Welcome to Learning with the Land PhD candidate, Cassandra Truong.

‘Learning with the Land’ is a SSHRC funded partnership (Lead CI Professor Rita Irwin, UBC) that responds to the urgent need for innovative models of learning, teaching, and scholarship that create and examine human-land relationships as collective expression grounded in movement of thought (theory) and body (practices) by drawing on a transnational coalition of scholars, students, artists, and writers in education. And what we learned in the US at AERA is that Australia is in a very different place on race and colonialism.

The Learning with the Land partnership brings together an international network of art educators to explore how artists and arts-based researchers are taking up the concept of reciprocity to critically engage with the land upon which they live, learn, teach, and create. This partnership focuses on how the arts might help challenge Western-Euro-centric understandings of land and provoke meaningful dialogue and action towards anti-colonial education and research practices. It simultaneously sees research as a response to the calls to action from the most recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (UN IPCC) that urges the use of scientific, local, and Indigenous Knowledge for adaptation and mitigation of the ongoing climate crisis (UN, 2021). This partnership is of utmost importance because, despite institutional policy commitments towards decolonisation, “There is a real need for academics to move toward concrete conversations about the Land to significantly reshape settler consciousness” (Ray, Cormier & Desmoulins, 2019, p.81).

Getting to the Roots

^{Posted July, 2023. Author, Cassie Truong.}

Starting my journey into this PhD has been challenging in many ways, in particular; there have been many moments of where I was confronted epistemologically and ontologically. As someone who is attempting to work in an anti-racist and anti-colonial space of research, the more I travel down the path of reading, writing, drawing, listening, making and moving, the more I am realising that the structures in which I follow are colonial in themselves. Academia and education in Westernised Australia is founded on and perpetuates racism and colonialism (Lander & Santoro, 2017). We cannot erase the fact that there were and are, systems in place which undervalue and at times, even neglect other forms of understanding, learning, teaching and knowledge.

I started with reading. It felt like the right thing to do because it was what I was taught to do, and because it was what every book and manual I had read about methodology had told me to do. I was to begin my journey by reading, then I would find a gap in the literature, I would devise a plan, collect data, analyse the data, write and present my findings in a final thesis. But as I continued into my second month, there grew a slight bodily discomfort in my artist self. There was an urgency to make and to respond. There were moments of where, in my body; I knew what to do, but logically and by method, it made no sense. It is here that I found myself giving permission for my artist self to write, because here I could intersect with my researcher and teacher selves too. Sometimes, I wrote a few words, other times they were small passages, and once in a while I would write what I can only describe as writings themselves.

I am now edging into my fourth month, after reading a few notable publications regarding post-qualitative inquiry by Elizabeth A. St. Pierre, I am finally seated; perhaps not entirely comfortably yet, but seated nonetheless in a space where I am happy to inquire in a rhizomatic fashion as an a/r/tographer should (Irwin, Beer, Springgay, Grauer, Xiong & Bickel, 2006), where I am weaving, crossing, intertwining, starting and stopping. The inquiry method, much alike to perhaps an artist’s practice, is non-linear and personalised. I am finding it natural again as a researcher to work like an artist where I find myself reading, thinking, writing, drawing, making, walking, moving, planning… I am doing the things or ‘methods’, which feel right to advance towards my goal because as I am not finding what already exists, but rather I am attempting to create something anew (St Pierre, 2021).

If the goal is anti-racist and anti-colonial education; then as a practitioner of education, it is only correct for me to embody this practice to understand what it means before demanding this from others. I have now found myself seated not in the university computer lab, or in my home office, rather I am firmly rooted inside of a forest. I am finding myself ready to let the forest guide me in exploring what it has to offer. It has taken some time to find this forest, and it has taken time and effort to travel to it. But I am confident; that now that I have located the stuff of my research, I can start exploring, inquiring and Learning with this Land.

Irwin, R. L., Beer, R., Springgay, S., Grauer, K., Xiong, G., & Bickel, B. (2006). The Rhizomatic Relations of A/r/tography. Studies in Art Education, 48 (1), 70-88.

Lander, V., Santoro, N. (2017). Invisible and hypervisible academics: the experiences of Black and minority ethnic teacher educators. Teaching in Higher Education, 22 (8), 1008-1021. DOI:10.1080/13562517.2017.1332029

St. Pierre, E. A. (2021). Why Post Qualitative Inquiry? Qualitative Inquiry, 27 (2), 163-166. DOI:10.1177/1077800420931142

Walking the Boon Wurrung Coast – A quick reflection

^{Posted August, 2023. Author, Cassie Truong.}

Cassie Truong. 2023.

On the 10th of August I took my first of soon to be many Boon Wurrung Coastal Walks. Getting to the beginning of the trail at Beaumaris Beach already had taken roughly an hour on public transport and around 2km of walking. The trail which I would then walk would be 17km from Beaumaris to the edge of St Kilda East, close to the suburb of Elsternwick. Getting home via more walking and public transport would also take roughly an hour. On that day I tracked 37,536 steps and over 20km within a 12 hour day.

But the physical pain and exhaustion I acquired from this sudden increase in physical activity, did not bring justice and closure to the sorrows and questions I felt inside from this excursion.

What did it feel like to traverse land before there were set concrete paths and fences to guide us? What will it feel like to travel when we walk in the possible apocalyptic future? What will our lands look like if we do allow the apocalypse to arrive? How did differently abled bodies navigate these terrains? What did it mean to meet your neighbouring people without written or verbal confirmation? What does it mean to have valuable and meaningful chance meetings? And what does it mean to not be sceptical of other’s intentions, but to welcome them with open arms as fellow siblings of to Mother Earth? What does it mean to only say we are paying respects, when our actions are not? What does it mean when you cannot find the landmark that is supposed to be on the Indigenous trail?

I want us to ask questions before anything, and it is important to remember that at times we will not have answers. But if we do not pay the mind space of these questions enough attention, we will never acquire the answers.

Learning to decolonise my painting practice

^{Posted April, 2024. Author, Cassie Truong.}

Cassie Truong. 2024.

One of the most difficult components on the quest to becoming anti-colonialist and anti-racist is the work you do on the inside. The work which requires you to recognise your own actions which reinforce, reproduce and remake acts of colonisation and racism. I cannot speak absolute truths, but I hypothesise that this is much more difficult work when you are ethnically Other. Because it means you realise how much you hate yourself, and how much of this hate comes from elsewhere. This work is heavy for me, it often makes me cry when I realise how much hate I have because of colonialism and racism.

But the quest is to find something better for the future. It is a quest so that people will not be afraid to do this recognition work. It doesn’t make you a bad person when you do something by accident, or unknowingly. You don’t think of a very young person as evil when they take something, but do not understand theft. The defining point is what you choose to do when you finally understand, when you recognise it within yourself. Do you continue walking straight, or do you turn? Shift? Break away?

While I was painting my fourth rendering for my research, I found myself in a colonial art space. A space with particular artists and paintings from sterile and quiet gallery halls which exhibit 17th century landscapes. It was at this point where the memories, feelings and thoughts contiguously brought forth my undergraduate art-school days of where I strived so hard to prove my whiteness.

“I’m classically trained in Western styled oil painting. There’s nothing ‘Asian’ about my practice.”

It was self-enforced assimilation. A result of being othered. A result of feeling disgraced and ashamed for what I was and what I couldn’t be.

It took two weeks to return to the half-finished painting. Do I erase it? Do I paint over it? Do I finish it and ignore the moment of clarity where I realised what I was doing by reproducing aesthetically similar works made by colonial settlers in seized lands? Do I leave it?

I chose to not erase, paint over, or ignore the feeling in my chest that said ‘this is wrong’. I searched who I was, and what was right. I acknowledged the feeling and unashamedly owned that acknowledgement as a battle scar in my quest. I made a commitment to decolonise my painting practice for the sake of justice.

Reflecting on becoming Living Inquirer

^{Posted July, 2024. Author, Cassie Truong.}

Cassie Truong. 2024.

It has been a period of time since I began becoming living inquirer. And as every living inquirer is a person with their own lives and experiences and relations, it is impossible to say that there is only one way to do living inquiry (Leggo & Irwin, 2018).

Lately, I have returned to reading. And perhaps I need to re-read some mentor texts on living inquiry and a/r/tography too. Your positionality as living inquirer frames how you do, re/present, tell and share your research (Irwin, 2013). My position as ethnic in Australia gives leverage to speaking on race, and this positionality I hold as a living inquirer, allows me to seek and ask questions which a White Australian researcher may not. It is also this position which allows me to ask Others to question their own racist ideas and behaviours towards Whiteness, because it definitely exists, and the end goal is for no racism. Not the continuation or reversal of the matter.

But this reflection is not about race. Race is a part of my positionality as a/r/t as much as it is me. I can see I am Chinese in the mirror. I am told by strangers in the streets. I am acknowledged through language with those who speak to me.

But autism is not something I was aware of until very recently. There is no ‘look’. Being female and non-White with other co-morbid mental health issues also meant that symptoms and traits were often missed and misdiagnosed. As child, teen and early adult there were cultural, financial, and accessibility barriers too.

So, what do I do with this new information about me?

How does it fit in with my positionality as living inquirer?

I have been asking for almost half a year now.

It is new, but also not new as it is simply that I never knew I was autistic. It is simply a term that finally encompasses all the difficulties I have tried to ‘fix’ throughout my life.

Where is its place in me as a becoming living inquirer to tell, read and interpret stories?

How do our untold dis/advantaged intersections shape how we become? There is no hierarchy to the intersectional privileges of our lives (Crenshaw, 1991), so how do I choose what influences me as a/r/tographic living inquirer?

Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299.

Leggo, C., & Irwin L., R. (2024). Chapter 15 – A/r/tography: Always in Process (2018). In A/r/tography: Essential Readings and Conversations.

Irwin, R. L. (2013). Becoming a/r/tography. Studies in Art Education, 54(3), 198–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2013.11518894