Academic institutions can be immutable toward experimental ways of doing research within intercultural, community-led contexts. Formal ethical frameworks do not hold space for research relationships to be properly tended to beyond the purposes of fulfilling a project’s ‘research objectives’ and ‘intended outcomes’. Such institutional stubbornness extends into academic publishing whereby it limits the various forms such research needs to take in order to do justice to the entanglements of relationships and wider social contexts.

In his talk, Sebastian J. Lowe will explore his recent collaboration with the curatorium collective and discuss how it provided the unique opportunity to compose an intermedial journal article around his doctoral work with taonga puoro players (traditional Māori musical instruments) in Whanganui, a small town located along the banks of Te Awa Tupua (The Whanganui River), on the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. Lowe's community-led, co-creative PhD project explores the many ways taonga puoro are used as ancestral tools for holistic wellbeing while Lowe also interrogates what is at stake as a critical-creative non-Indigenous researcher working in this mode of emergent scholarship. 

Through these collaborations Lowe will think through how the ethical commitments involved in thinking through and with form, and its emergent analytical potential, can amplify a commitment to community and to scholarship in subtle, life-affirming ways. He will suggest, in short, that new forms of critical creative scholarship can do justice to intercultural, community-led research. 

curatorium collective: https://www.aas.asn.au/curatorium 
Instagram: @c_ctv