Ideas with(in) place

Ideas with(in) place

This is a curated series of embodied encounters that invite participants to think, feel, and learn with place - in place. Developed by The Alliance for Praxis Research for the School for Social Change by revisiting previous work done by the collective, the series brings together walking, play and storytelling as methods to explore how place shapes and is shaped by identity, care, memory, commons, and more-than-human ecologies.

Each session is situated within a specific site across Melbourne, engaging directly with its material and ancestral layers. Here, people are invited to move and learn with(in) place. Beginning with reflections on identity and positionality, we trace how individual trajectories are embedded within broader geographies of power. We then shift toward practices of care, asking how relationships with water and urban ecologies might be reimagined through play and speculation. From there, we walk with memory - surfacing hidden waterways and disrupted narratives that continue to shape the city beneath its colonial infrastructures.

The later encounters turn toward the commons and ecological entanglements, exploring how shared spaces are collectively produced, maintained, and contested, and how urban life is co-constituted with more-than-human actors. Throughout, participants are not positioned as observers but as co-creators of knowledge, engaging in practices that are sensory and relational. Together, these encounters form a pedagogical arc that resists purely abstract or extractive modes of learning – “action and reflection of people over the world with the intention of transforming it” (Freire, 2024).

All events, except the first, involve walking considerable distances through the city. Please wear comfortable shoes, bring water and dress appropriately for the weather. Please get in touch with us if you’d like to know the routes we’ll be taking, particularly in relation to accessibility needs.

Identity

29th of April, 6 pm, at Balam Balam Place - Community room 201.

An embodied encounter exploring positionality through reflection and play. Using the “River of Life” activity, people are invited to map emotional, geographical, and social journeys that shape who they are today, then engage in a relational game to explore how they connect to place, people, and power - in a safe, welcoming space - together.

Care

9th of May, 10:30 am, meeting at Enterprise Park.

How do we care for water, and how does water cares for us? Reframing waterways through urban play, this experience is situated along the Birrarung to speculate on a near-future flooded world. To tension dominant relations with water so we can envision alternative caring futures, people are invited to engage in play thinking to intimately reconnect with water, all in walk we call “Regenerating a body of Water: a walk with Birrarung-ga”.

Memory

13th of May, 6pm, meeting at North Lawn (University of Melbourne).

Kummargii Yulendj Barring Gadhaba | Projections of a Current Future. In this encounter, people are invited to walk the flow of William’s Creek from its headwaters in Parkville to its meeting with the Birrarung River (the Yarra). Based on a collaboration between Boon Wurrung Senior Elder and Professor, N’arwee’t Dr Carolyn Briggs AM, The Alliance for Praxis Research (APR) and Amina Briggs, this walk disrupts the city’s colonial infrastructure by resurfacing the buried path of the creek, reawakening the ancestral memory of water that still flows beneath Melbourne’s streets.

PLEASE BRING HEADPHONES!

Commons

23rd of May, 10:30 am, meeting at South Kensington train station.

Have you ever seen commons in action? Join us for a walk and talk through the suburb of Kensington to experience the different flows of commoning that take shape across local food and waste initiatives - of the compost hubs, urban farms, fresh food market, seed savers, and food forest. Taking the Kensington community as an example, here we discuss how grassroots initiatives produces, redistributes, and recirculates local value to move toward a more sustainable and socially fair society, one grounded in an ethics of social and ecological regeneration.

Ecologies (CANCELLED)

27th of May, 6pm, meeting at Jewell station, avenue side.

Places are entangled with more-than-human lives. Especially in urban areas where there are layers of human and non-human infrastructures that co-habit in an ever-growing landscape. In this session we will walk along some of Naarm’s overlooked green spaces: nature strips. We will be using drawing as an observational and relational tool to engage with these informal green spaces and learn about how locals in Bulleke-bek transform nature strips for the health of their habitat corridor.