I have extensive professional experience as a curator, producer, and policy consultant within the arts and community development space. This expertise forms informs the unique creative research methods to be developed for this PhD project. Over the past decade I have worked to foster an entangled collaborative practice on Larrakia Country in a number of diverse contexts. This approach has resulted in a deeper appreciation of the multiplicity of forces at play within the ecologies that we live, love, work and create within, and for. Through these various projects I have come to a richer, nuanced sense of collaboration and a more acute understanding of the breadth of collaborators, including both human and non-human agents, to be considered and engaged on specific sites. This, in turn, has produced a way of working committed to fostering modes ‘of becoming (collectively and individually) oneself in a particular place (Carter, 2004, p. XII).

My PhD research will extend these commitments in critical dialogue with an interdisciplinary literature drawn from art, anthropology, and feminist STS, as well as a range of practicing artists and collectives. Developing a distinctly original practice-based curatorial methodology, the research will draw together themes, materials and collaborators from my previous practice to create new constellations of ‘material thinking’ (Carter). With access to an extensive archive that includes podcasts, audio tours, policy documents, reports and documentation of internationally touring dance works, exhibitions, community talks, community workshop programs, and new media works, I will remix and sample archival and future concepts to produce creative and critical theory outputs for (re)learning.

Through this practice, the research will address questions about collaboration within a redefined policy ecology that includes human and nonhuman participants, as well as non-linear temporalities such as seasonal forces.

Ultimately, the aim of this experimentation is to orientate towards a theory of an emplaced policy for place that includes processes that operate beyond bureaucratic documents and the settler models of governance that produce them. Mapping collaboration on Larrakia Country in these ways will produce new knowledge that can enable a radically expanded agenda for future community thinking and planning on Larrakia Country and beyond.