Gail Crimmins

1. Climate change can disrupt established ways of life through long-term unidirectional shifts or shorter-term variability. The multifarious threats posed by climate change force individuals and co...

In late 2022, the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT marked a watershed moment for postsecondary education, forcing universities worldwide to confront the challenges and opportunities of generative...

An autoethnographic exploration of the life and career experiences of ten academics across the Australian Regional University Network (RUN) unearthed a prevailing disjuncture between formative cultural experiences and academia that expands upon Binns’ revised notion of cleft habitus. It signifies a gap between the generative capacity of cleft experience and its predominant construction in the literature as loss, difficulty and perceived deficit. Drawing on a framework that combines ‘cleft habitus’ and principles of intersectionality, this paper examines how cleft experiences impact study and academic work in higher education. Key findings include how academics within a cleft habitus space occupy liminal insider/outsider positions of privilege and disadvantage and can leverage insights gained from these experiences to inform their broad scholarly practice. Reconceptualising cleft habitus as a resource provides a new contribution to discourses around equity, diversity and inclusion in higher education.

This paper explores the work experience and career trajectories of people working across 12 UK‐based universities awarded an Athena Swan Charter, an international scheme that recognizes commitment to gender equality. Despite, or perhaps due to institutional reward leading to gender‐washed “peacocking”, everyday sexisms and gender regimes are sustained through acts of gendered microinsults that often go unnoticed and are individualized. Women in “awarded” institutions report being spoken over, disproportionately allocated academic housework, experience re/enforced gendered boundaries, and inadequate equality policy provision. They also identify microinvalidations through exclusion from meetings, mis/appropriation of their ideas, gender inequality denial, and overt or covert resistance to gender equity initiatives. An analysis of these microaggressions determines their interconnected, mutually constitutive, and reproductive nature; it suggests that institutional gender‐washing propagates a misconception of current levels of gender inequality which kindles “equity‐backlash”. The findings reveal unintended outcomes of gender award schemes that might be mitigated through visibilising and addressing inequality regimes and their impacts.

Effective climate change communication is central to public engagement, self-efficacy, and support for mitigation and adaptation policies. Yet, communicators face numerous challenges, such as misinformation, climate despair, and the complexity of climate science. This study examines the views of 29 climate change communicators from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand to evaluate the alignment between practitioner insights and research-backed strategies. Findings confirm the significance of audience segmentation, localized, and solution-focused messaging and collaborative approaches. A four-pillar framework, consisting of simplicity and local relevance, audience segmentation, storytelling, and actionable steps, emerges as a strategic model for enhancing the communication impact. This study offers a structured guide for improving climate communication effectiveness within diverse sociopolitical contexts by integrating theoretical insights with practitioner perspectives.

The paper seeks to illuminate the limiting categorisations and hierarchical relationships between urban versus rural, slow versus fast research and between research methodologies, to reconsider notions of place and re -search (or searching and searching again) in a ‘rural’ Australian context. We illustrate these ideas by first examining the dynamic, productive nature of language and by demonstrating how language can be used to review and resist dominant and conservative beliefs and limiting categories. We also specifically consider how critical discourse analysis can reveal the discursive ‘Othering’ of both ‘the rural’ and women living in rural communities and catalyse a feminist narrative inquiry designed to hear and amplify the voices of a diversity of women living in southwest Queensland and how this seeds case studies crafted to enable women in rural, regional and remote communities to work achieve their storied vision and capacities. The paper finally demonstrates how over time (2019–ongoing), slow re- search processes , supported by relationality and trust, evolved, suggesting that discourse analysis, as analytical activism, can lay the foundations for sustained, engaged and relational re- search designed to expose and address entrenched gendered power imbalances and limiting binaries.