Grant to help academics improve publication of the personal
An Avondale academic and her colleague will use a winning grant to improve higher degree by research supervision of long-form trauma narrative in Australia.
Drs Carolyn Rickett and Sue Joseph have received $6000 from the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia. They will use the grant, one of only two awarded by the association this year, to continue developing a model of education theory. The model is for supervisors of higher degree by research students using forms of literary journalism that include the stories of those who have experienced personal trauma.
“The impulse to tell stories and narrate traumatic experience increasingly informs what is now selected by publishers and circulated,” says Rickett, the assistant dean (research) in the Faculty of Arts, Nursing and Theology at Avondale College of Higher Education. She and Joseph, a senior lecturer in the writing program at the University of Technology Sydney, note how higher degree by research students “are often motivated to draw on the personal to produce literary artefacts, so we’d like to explore the ways in which ethical frameworks operate in supervisory spaces.” The two thank the association for the grant. “We’re very grateful,” says Rickett.
She and Joseph will interview 10 academics from higher education providers across the country to discover what training and resources they need to safely and ethically supervise their students.
The project has the “promise to delve into areas of journalism research that have received little attention in the scholarly or in the professional literature,” says the association’s president, Professor Matthew Ricketson.
Rickett and Joseph’s research of long-form trauma narrative began with the presentation of a co-authored paper at the Australian Association of Writing Programs Conference. The paper examined the ethical concerns of students drawing on personal trauma in creative writing supervised and examined in educational institutions.
Rickett also co-edited an anthology as part of the New Leaves research project, which examines the relationship between writing poetry and healing. Joseph is the author of three books, including The Literary Journalist and Degrees of Detachment: An Ethical Investigation and Speaking Secrets.
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