Foreword Acknowledgements Preface: Rock and Stone 1. Mapping the Territory 2. White 3. Thinking Through Country 4. A Literature Review of Water 5. Intimate Intensity: Immiboagurramilbun/ Chrissiejoy Marshall 6. A Dry Land: Daphne Wallace 7. Travelling Water Stories: Badger Bates 8: Creation. Treahna Hamm 9. Mutual Entanglement Postscript: Always Unfinished Business of Singing the Country References
Margaret Somerville is internationally renowned for her creative and experimental writing and research about place. She is Director of the Centre for Educational Research which focuses on researching sustainable futures at the University of Western Sydney.
This superbly crafted arts-informed inquiry excels on many levels.
Its stories reveal the nuanced specificity of people, places, and
cultures while connecting the local with what everyone in the
region (and on the planet) shares and needs—water.
Methodologically, through her attention to lived experience and
artful representation, and conceptually, through her placed entries
into the uncertainty of the Anthropocene, Margaret Somerville has
created a beautiful and timely book which should be of interest to
many students of culture and environment.-- David Greenwood,
Education, Lakehead UniversityIndigenous engagement with territory
is foundational to the way this work demonstrates how human beings,
who are more than 50% water, remerge and flow with the land through
memory, verse, art story and abiding love of place. Somerville, as
an oral historian, has honed the craft of self-reflexivity to parse
out ideological dross that might interfere with the voices of the
Indigenous People, the re-greening of that fair land and the
nourishing of its People.--Marlene Atleo, Educational
Administration, Foundations and Psychology, University of
ManitobaExquisitely written, this book is about the deep mattering
of water, about storylines and Country, flows and places, all sorts
of reconciliations, and the enduring significance of art as
necessary knowledge, especially in a time of global ecological
challenge. It reaches out from its local engagements in Australia
to embrace the world. An astonishing work, of great power and
beauty.--Bill Green, Teacher Education, Charles Sturt
UniversityThis is a story of water and a writing that longs to be
water. A five year collaborative (auto)ethnographic study of
drought in Australia, it deals with resource management and
embodied arts-based methodologies across cultural differences. A
unique and strong-voiced book, it elaborates art and place as
public pedagogy, moving between Western and Aboriginal knowledge
systems and touching upon deep mapping, sharp tongued women,
elusive lakes, and sacred waters. -- Patti Lather, Education, Ohio
State UniversityMargaret Somerville’s groundbreaking ethnography
provides a poetic contact zone that makes meaningful Aboriginal
stories and artwork about creative practices of searching for water
in the world’s driest continent. Globally we are running out of
usable water. Learning from Aboriginal language-and-knowledge,
philosophy and the pioneering methodology of ‘thinking through
Country’ are integral to understanding the impermance of water.
This is a refreshing mapping of Aboriginal storylines of Country.--
Michael Singh, Education, University of Western SydneyMargaret
Somerville’s work defies categorisation: it is ethnography, poetry,
research text and story-telling rolled into one. It is political,
humane and engaging in its treatment of that most serious of
subjects: water. The original and embodied methodology will provoke
social science researchers and students of social science research
to rethink the possibilities for knowledge creation, as well as
inspiring new ways of working with co-researchers. --Miriam Zukas,
Adult Education, Birkbeck, University of LondonMargaret Somerville
and the artist/researchers that she collaborates with have created
an inspiring posthuman ethnography about water. Water in a dry land
is a groundbreaking work that challenges readers to fundamentally
shift their thinking about water, about research, relations, and
the significance of the more-than-human.--Mindy Blaise, Early
Childhood Education, Hong Kong Institute of EducationAnyone
interested in global water sustainability, Indigenous knowledge, or
fresh ways to think about learning, land and community will find
deep inspiration in Water in a Dry Land. Margaret Somerville
provides here a remarkable model of collaborative innovative
research with community. Rendered movingly in story, ritual and
picture, her study overturns convention to reveal striking new
insights and sources of knowing for addressing global water crises.
But beyond the provocative scholarship here, Somerville’s profound
personal tale of water draws readers into their own "thinking
through country" that can transform pedagogy and research.
--Tara Fenwick, Education, University of Stirling
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