Abstracts

“To Tell”: Narration, Ascertainment and Closure: Lived Experience and Life-Writing in the Justice System and in Everyday Life 

Kate Rossmanith (Macquarie University)

This paper explores two meanings of the word ‘tell’: to narrate and to ascertain. It does this in the context of two research projects I am currently conducting: (1) an ethnographic study, based in the justice system, investigating the way that ‘closure’ is promised to people as a feeling they can attain; and (2) an interview study examining what life-writers think they are doing when they write about their lives.

In doing so, the paper will advance understandings of ‘closure’. Closure as a concept is amorphously defined. There is no consensus among researchers about what closure is, whether it exists, or, if it exists, how it could be achieved. Research has, to date, treated closure and people’s purported desire for it as something able to be measured (psychology); or the research has studied closure as a socially constructed emotion (sociology) where ‘closure’ is a feeling and a capacity (i.e., an ability to put trauma behind you). Legal researchers have shown how constructions of closure have been weaponised in arguments for capital punishment (i.e., the assumption that executing an offender will deliver closure to a victim’s family). Gestaltists, a century ago, used the term ‘closure’ to help explain human mental perception. Literary theorists used the word sixty years ago to describe the rhetorical means by which a sense of resolution is invested in novels and poetry.

Combining approaches from phenomenological anthropology and life-writing, this paper explores relationships between narration, ascertainment and closure in people’s lives.

Imagining Fitness: A Social and Cultural History of Fitness Cultures in Australia 

Tanya Evans (Macquarie University)

This paper presents work in progress on a social and cultural history of fitness in Australia, sitting in conversation with a growing interdisciplinary literature on the cultural and social history of imagination. People use imagination to make meaning, articulate problems, create stories, and craft their futures — and this paper argues that imagination is central, not incidental, to how Australians have engaged with fitness cultures over the past six decades.

Current sports science and psychology acknowledge the significance of visualisation in elite sporting practice, but far less is known about its role in the general population's relationship with fitness. This paper asks: how has fitness been imagined in Australia, and how have those imaginings shaped everyday bodies, identities, and lives?

The connection between mind and body in fitness cultures is not purely psychological but is social and cultural: commercial, gendered, and classed. The visualised future self compels people to become and remain 'fit' — but this imagined self is produced through images, role models, fitness spaces, and consumer culture. Drawing on oral history methodology and scholarship on gender and everyday life, this paper attends to how fitness dreams are given form, embodied in practice, and felt across Australian society.

Breaking Plates and Picking up the Pieces: Rhythm, Imagination and Distributed Creativity in Screen Storytelling

Karen Pearlman (Macquarie University)

This presentation asks about the feeling and function of rhythm in imagination, creative practices, collaborations and productions. It proceeds from the premise that:

rhythm is the one indispensable and biologically grounded element common to all human action and interaction and to all time‐based semiotic modes. It links the body to acts of meaning‐making, imbuing the meaningful communicative acts that propel the semiotic event forward with feeling. (van Leeuwen 2025, p. 25). 

The presentation begins with a screening of Breaking Plates (Pearlman et al. 2025), a raucous documentary about the not-so-silent women of the silent film era. Questions motivating the film’s narrative design were: what did the wild women of early silent film know? what can we learn from them? and why are we so much more polite?  The ‘answers’ we came up with are declared by bodies in motion creating a conversation of rhythmic moves and ideas over 120 years.  The embodied rhythms conveying these ‘answers’ arose through thousands of instances of enactive collaborative creativity. 

After the screening, one instance of distributed creativity in Breaking Plates will be analysed through a forensic look at a key passage. This analysis illuminates how the ‘links [of] the body to acts of meaning‐making’ occurred in specific moments of creative processes. Questions from there include: what principles can be extracted from this instance of rhythmic coordination that can be applied more broadly? Is there a rhythm of friction and flow, competition and cooperation, that can be better understood to help keep creativity in motion through moments of confusion and uncertainty? Activating ideas about ‘rhythmic intelligence’ (Alhadeff-Jones, 2021), ‘kinaesthetic imagination’ (Reynolds 2007, Pearlman, various) and ‘participatory sense making’ (de Jaegher & di Paolo 2007, 2015), this presentation aims to begin developing a framework for understanding the functioning of rhythm in distributed creativity.  

Articulating a Sexual Ethics in the Age of Online Misogyny: Lessons from Andrea Dworkin

Louise Richardson-Self (University of Tasmania)

In January 2026 Elon Musk’s generative AI chatbot Grok made headlines; it was being deployed en masse by X users to digitally undress and sexualise women by manipulating their selfies. Such AI generated deepfakes are part of a longer history of technology-facilitated sexual degradation of women and, indeed, an even longer history of patriarchal oppression through which sexual objectification has been a key mechanism of gender subordination. The need for feminist activism, and for a feminist sexual ethics, remains as pertinent today as ever. And, to re-articulate a feminist sexual ethico-politics fit for women’s needs in the present, I suggest a return to the works of second wave feminist Andrea Dworkin. Dworkin has a reputation for being a porn-opposing, sex-negative feminist who saw woman-hating everywhere, and saw pornography—and intercourse more broadly—as a central site where this hate was realised. While Dworkin’s critiques of pornography and sexual objectification are helpful in articulating the contours of women’s present tech-facilitated oppression, I will argue that Dworkin’s sex-negative reputation is overblown and her oeuvre contains within it the genesis of an emancipatory feminist sexual ethics, thereby illustrating the enduring relevance of Dworkin’s thought for navigating and transforming our current reality.

Who Am I Talking To, Please? 

Tiffany Hambley (Macquarie University)

As AI use becomes more established in society, questions of narratorial veracity, authorial identity, authenticity, trustworthiness, reliability — and even the seemingly simple question of “who is on the other end of the line?” — become murky. It is now possible to find oneself in “dialogue” with an entity which does not have the shape of mind we have historically been able to impute to the other speaker.

In this paper, I consider some consequences of AI interaction on the inner space of the human interlocutor. Although there is acute popular and scientific interest in whether LLMs show emergent forms of consciousness, there has arguably been less focus on the interior effects on human consciousness of interacting with these bots.

I argue that sustained interaction with chatbots has the potential to powerfully erode both imagination, and trust in our own self-narratives. Coming to feel that a “machine knows me better than I know myself” may have implications for our ability to synthesise disparate information, make creative leaps, imagine alternate positions, and, especially, to self-narrate. This has urgent implications for our well-being, our sense of self, and for our ability to find novel solutions to issues of our time.

I am exploring this problematic in my creative work as an essayist and memoirist. I take concepts from literary studies and use them to critically examine interactions with LLMs. In particular, I consider “persona” both as it pertains to the narrative work of the memoirist, but also as it pertains to the “helpful, harmless, honest assistant” persona that chatbots are shaped to personify.