curtin University,
Australia. Samantha is a modern historian and her research interests
include community, education and educators, nations and nation mak-
ing, and trauma.
Vicki Schriever is Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at the
University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. Vicki supports and contrib-
utes to the development and growth of aspiring early childhood educa-
tion preservice teachers. Vicki’s research interests include decision making
with digital technologies in early childhood and autoethnographic
accounts of lived experiences.
Elena Spasovska Elena’s interdisciplinary research focuses on women,
peace and security. After undertaking a master’s in Spain and teaching at
the Institute of Gender Studies in her native North Macedonia, Elena
completed her PhD in Australia in 2017. She has taught across three
Australian universities, published research and founded a not-for-profit
xxx Notes on Contributors

to aid implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals in the

Western Balkans.
Katarina Tuinamuana teaches/researches the cultural and sociological
politics of education at the Australian Catholic University, Sydney,
Australia, analysing the changing social and political contexts that govern
everyday practice in education. Her writing focuses on a feminist ethics
of care, decolonising time in academia and higher education pedagogies
at the cultural interface.
Amelia Walker has published four poetry collections plus three poetry
teaching resource books for schools. After an initial career in nursing, she
returned to university in her 20s to study creative writing, completing her
PhD in 2016. From 2017 to 2019 she served as secretary of the
Australasian Association of Writing Programs.
Susan Walsh is Professor Emerita, Faculty of Education, Mount Saint
Vincent University, Canada. She is working on a book of poetry and
Miksang (contemplative photography). Please see her (2018) book Artful
and Contemplative Openings: Researching Women and Teaching as well as
her co-edited book (2015) (with B. Bickel and C. Leggo) Arts-Based and
Contemplative Practices in Research and Teaching.
Margaret Walton-Roberts is a professor in the Geography and
Environmental Studies Department at Wilfrid Laurier University,
Canada. Her research has examined international migration with a focus
on gender and skilled migration, and immigrant and refugee settlement
and integration in Canada. Her latest co-edited publication is A National
Project: Canada’s Syrian Refugee Resettlement Experience (2020).
Marthy Watson is a lecturer, University of Southern Queensland,
Australia. She has extensive experience leading and developing course
materials in the area of literacy and arts education and has worked on
numerous research projects supporting culturally and linguistically
diverse communities. She strongly advocates for the arts and regularly
presents at conferences and arts workshops in schools.
Marguerite Westacott Marguerite’s career in education encompasses a
variety of educational sectors, in several roles: teacher, leadership, coun-
 Notes on Contributors xxxi

sellor, art therapist, consultant, curriculum development and governance.

Marguerite is passionate about innovative and futures-focused pedagogi-
cal practice and curriculum design. She has also worked and continues to
volunteer in the community sector.
Tina Yngvesson holds MSc degrees in educational research and interna-
tional business and is a PhD research fellow at Nord University in
Norway. She also works as a teacher in a Swedish primary school and is a
member of an international research group, Social Justice and Diversity
in Education, at Nord University.
Joanne Yoo is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. She has worked exten-
sively across primary and secondary teacher education programmes. Her
research interests include teaching as an embodied practice, action
research and writing as inquiry.
 List of Figures

Mentoring Beyond the Finite Games: Creating Time and Space

for Connection, Collaboration and Friendship
Fig. 1 Protected space, safe space, authentic space—Vicki’s diary excerpt 67

Arts-Based Reflection for Care of Self and Others

in the Academy: A Collaged Rhizomatic Journey
Fig. 1 Initial markings on canvas 140
Fig. 2 Heaviness, layered lines and textures 143
Fig. 3 The un/final product 144

Envisioning Caring Communities in Initial Teacher Education

Fig. 1 Care mind map 207

Beyond Survival: The ShiFt to Aesthetic Writing

Fig. 1 Noticing impermanence through small concrete details.
(Photograph: Cecile Badenhorst) 268
Fig. 2 We notice the ethic of care. (Photograph: Heather McLeod) 270
Fig. 3 Food is more than food. (Photograph: Heather McLeod) 273
Fig. 4 Noticing the smallest things. (Photograph: Cecile Badenhorst) 276

xxxiii
xxxiv List of Figures

The Gift of Wit(h)nessing Transitional Moments Through

a Contemplative Arts Co-inquiry
Fig. 1 Materializing intentions. (Photograph: S. Walsh) 285
Fig. 2 Art and ritual. (Photograph: S. Walsh) 288
Fig. 3 Barbara candle lighting. (Photograph: B. Bickel) 288
Fig. 4 Barbara in movement I. (Photograph: B. Bickel) 290
Fig. 5 Sewing across generations. (Photograph: S. Walsh) 291
Fig. 6 Barbara in movement II. (Photograph: B. Bickel) 292
Fig. 7 Receiving, opening, surrendering. (Photograph: S. Walsh) 294
Fig. 8 Susan in prayer. (Photograph: B. Bickel) 295
Fig. 9 Visual reflections on the journey home. (Photograph: B. Bickel) 295

Canon, Legacy or Imprint: A Feminist Reframing

of Intellectual Contribution
Fig. 1 Leaf imprints as a metaphor for scholarly imprint 336
Fig. 1 A ‘reimagining the academy word cloud’:Holding expansive space
for academic lives and futures 393
 Reimagining the Academy: Conceptual,
Theoretical, Philosophical,
and Methodological Sparks
Rachael Dwyer and Alison L Black

Introduction
How do we move the academy closer to the one we want, rather than the
one we have? What can we learn by listening to stories about what women
think, know, and experience in the academy? Rosalind Gill (2009) won-
dered what would it mean, and what would we find, if we turned our lens
and our gaze upon our own experiences, on the practices, experiences and
feelings, and the secrets and silences within our own work/lives and
workplaces? Exploring the hidden injuries of neoliberal academia, Gill’s
(2009) research connected academic life, emotion, and neoliberalism and
was formulated as a ‘demand for change’. In many ways, our book con-
tinues this demand. Spiriting the theme for International Women’s Day
2021, we are embracing the hashtag #ChooseToChallenge and

R. Dwyer (*) • A. L. Black

School of Education and Tertiary Access, University of the Sunshine Coast,
Sunshine Coast, QLD, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 1

A. L. Black, R. Dwyer (eds.), Reimagining the Academy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75859-2_1
2 R. Dwyer and A. L. Black

challenging and changing the movement of the academy towards kind-

ness, connection, and an ethics of care.
In these times where economic justifications—rather than ethics and
values—dominate, we need to act purposefully and intentionally to
reclaim and reimagine the spaces we wish to inhabit. We need to make
shiFt happen! The impacts of capitalism, neoliberalism, and patriarchy
can be seen everywhere: in systemic inequalities of income, wealth, gen-
der, and race, in climate inaction, in access to quality healthcare, and
more. Too often, the importance of human connections and relation-
ships is overlooked. Yet, we see that valuing people and their lived lives,
engaging, and practising empathy provide a pathway to addressing so
many of these challenges. We know from personal experience how a sense
of powerlessness and overwhelm can challenge our capacity to hope. This
book has been written in the year of a global pandemic, a year of bush-
fires, loss of all kinds, intense emotions, and bone deep exhaustion.
And yet, we seek to remain hopeful and focused on enacting positive
changes, on reimagining the academy we want for ourselves, our col-
leagues, and our students, and on building the kinds of communities of
which we wish to be a part.
This introductory chapter foregrounds our deep commitments and
provides a conceptual foundation for the book and the chapters it con-
tains. We use this chapter to introduce the core philosophical sparks and
threads interwoven across the book, ideas that connect us in terms of
histories, beliefs, values, hopes, and methodologies, and ideas that point
us towards what matters.
In writing this chapter, we make use of aesthetic and creative writing
to foreground the scholarly ideas we have found powerful and meaning-
ful—text to savour, read slowly, and enjoy. Each section begins with a
‘highlighter poem’,1 which serves to elucidate and synthesise ideas from
the important scholarly work that is ‘sparking’ something in us.

1
Also known as erasure poems.
 Reimagining the Academy: Conceptual, Theoretical… 3

 ot Afraid of the F-Word: Living Feminist

N
Academic Lives
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house
For women, the need to desire and nurture each other:
Redemptive
Interdependency between women
Difference, a fund of necessary polarities
Creativity can spark
The power to seek new ways of being in the world
Our personal power is forged
Without community there is no liberation
Seek a world in which we can all flourish
Take our differences and make them strengths.
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
     (Responding to Audre Lorde, 1984)

We see feminist values as fundamental to our work as academics. We

gather great inspiration from our colleague and friend, Elizabeth
Mackinlay, as she writes and draws about teaching and learning like a
feminist (2016). In the opening three pages of her text, Mackinlay makes
three points that resonate deeply with us. First, she points to the prob-
lems with feminism in terms of representation and inclusion.

… feminism in and of itself holds no claims to innocence. It has a particu-

lar kind of historical reputation and contemporary habit of excluding those
who are not white, middle-class, educated, cis-gendered, able-bodied and/
or heterosexual from its dialogic doors. Feminism might like to think itself
a disobedient daughter but its perceived inability to move with the times …
works against it. (Mackinlay, 2016, pp. 2–3)

Feminism has a long history of exclusion. Middle-class white women

have written about their experiences of the patriarchy, without attending
to the voices of women of colour, poor women, trans women, and queer
women. The work of Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) on intersectional femi-
nism, now considered a landmark, took ten years to be widely taken up.
Audre Lorde’s vast body of work (e.g. 1978, 1984, 1988) and Aileen
4 R. Dwyer and A. L. Black

Moreton-Robinson’s (2000/2020) Talkin’ Up to the White Woman are

powerful examples of the labour and of the risks undertaken by Black
women to courageously call for their inclusion by white/straight/cis-­
feminists. As Bunda, Gilbey, and Monnapula-Mapesela (this volume)
suggest, the relevance of these works today is striking: so little has actually
changed.
Second, Mackinlay points to the inherent risks of proclaiming oneself
or one’s work as ‘feminist’.

The epistemological, ontological and material danger of being a feminist in

higher education hangs ominously in the air, a constant hum, low and
foreboding. Staying alert and awake, all the while muffling and muzzling
our voices as feminists, is a lonely and exhausting place to be. The kind of
self-surveillance necessary is a day-in-day-out non-stop process of assessing
the safety of the spaces, situations and scenarios we find ourselves in.
(Mackinlay, 2016, p. 3)

Declaring oneself a feminist is dangerous. We see the risks of being a

‘willful feminist’ explained so well by Sara Ahmed in Living a Feminist
Life: ‘to become feminist is to kill other people’s joy; to get in the way of
other people’s investments’ (2016, p. 65). As Sarah Burton (2018) points
out, within the neoliberal university, the intellectual positions that femi-
nists occupy are seen as illegitimate. The feminist academic is seen as a
troublemaker, unsettling the neoliberal order and hierarchy.
Third, Mackinlay speaks aloud one of our deepest fears in writing this
chapter and editing this book: the risk of being judged ‘not feminist
enough’.

For those of us in Women’s and Gender Studies, the feminist identity

stakes seem particularly high—and the accusations of being ‘unfeminist’,
‘not feminist enough’ or a ‘bad feminist’ come just as fast, thick and pain-
fully from within as they do from outside. There is an unsaid expectation
that being a Women’s and Gender Studies academic means that you will
necessarily speak, teach and learn like a feminist. (Mackinlay, 2016, p. 3)
 Reimagining the Academy: Conceptual, Theoretical… 5

We feel this deeply that because we write about women in academia, we

must wear a particular kind of feminist garment, conforming to particu-
lar feminist discourses. As we have described earlier, we don’t shy away
from the need for critique within feminist communities—especially
around intersectionality. But we know that, because of the themes and
focus of this book, there may be feminist readers who do not feel that
their feminism is represented here. We hope that there is space enough
for us all.

Reclaiming Care
Care
The very Being of human life
A connection of encounter between two human beings
Really hear, see, or feel what it is the other tries to convey
Carer and cared-for, a way of being in relation.
An ethic of care
An ethic of relation
    (Responding to Noddings, 1992)

As articulated in The Feminine Mystique (Friedan, 1963), care work has

been essentialised as ‘women’s work’, equated with ‘feminine’ practices of
homemaking, domesticity, and mothering. We understand the concern
that any emphasis on care and caring may support the ongoing exploita-
tion of women. We also acknowledge that we are not all equally burdened
with the work of care. In the contemporary academy, pastoral care
work—supporting and advising students—disproportionately falls on
the workloads of women (Thornton, 2013; Wallace et al., 2017). This
invisible labour is compounded for BIPOC women (Magoqwana et al.,
2019), who are viewed as role models for students and peers, seen as ‘the
academic housekeepers—forced to care generously with few resources or
reward’ (p. 6).
However, in other literature care has been foregrounded as a founda-
tion for feminist work. Carol Gilligan (1982) and Nel Noddings (1984,
1992) write of an ‘ethics of care’, which has an emphasis ‘on living
6 R. Dwyer and A. L. Black

together, on creating, on maintaining, and enhancing positive relations’

(Noddings, 1992, p. 21). The concept of caring in an ethics of care is
focused on how we treat others and ourselves. We seek to reclaim this
‘values-driven’ accentuation of ‘care’ and ‘caring’ as ‘ethical ways of being’
in the academy and as underlying values that push back against the neo-
liberal agenda of individualism, meritocracy, comparison, and competi-
tiveness. Theorising care, thinking about care, writing about care, or
recognising that the practice of care is essential to developing an ethic of
care is a political project that helps us think and do. Across this book,
authors are pondering on notions of ‘care’ towards self and others, on the
role kindness might play in effecting mutuality, transformation, and well-
being, in assisting us to ‘do academia differently’. Collectively, our care
ethics cause us to question neoliberal principles of individualism, effi-
ciency, and competition, and connect us to a preference for the infinite
game (Carse, 1986; Harré et al., 2017; Harré, 2018), where the focus is
not on winning but on continuing the game-play where care is embed-
ded in all of our encounters and interactions, and central to our indi-
vidual and collective survival (Lawson, 2007).

Playing the Infinite Game

The infinite game
Keep the game in play
Open and inclusive,
Helps us flourish.
Heartfelt, deep listening,
Create and recreate our institutions.
Finite games,
Bound by rules,
Pulling us apart.
Taken too seriously.
Winner is declared.
Rendering the community spellbound.
A distraction from what really matters.
     (Responding to Harré et al., 2017)
 Reimagining the Academy: Conceptual, Theoretical… 7

We have found Harré et al.’s (2017) metaphor of ‘the university as an

infinite game’ and their call to keep ‘the infinite game alive’ to be a ‘much
needed form of academic activism’ (p. 5) incredibly motivating and
inspiring. So much of neoliberal academia stunts life and growth, forgets
the potential of people, and forgets the importance of taking our ‘intu-
itions, lived experience and observations of injustice and exclusion seri-
ously’ (p. 5). For Harré et al., and for us, a feminist positioning informs
our valuing of the infinite game metaphor, a metaphor focused on inclu-
sivity, openness, relationship, deep listening, careful observation, and
thought, and a metaphor that strengthens through an ethics of care, con-
nection, and community. In this book, we are seeking to consider those
bodies, those values, those ethical ways of being and working and feeling
that neoliberalism does not welcome and that without our activism ‘sit
outside the dominant finite games of the university’ (Harré et al., 2017,
p. 6). Too often the academy’s finite games of winners and losers and
counting and rules distract us from what really matters—distract us from
playing ‘the infinite game’.
With this book, we are using our voices, research, and lives as
#CredibleWomen and fighting the creeping inhumanity of our institu-
tions. We are doing this with creativity and solidarity and enacting alter-
native ways of ‘working together, being together and thinking together’
(Nixon, 2016). Sharing stories of our embodied and affective experiences,
we are cultivating awareness, hope, and space for the infinite. Of course,
the academy lures us seductively and repeatedly into its career games and
images of success and strategy. Deeply ethical ways of working, imagina-
tion, and possibility thinking take time and effort, and they require us to
play ‘the long game’, a game ‘as long as an academic life, perhaps’ (Harré
et al., 2017, p. 12). And so, a long game is also a slow game.

 low Scholarship as Resistance

S
to Fast Academia
The neoliberal university
High productivity
Compressed time
8 R. Dwyer and A. L. Black

Isolating
Increasing demands
Too rarely discussed
Feminist ethics of care
Collective action
Good scholarship requires time
Think, write, read, research
Resist
Disrupt
Slowing down
Collaborative, collective, communal ways forward.
     (Responding to Alison Mountz et al., 2015)

What we are advocating for are cultural shiFts. Slow scholarship supports
our feminist politics of resistance helping us to question and undo struc-
tures of power and inequality and the accelerated timelines and ever-­
increasing demands of neoliberal governance. Alison Mountz et al. (2015,
p. 1238) call for slow scholarship focused on ‘cultivating caring academic
cultures and processes’ and remind these are determined by how ‘we’
‘work and interact with one another’. It is ‘we’ who can create possibilities
for a more just university and world. We can create shiFt and can focus
on quality and depth, reflection, relationship, and community. We can
count differently.

Counting culture leads to intense, insidious forms of institutional sham-

ing, subject-making, and self-surveillance. It compels us to enumerate and
self-audit, rather than listen and converse, engage with colleagues, stu-
dents, friends and family, or involve ourselves in the meaningful and time-­
consuming work that supports and engages our research and broader
communities. …What if we counted differently? Instead of articles pub-
lished or grants applied for, what if we accounted for thank you notes
received, friendships formed, collaborations forged? (Mountz et al.,
2015, p. 1243)

And when Mountz et al. (2015) talk of slow, they talk of ‘re-making the
university’, of building a ‘culture of possibilities’ that ‘allows creative
 Reimagining the Academy: Conceptual, Theoretical… 9

people to do their best work’ (2015, p. 1238). They draw on Victoria

Lawson’s (2007) writing about ‘geographies of care’ and in so doing
‘inject a feminist ethics of care into the notion of slow scholarship’
(Mountz et al., 2015, p. 1239). The focus here is about creating an ethics
of care—bringing attention to how we work and interact with one
another, and who we are as we are doing it. Society’s current focus seems
to be on ‘emergency response’ or ‘single-issue strategies for dealing with
disasters’, rather than on ‘long-term approaches of mutual learning that
involve building a sense of attachment rather than disconnection’
(Lawson, 2007, p. 8). Building ‘long-term, enduring relationships with
people and places’ can happen in our teaching and our research (Lawson,
2007, p. 8). Caring research can take many forms, it ‘suggests a broad
range of methods’ and ‘an expansion of what counts as evidence in our
work’ (Lawson, 2007, p. 9). We have sought to privilege these many
forms and possibilities here, to build open, storied, and aesthetic dia-
logue, and to contemplatively consider our roles in making the world a
better place.
This book has been written by women who want to do academia dif-
ferently and who are engaged in imagining together; we are embracing
non-metric ways of supporting each other and providing encouragement,
friendship, and connection. We are embracing the values of ‘slow’—the
‘slow movement’ (Parkins & Craig, 2006)—‘slow scholarship’ (Mountz
et al., 2015; O’Neill, 2014)—and the focus of ‘the slow professor’ (Berg
& Seeber, 2016). Through our sharing, listening, and connecting with
each other, we are establishing value in each other and ourselves; we are
recognising a different value to the metrics and measures that are being
held to us as incentives and punishment. And something fundamental is
shiFting. We are establishing for ourselves a firm set of values and alterna-
tive guides for our academic and non-academic practice. We are discard-
ing and challenging the bounds of what is permissible and possible in
academia. In writing and researching ourselves, our visions, our hopes,
and our workplaces, we are creating for ourselves caring and care-full col-
laborations which are undoing the damage of our highly managed and
intensified work environments. We are fuelling our creative and collective
capacities in ways that are expansive, collaborative, pleasurable, and col-
lectively advantageous.
10 R. Dwyer and A. L. Black

 rts-Based and Autoethnographic Methods:

A
Alternatives to the Masters’ Tools
Audre Lorde’s words used earlier in this chapter have prompted us to
think about the tools we may want to use to begin the work of disman-
tling that master’s house. Writing our own experiences of academia into
existence and using aesthetic methods/tools—poetry, art, story, reflective
writing—provide us with spaces to reimagine ourselves within academia,
and in turn, to reimagine the academy itself.
Contemplative, arts-based, and storied methodologies inform our
work and support the creation of ‘caring research’, our ‘expanding of
what counts as evidence’ in the academy (Lawson, 2007). These method-
ologies help us understand and see different points of view, connect, and
feel. And as woman academics, we want to dismantle the idea that our
personal and professional identities are separate from one another. Our
lives are intricately entangled with our work.

Arts-Based Research

Art
Both immediate and lasting
Grab hold of our attention
Provoke us
Transport us
Arts-based researchers
Engaging in art making as a way of knowing
A novel worldview
Aesthetic knowing
Fostering reflexivity
Empathy
Advancing care and compassion
     (Responding to Patricia Leavy, 2017)

Like Leavy, we find synergies between artistic practice and research and
see their potential to provide new insights, to explore and discover, to
 Reimagining the Academy: Conceptual, Theoretical… 11

evoke and provoke, to foster empathy, and to engage those who sit out-
side of traditional audiences (Leavy, 2017). As Barone and Eisner explain,
‘arts based research is a heuristic through which we deepen and make
more complex our understanding of some aspect of the world’ (2011,
p. 3). It is a way of researching that inspires ‘imagination and possibility’
and that helps us ‘change, reframe things’, and it ‘open[s] inquiry through
different ways of being and knowing’ (Walsh, 2017, p. 6).
Arts-based research and writing as inquiry creates contemplative and
responsive space for participation, particularly for those whose voices are
often excluded, allowing different images and stories to be seen and heard
(O’Neill et al., 2017). It opens space for ‘women’s words, voices, and
often their difficult experiences’ and helps us ‘make sense of experience as
something shaped at the intersecting axes of gender and class (for exam-
ple), something wrought in particular socio-historical, cultural, and
political contexts—and therefore something shiftable’ (Walsh, 2017,
p. 12). Ah, something ‘shiFtable’.
Given the significant challenges facing our world, we see the arts and
‘artful openings’ as providing enormous opportunities for creating pow-
erful research texts—texts that engage us with the world, and with others,
that elicit emotional responses, and help us ‘breathe with impermanence’,
‘everchangingness’, and ‘interconnectedness’ (Walsh, 2017, p. 12). We
see engagement, empathy, and emotion as the most likely ways we can
facilitate movement and change and make shiFt happen. So, our caring
research and stories of experience hold much promise.

Autoethnography

Autoethnographers’
Personal experience
Infusing with political/cultural
Rigorous self reflection
Reflexivity
Show people in the process
The meaning of their struggles
     (Responding to Adams, Ellis, & Holman Jones, 2017)
12 R. Dwyer and A. L. Black

We are drawn to autoethnography and to its capacity to reveal powerful,

embodied, and evocative stories about life in academia—the lives that we
have ourselves experienced. Autoethnography provides opportunities for
accounts that challenge the dominant and taken-for-granted (Adams,
Ellis, & Holman Jones, 2017) opportunities to write in between the
spaces left in existing research. As Harris (2017) explains, ‘autoethnogra-
phy’s power’ comes from ‘its coconstitutive nature’, and it is ‘through this
shared research/creative activity, social change is enacted’ (p. 26).
Further, our autoethnographic writing and research invites relation-
ships with our work that are characterised by reciprocity. As Clark (2010)
reminds, storying or narrating our experiences is how we make sense of
our lives. We learn about ourselves through this work; and, the work
gives us something back.
Autoethnography, according to Holman Jones et al. (2016), is distin-
guished by four characteristics: ‘purposefully commenting on/critiquing
culture and cultural practices, … making contributions to existing
research, … embracing vulnerability with purpose, and creating a recip-
rocal relationship with audiences in order to compel a response’ (p. 22,
italics in original). We consider each of these in turn.
Autoethnographers use their stories not only as an exploration of
themselves, but because their stories illuminate something about the
broader world. They interrogate the personal, social, and cultural nuances
of the experiences, going beyond autobiographical accounts in the way
they highlight the relationships ‘between’ the stories and the cultural
practices in which they are situated.
Autoethnographies make contributions to existing research. While dif-
ferent approaches to research seek to understand trends and make gener-
alisations about the lives of large groups of people, autoethnography
focuses on the ‘why and how and the so what of those lives’ (Holman
Jones, 2016).
Autoethnography requires a vulnerability, as the researcher opens up
their personal experiences for others to see. This vulnerability is not with-
out risk, particularly when, as is the case with the work in this volume,
the cultural practices being critiqued relate to the author’s work and
livelihood.
 Reimagining the Academy: Conceptual, Theoretical… 13

Autoethnographies create reciprocal relationships with readers. There

is an expectation that the reader is an active participant in meaning-­
making and that they read with a sense of responsibility.
Ultimately, important knowledge is passed through stories. The stories
in this collection offer a sense of what is possible, the writing of them
supporting the finding of ourselves (our voices, souls, bodies, rhythms,
drives, yearnings, ways of knowing and being), supporting the finding of
resources and relationships, and the values we might call upon—kind-
ness, connection, and an ethics of care. Our stories shine a light on our
capacities to resist, reimagine, and replenish, together.

Looking Ahead
This chapter began by posing the question: How do we move the acad-
emy closer to the one we want, rather than the one we have? Reflection
on this question shapes all of the contributions found in this book, con-
necting us to our shared intentions to build a kinder, more inclusive,
values-informed academy—and one that is responsive to women’s knowl-
edges, ways of being, ways of working, and experiences. This introduc-
tory chapter has provided an overview of the concepts, theories, and
methods that we find enabling, that help us to reimagine the university
and support our moving forward. We have outlined our valuing of wom-
en’s lived experiences and lived visions, our drawing on the work of femi-
nist scholars, our emphasis on an ethics of care, and the core ideas and
concepts we have found helpful in supporting both the reimagining of
the academy and our imagining of revolutionary futures. The metaphor
of the infinite game welcomes our hopefulness and our ethical ways of
being and working in academe; and our attention to slow scholarship
reminds us we can create possibilities for a more just university and world.
Our arts-based and autoethnographic methods open us to inquiry, sup-
porting our contemplation and fresh ways of seeing, feeling, and relating.
We, and the authors who have contributed to this volume, are leaning
into these nourishing ideas and approaches. We are listening generously
and allowing the stories we are living and reading and writing to guide
our thinking, our actions, our teaching, service, and research. This
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Tattle-tales
of Cupid
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: Tattle-tales of Cupid

Author: Paul Leicester Ford

Release date: September 9, 2023 [eBook #71597]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1896

Credits: Richard Tonsing, Charlene Taylor, and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TATTLE-

TALES OF CUPID ***
Transcriber’s Note:
New original cover art included with this eBook is
granted to the public domain.
 TATTLE-TALES OF CUPID

Books by Paul Leicester Ford

THE HONORABLE PETER STERLING

THE GREAT K. & A. TRAIN ROBBERY
THE STORY OF AN UNTOLD LOVE
THE TRUE GEORGE WASHINGTON
 TATTLE-TALES
OF
CUPID

TOLD BY

PAUL LEICESTER FORD

❦

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1898
 Copyright, 1896,
By Harper and Brothers.

Copyright, 1898,
By The Century Co.

Copyright, 1898,
By Paul Leicester Ford.

University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.
 TO MY PLAYMATE

My dear Doña:

Once upon a time two children read aloud together more or less
of Darwin, Spencer, Lyell, Goethe, Carlyle, Taine, and other writers
of equal note. Though the books were somewhat above their
comprehension, and certainly not so well suited to their years as
fairy-tales and romances, both the choice and the rejection were
deliberately made and consistently maintained. The discrimination
originated neither in excessive fondness of fact, nor in the slightest
dislike of fiction; being solely due to a greater preference for the
stories they themselves created than for those they found in books.
Presently, one of these two, having found a new playfellow, stopped
inventing and acting and living their joint imaginings, and the
other one had to go on playing by himself. But he has never
forgotten the original impulse, and so, in collecting the offspring of
some of his earliest and some of his latest play-hours, his thoughts
recur to the years of the old partnership, and he cannot please
himself better than by putting his playmate, where she truly
belongs, at the beginning of his “imaginary” playthings.
 NOTE

“His Version of It” is reprinted in this form by permission of the

Century Company.
“The Cortelyou Feud” is reprinted by permission of Messrs. Harper
and Brothers.
 Contents

Stories PAGE

His Version of It 3
A Warning to Lovers 49
“Sauce for the Goose” 87
The Cortelyou Feud 103

Plays
“The Best Laid Plans” 133
“Man Proposes” 197
 Tattle-Tales of Cupid

HIS VERSION OF IT

“She’s a darling!” exclaimed the bay mare, between munches of the

big red apple.
“That’s just what she is!” responded the off carriage-horse; and
then, as part of his apple fell to the floor, he added fretfully: “I do
wish, Lassie, that you girls wouldn’t talk to a fellow when he’s doing
something! You’ve made me lose half my apple!”
Old Reveille, with the prudence of twenty-eight years of
experience, carefully deposited the unmasticated fraction of his apple
beside an uneaten one in his manger before remarking reflectively:
“She’s a thoroughbred; but she’s not the beauty her mother was at
the same age.”
“Fie!” reproved one of the cobs: “how can you be so ungallant,
when she always gives you an extra apple or piece of sugar?”
“I call it shameful unfairness,” growled the nigh horse of the pair.
“She doesn’t keep you up till two or three in the morning at balls and
cotillions. She doesn’t so much as ride you in the park, as she does
Lassie or Bubbles. When you haven’t done a step of work in six years,
and spend your summers out in the pasture and your winters in a
box-stall eating your head off, why should you get a double portion?”
“Yes,” whinnied Bubbles, plaintively; “and, what’s more, she
always kisses you.”
Reveille, who meantime had swallowed his first apple, looked up
with a lofty smile of superiority. Then he slowly winked his off eye,
remarked, “Naturally, you don’t understand it,” and fell to lipping his
second apple caressingly, previous to the decisive crunch. “See if that
doesn’t drive the women wild,” he cogitated, with a grin.
“Now isn’t that just like a man!” complained Lassie. “As if it wasn’t
enough to get more than his share, but he must go and have a secret
along with it.”
“Huh!” grunted the polo pony, who was, of necessity, the brains-
carrier of the stable; “if it’s family property, it can’t be much of a
secret; for I never heard of anything to which six humans were privy
that didn’t at once become town gossip. And they must be aware of it,
for, from the Major to the Minor, they discriminate in favor of
Reveille in a manner most reprehensible.” The polo pony was famous
for the choiceness of his language and the neatness of his wit; but he
was slightly vain, as was shown by his adding: “Pretty good, that, eh?
Major—that’s the man we take out riding or driving. Minor—that’s
the three-year-old. Do you hitch up to that post?”
“Do they all know your secret, Reveille?” asked Lassie,
ingratiatingly.
“They think they do,” replied the veteran. “They don’t, though,” he
added; and then, heaving a sigh, he continued: “But the roan filly
did, and Mr. Lewis’s big grey, and dear old Sagitta—that was the
Russian wolf-hound, who died before any of you youngsters joined
our set.”
“Then I fail to perceive,” remarked the polo pony, “why they
should treat you differently, if they are ignorant of the circumstances
to which you refer.”
“My dear colt,” retorted Reveille, “when you are grown to
horsehood you will learn that we are all governed by our
imaginations, and not by our knowledge. Why do you shy at a scrap
of white paper? Superficially because you are nearly related to an ass,
actually because your fancy makes it into a white elephant.”
 “And how about your putting your head and tail up, and careering
all over the home lot, last summer, just because our Major fired his
revolver at a hawk? Were you an ass, too?” saucily questioned one of
the cobs.
“Probably,” assented the oldster, genially; “for that very incident
proves my point. What that shot reminded me of was the last time I
heard my Major fire his revolver. I saw a long, gentle slope, up which
a brigade of ‘secesh’ were charging to a railroad embankment
protected by a battery of twelve-pounders firing six rounds of case-
shot to the minute. And I was right among the guns again, seeing and
hearing it all; and my Major—only he was a captain then—was saying
as coolly and quietly as he orders the carriage now: ‘Steady, men,
steady! There’s a hundred yards yet, and they can’t stand it to the
finish. Double charge with canister! Three more rounds will settle
them.’ Which was just what it did. We horses, with the aid of the men
and guns, held the Weldon railroad, and Lee and his mules stopped
holding Richmond.”
“Doesn’t he tell a story beautifully?” remarked Bubbles, in a
distinctly audible aside to Lassie.
“I’ve never known a better raconteur,” answered Lassie, in a stage
whisper of equal volume.
“Lay you a peck of oats to a quart that the girls get that secret out
of him,” whispered the Majors saddle-horse, who, as a Kentuckian of
thoroughbred stock, had sporting and race-track proclivities.
“Not with me!” denied the second cob. “Besides, no gentleman
ever bets on a certainty. Gaze at the self-satisfied look on the old
fool’s phiz. Lord! how a pretty face and figure, combined with
flattery, can come it round the old ones!”
There could be no doubt about it. Reveille was smirking, though
trying not to desperately; and to aid his attempt, he went on, with a
pretence of unconscious musing, as if he were still in the past: “Yes;
we are ruled by our imaginations, and, consequently, though I have
reached the honourable but usually neglected period in life which
retires an officer and a horse from active service, I get a box-stall and
extra rations and perquisites.”
“How rarely is the story-telling faculty united with the
philosophical mind!” soliloquised Bubbles to the rafters.
 “And how rarely,” rejoined Lassie, “are those two qualities
combined with a finished, yet graphic, style!”
“I would gladly tell you that story,” said the old war-horse, “but it
isn’t one to be repeated. Every horse who isn’t a cow—to make an
Irish bull, which, by the bye, is a very donkeyish form of joke—has
done certain things that he has keenly regretted, even though he
believes that he acted for the good—just as brave soldiers will act as
spies, honourable lawyers defend a scoundrel, and good women give
‘at homes.’”
“What a decadence there has been in true wit!” remarked Lassie,
apropos of nothing. “It is such a pleasure to be put next a horse at
dinner whose idea of humour was formed before youthful pertness
was allowed to masquerade as wit.”
“It is a mortification to me to this day,” went on Reveille, “even
though the outcome has justified me. You know what our equine
code of honour is—how we won’t lie or trick or steal or kill, as the
humans do. Well, for nearly two months I was as false and tricky as a
man.”
“I don’t believe it,” dissented Bubbles.
“The truly great always depreciate themselves,” asserted one of the
mares.
“No, ladies, I speak the truth,” reiterated the warrior; “even now
the memory galls me worse than a spur.”
“It would ease your conscience, I am sure,” suggested Bubbles, “to
confess the wrong, if wrong there was. A highly sensitive and
chivalric nature so often takes a morbidly extreme view of what is at
most but a peccadillo.”
“This, alas! was no peccadillo,” sighed Reveille, “as you will
acknowledge after hearing it.”
“I may be a colt, but I’m not a dolt,” sneered the polo pony to
himself. “As if we weren’t all aware that the garrulous old fool has
been itching to inflict his long tail upon us for the last ten minutes.”
“My one consolation,” continued Reveille, “is that the roan filly
was in the traces with me and an equal culprit in—”
“I thought that one of the sex of Adam would saddle it on a woman
before he got through,” interjected the cob.
 “Cherchez la femme!” laughed the polo pony, delighted to trot out
his French.
“All I meant to suggest, ladies and gentlemen,” affirmed Reveille,
reflectively, “is that a woman is an excuse for anything. If this world
is a fine world, it is because she pulls the reins more often for good
than for bad.”
“‘Those who always praise woman know her but little; those who
always blame her know her not at all,’” quoted the worldly-wise
Kentuckian.
Reveille swallowed the last fragment of his second apple, cleared
his throat, and began:—
“It was after Five Forks, where my Captain got a major’s oak-leaf
added to his shoulder-straps, and a Minié ball in his arm, that the
thing began. When he came out of the hospital—long before he
should have, for the bone had been shattered, and took its own time
to knit—we hung about Washington, swearing at our bad luck, my
Major suffering worse than a docked horse in fly-time from the little
splinters of bone that kept working out, and I eating my head off in
—”
“History does repeat itself,” murmured the envious carriage-horse.
“Well, one day, after nearly three months of idleness, when I was
about dead with stalldom, I permitted the orderly to saddle me, and
after a little dispute with him as to my preferences, I let him take me
round to Scott Square. There for the first time I met the roan filly and
the big grey. She was a dear!” he added, with a sigh, and paused a
moment.
“Ah, don’t stop there!” begged one of the ladies.
“Get a gait on you,” exhorted the cob.
Reveille sighed again softly, shook his head, and then came back to
the present.
“‘May you never lack for oats and grass,’ said I, greeting them in
my most affable style.
“‘May you die in clover,’ responded the grey, nodding politely.
“‘May you have all the sugar you desire,’ added the filly, sweetly,
and greeting me with a graceful toss of the head. That told me that a
woman belonged to her, for men never give sugar. Sometimes, on a
forced march, my Major used to divide his ration of hardtack with
me; but I never tasted sugar until—well, we mustn’t get ahead too
fast.”
“No danger, while he is doing the lipping,” grumbled the
disagreeable cob.
“‘I see by your saddle that you are in the service,’ remarked the big
grey. ‘I am not so fortunate. Between ourselves, I think the fellow I
let ride me would do anything sooner than fight—though, now it’s all
over, he says if he’d returned from Europe in time he should have
gone into the army.’
“I shook my head dejectedly. ‘I’m very much off my feed,’ I told
them. ‘My Major is not able to ride, and won’t be for a long time, so
I’m horribly afraid I’ve been sold. I really wouldn’t have believed it of
him!’
“‘What things man is capable of doing!’ sighed the filly, with tears
of sympathy in her eyes.
“‘Cheer up, comrade,’ cried the grey, consolingly. ‘Even if you are
sold, you might be worse off. You are still a saddle-horse, and as Miss
Gaiety and I both have good stables, you probably will have the same
luck, since you are in our set. The fellow I carry spurred my
predecessor, when he was leg weary, at an impossible jump in
Leicestershire, and because he fell short and spoiled his knees the
brute ordered him sold, and he was put to dragging a huckster’s cart,
besides being half starved. You’re not so bad off as that yet.’
“Just then three people came out of the house before which we
were standing, and I can’t tell you how my heart jumped with joy,
and how my ears went forward, when I saw that one of them was my
Major. For the instant I was so happy that I felt like kicking up; but
the next moment I was ready to die with mortification at the thought
of how I had cheapened him to strangers. Think of my saying such
things to them of the best man that ever lived!
“‘That’s my Major,’ I told them, arching my neck and flicking my
tail with pride. ‘He held the Weldon railroad without—’”
“But you told us a little while ago,” protested Lassie, “that—”
“Yes, yes,” hastily broke in the story-teller with a note of
deprecation in his voice. “Don’t you see, girls, that having just
belittled him, I had to give him the credit of it, though really we
horses—But there, I won’t go into that now.”
“That much is saved!” muttered the cob.
“Walpole,” said the polo pony, “well described a certain period of
life when he denied that a man was in his dotage, but suggested that
he was in his ‘anecdotage.’”
“It was far from my intention—” Reveille began, with dignity.
“I do wish you would bridle your tongues, the two of you,” snapped
Bubbles. “It’s just what I should expect of a colt that has never seen
anything better than a poplar ball and a wooden mallet, and so
dislikes to hear of real battles. Please pay no heed to him, Mr.
Reveille.”
“We don’t notice either of them one curb or snaffle bit,” declared
Lassie, “so why should you? Forgive me for interrupting you, and do
tell us what you told the steeds about our Major?”
Reveille hesitated, and then resumed his tale: “‘His battery held
the Weldon railroad without any infantry supports,’ I told them,
adding, ‘Sheridan’s right-hand man. Perfect devil at fighting, and the
kindest human in the world.’
“The roan filly, being a woman, answered: ‘He looks both;’ but the
grey, being something more stupid, remarked: ‘Then what made you
think he had sold you?’
“‘Dear Mr. Solitaire,’ cried the mare, ‘you must know that we all
say things in society, not because we think them, but to make
conversation. I knew Mr.—thank you, Mr. Reveille—was joking the
moment he spoke.’ I tell you, gentlemen, women can put the blinders
on facts when they really try!
“‘What do you think of my Felicia?’ asked Miss Gaiety.
“I had been so taken up with my dear that I hadn’t so much as
looked at hers. But, oh, fellows, she was a beauty! Filly built, right
through—just made to be shown off by a habit; hair as smooth as a
mare’s coat, and as long and thick as an undocked tail; eyes—oh,
well, halter it! there is no use trying to describe her eyes, or her nose,
or her mouth, or her smile. She was just the dearest, loveliest darling
that I ever did see!
 “Mr. Lewis was putting her up, while my poor dear stood watching
them, with a look in his face I had never seen. Now, when there was
anything to be done, my Major was always the man who did it, and it
puzzled me why he had let Mr. Lewis get the better of him. The next
instant I saw that his right arm was still in a sling, and that his
sword-sash was used to tie it to his body. Then I knew why he had an
up-and-down line in his forehead, and why he bit his mustache.
“‘Can I give you any help, Major Moran?’ asked Mr. Lewis, when
he had helped Miss Fairley mount.
“‘Thanks, no,’ answered my pal, rather curtly, I thought; and
putting his left hand on me, into the saddle he vaulted. But he was
foolish to do it, as he said ‘Ouch!’ below his breath; and he must have
turned pale, for Miss Fairley cried out, ‘Mr. Lewis, quick! He’s going
to faint!’
“‘Nothing of the kind,’ denied my backer, giving a good imitation
laugh, even while his hand gripped my neck and I felt him swerve in
the saddle. ‘Miss Fairley, I will not let even you keep me an
interesting invalid. If there was any fighting left, I should long since
have been ordered to the front by the surgeons; but now they wink
their eyes at shirking.’
“‘I told you you ought not to go, and now I’m sure of it,’ urged Miss
Fairley. ‘You’ll never be able to control such a superb and spirited
horse with only your left arm.’”
“Bet that’s a subsequent piece of embroidery,” whispered the polo
pony to his nearest neighbor.
“Now, I have to confess that I had come out of the stable feeling
full of friskiness, and I hadn’t by any means worked it off on the
orderly, much of a dance as I’d given him. But the way I put a check-
strap on my spirits and dropped my tail and ears and head was a
circumstance, I tell you.
“‘There’s not the slightest cause for alarm,’ my confrère answered
her. ‘The old scamp has an inclination to lose his head in battle, but
he’s steady enough as a roadster.’
“‘I really wish, though, that you wouldn’t insist on coming,’
persisted Miss Fairley, anxiously. ‘You know—’
“‘Of course, Miss Fairley,’ interrupted my Major, with a nasty little
laugh, ‘if you prefer to have your ride a solitude à deux, and I am in
—’
“‘Shall we start?’ interrupted Miss Fairley, her cheeks very red, and
her eyes blazing. She didn’t wait for an answer, but touched up the
filly into a trot, and for the first mile or two not a word would she say
to my colleague; and even when he finally got her to answer him, she
showed that she wasn’t going to forget that speech.
“Well, what began like this went from bad to worse. He wasn’t
even aware that he had been shockingly rude, and never so much as
apologised for his speech. When Miss Fairley didn’t ask him to ride
with them the next day, he ordered me saddled, and joined them on
the road; and this he did again and again, though she was dreadfully
cool to him. My dear seemed unable to behave. He couldn’t be
himself. He was rude to Mr. Lewis, sulky to Miss Fairley, and kept a
dreadful rein on me. That week was the only time in my life when he
rode me steadily on the curb. My grief! how my jaw did ache!”
“I wish it would now,” interrupted the cob, sulkily. Let it be said
here that horses are remarkably sweet-natured but this particular
one was developing a splint, and was inevitably cross.
“Don’t be a nag,” requested one of the mares.
“The roan filly always blamed my Major for making such a mess of
the whole thing; but even though I recognised how foolish he was to
kick over the traces, I saw there were reasons enough to excuse him.
In the first place, he enlisted when he was only nineteen, and having
served straight through, he had had almost no experience of women.
Then for six months he had been suffering terribly with his arm, with
the result that what was left of his nerves were all on edge. He began
to ride before he ought, and though I did my best to be easy, I
suppose that every moment in the saddle must have caused him
intense pain. Finally, he had entered himself for the running only
after Mr. Lewis had turned the first mile-post and had secured the
inside track. I really think, if ever a man was justified in fretting on
the bit my chum was.
“At the end of the week Miss Gaiety bade me good-bye. ‘I heard
Mr. Fairley say that we could now go back to Yantic; that’s where we
live, you know,’ she told me. ‘It’s been a long job getting our claim for
uniforms and blankets allowed, but the controller signed a warrant
yesterday. I’m really sorry that we are to be separated. If your