Creative Expression and Wellbeing in Higher Education: Making and Movement as Mindful Moments of Self-care(Wellbeing and Self-care in Higher Education)

This volume focuses on individual and collective practices of creativity, embodiment and movement as acts of self-care and wellbeing. Creative Expression and Wellbeing in Higher Education positions creative expression as an important act for professionals working in higher education, as a way to connect, communicate, practice activism or simply slow down. Through examples as diverse as movement through dance and exercise, expression through drawing, writing or singing and creating objects with one’s hands, the authors share how individual and collective acts of creativity and movement enhance, support and embrace wellbeing, offering guidance to the reader on how such creative expression can be adopted as self-care practice. This book highlights how connection to hand, body, voice and mind has been imperative in this process for expression, fl ow and engagement with self and wellbeing practices. Self-care and wellbeing are complex at the best of times. In higher education, these are actions that are constantly being grappled with personally, collectively and systematically. Designed to support readers working in higher education, this book will also be of great interest to professionals and researchers.

Table of Contents:
1. Poetic inquiry: Transformational representations of wellbeing and self-care in higher education Section 1: Making and creating as a representation of self-care 2. The feeling of doingthinking and thinkingdoing of making processes 3. Journaling Right and Left 4. Meditative Math-Making Section 2: Collaborative expression, embodiment, and the power of relationships 5. Stepping off the Edge: Circles of Connection and Creativity for Wellbeing in the Academy 6. Running, Writing, Resilience: A Self-Study of Collaborative Self-Care Among Women Faculty 7. Making mindful moments: Made artefacts as a form of data visualisation to monitor and respond to self-care and wellbeing Section 3: Creative practice as interruption 8. Using arts-based and feminist methodologies to slow the wear and tear/s of academic work/life 9. Playing with pictures to make sense and interrupt the hurly-burly university game. 10. Self-Care in the Time of Crisis: An a/r/tographic conversation to explore self-care as academics, that took an unexpected turn Section 4: Mind, body, and movement as acts of self-care 11. Kia kōrero te tinana katoa (The whole body must speak): Māori early career academics and performing ones’ cultural self for hauora 12. Cycling as a form of self-care: Incorporating and sustaining purposeful movement practices to support wellbeing 13. Anatomy of a burnout: Walking, reading and journal writing as practices of self-care to support intellectual life

About the Author :
Narelle Lemon is an interdisciplinary researcher in the fi elds of education, positive psychology and arts, holding the positions of Associate Professor in Education and Associate Dean (Education) for the School of Social Sciences, Media, Film and Education at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.