The Parkville campus of the University of Melbourne is situated on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people & we acknowledge and respect their continuing connection with Country.

This year’s conference is on the theme of Movement & Stasis and our program of academic keynotes, plenaries, papers, panels and allied events reflects consideration of movement & stasis, including notions of physical, social, political, communal or artistic movement, but also arrivals, departures, walking on country, transformation, mobility and change. Placing movement alongside stasis, conference attendees will consider the two themes in relation: ambiguities, contradictions, tensions, as well as productive entanglements enabled by both/and thinking. The theme of stasis spans periods of inactivity or equilibrium through to stoppages and civil strife.  Stasis might also mean slowing down; it might mean stability.

Our conference program engages these themes in a manner relevant to the creative writing discipline, creative and professional writing practices and processes, research in creative writing, the teaching of writing and related issues.

Keynote speaker: Professor Sandra Phillips

Wakka Wakka and Gooreng Gooreng woman, Professor Sandra Phillips is Associate Dean Indigenous in the Faculty of Arts Office of the Dean and holds an ongoing professorship in Publishing and Communications in the Faculty’s School of Culture and Communication. After a long career in publishing and cultural leadership, Sandra’s completion of a PhD while raising three sons as a sole parent established her full-time career in academia. Sandra is Chief Investigator on two ARC Linkage-funded research projects, Community Publishing in Regional Australia (2023-2025) and Reading Climate – Indigenous literature, school English, and Sustainability (2025-2028) and CI on Casting the Net for What Matters:  The ALIVE National Consortium for Equitable WellBeing and Mental Health Systems Transformation (2025-2030) funded by the NHMRC Medical Research Future Fund. Sandra’s peer-reviewed scholarship includes 2025 titles co-authored through these industry-engaged projects such as: ‘The Significance of Place: Insights from Community Publishing in Regional Australia’; ‘Reading beyond extraction?: More-than-Human Regions in Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby’; and ‘Reading climate: subject English beyond the colonial’. A strong leader, Sandra also brings vision and courage to systemic change and she is currently preparing a manuscript for her first sole-authored book with the working title, ‘Seeing Clearly: Six Decades of Publishing Indigenous Literature 1964-2024’.

Enquiries

Please send your enquiries to AAWP-conference2025@unimelb.edu.au including any support requirements in order to participate fully.

For more information please visit the 2025 AAWP Conference webpage.