New Lives in an Old Land

Re-turning to the Colonisation of New South Wales through Stories of my Parents and their Ancestors

New Lives in an old land is an extraordinary book of narrative scholarship in relation to the great global colonisation of the world in the eighteenth century. It traces the origins of the settler colonial establishment of Australia through the major historic events of the time, such as the Irish uprising, the American revolution and the fierce wars for land and culture in Scotland, that led to extreme poverty and displacement of large numbers of people. Through a delicately narrated family history Bronwyn Davies teases out the threads of complex networks of entanglement that produced the numerous lives through which she interprets the coming of settlers to the Australian colony. Not shying away from the horrendous impact on the Aboriginal custodians who had cared for the land for tens of thousands of years, or the brutal treatment of convicts on whose labour the settlement was built, the book looks unstintingly at the complex characters involved in this entanglement. In its forward-looking possibilities, it is essential reading for all Australians who struggle to comprehend the ethical, social and environmental challenges of this land. Margaret Somerville, Professor, Western Sydney University

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Deleuze and Collaborative Writing

An engagement with Gilles Deleuze and collaborative writing

How might we think of collaborative writing if we think with the concepts that Deleuze has generated? And, how might we begin to write, together, on what Deleuze would call an immanent plane of composition? On such a Deleuzian plane, or plateau, it was not appropriate to make Deleuze external to us, as if he were the authority who might inform us on the correct way forward. Instead we sought to make Deleuze one of us, and to open up, with him, a new stream of thought, and of being, in order to explore our topic of Deleuze and collaborative writing.

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Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales. Preschool Children and Gender

Exploring the way gender as a social category is made to matter in the everyday lives of children.

This book analyzes preschool children's experience of becoming gendered drawing on poststructuralist theory. Based on observations of preschool children's play, and on their discussions about feminist stories read to them by the author, this book explores the way gender as a social category is made to matter in the everyday lives of children.

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Listening to Children. Being and Becoming

Towards emergent listening and to anticipating ethical questions in intra-actions with children.

"Professor Davies’ thinking and theorizing is one of a kind; she has based these new ideas on her well-established and distinctive earlier thinking about the subject and its connection to the world. Nevertheless she manages to ‘ascend’ to different levels each time she writes, and succeeds in ‘renewing’ herself and her thinking in each new book. I see this book as unique in its methodological approach."

Teija Rantala | University of Helsinki, Finland

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Life in the classroom and playground. The accounts of primary school children

Helping teachers to imagine how their words & actions impact on children's lives & capacity to learn

Written at the beginning of the 1980s, Bronwyn's first book asked children for their own accounts of what was going on in the classroom and playground. By looking at classrooms from the point of view of the children, instead of the teachers, it argues that teachers who can take children's perspectives into account will have a far greater chance of communicating their adult knowledge to the children in their classrooms.

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Doing Collective Biography

Towards a poststructural conception of the subject-in-relation, in-process

"The book describes how to set up collective biography workshops in which participants examine how discursive structures and power relations have both enabled and limited the conditions of possibility for their lived experience. Focusing on a more complicated reflexivity than is usually described in social science research, collective biography, inspired by Frigga Haugand refined by Davies, will no doubt be used increasingly by researchers interested in the production of subjects in a postmodern world."

Elizabeth St Pierre

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A Body of Writing 1990-1999

A unique engagement with poststructuralism that defies the boundaries between theory and embodied practice.

Whereas poststructuralists are often accused of excessive abstraction, Davies' sophisticated and nuanced discussions of subjectivity, agency, epistemology, feminism, and power are embedded in vital depictions of life experience and empirical research. The papers gathered together here make poststructuralist concepts usable, providing a conceptual framework for interpreting and analyzing the social world.

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Pedagogical Encounters

New ways of thinking about learning spaces as ethical, responsive, transformable spaces.

"A wholly absorbing work. It is bursting with fresh and exciting ideas that leap from the text into the classroom, and indeed, into daily life. The contributors draw inspiration from the work of Gilles Deleuze, but in their hands issues of relationality, art, indeterminacy, difference, and co-creation take on new significance. We see them brought to life in wide-ranging classroom practices and gain from these expositions a new compass for enriching educational practice."

Kenneth Gergen

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42 Research Books

Aelfraeda and the Red City was published in 2023 by Ornithorhynchus Paradoxus Press. Written by Bronwyn Davies and illustrated by Isobel Manning.

It is available from Bronwyn for purchase. Contact her on email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you are interested.

The story begins thus:

1 Departure

It is never the beginning or the end that are interesting; the beginning and the end are points. What is interesting is the middle… Being in the middle of a line is the most uncomfortable position.

But a story must begin somewhere.

The girl is climbing down the steep hillside, through a narrow pass between two rocks. The wind howls through the rocks, flinging red dirt into the air, whipping threads of dark gold hair out of her blue scarf, and across her face. Her eyes squint against the dust and the light. She wipes the sweat from her eyes to see more clearly across the distant plains to the west and the vast mountain range to the north. She must continue to make her way down the escarpment to reach water and shelter before nightfall.

Her foot slips on a small rock and she begins to slide down the rockface.

Regaining her balance, with strong, thin arms stretched out to each side, she continues, carefully picking her way down through the narrow spaces between the rocks. The soles of her shoes are sturdy, she has a blanket in her backpack, and the things she will need for her journey; a flint stone, a sharp knife, a bowl, a flask for water, a snare, flour and salt, writing paper, a pen and ink, a sewing kit, some string, a chest of potions, and a small casket of jewels that had belonged to her grandmother.

When the sun begins to drop below the blue mountains across the far side of the plain, the sky flares blood-red, illuminated by the red dust...

 

Synopsis: Aelfraeda and the Red City is made up of closely woven stories that unfold the life and adventures of the elven matriarch, Aelfraeda. The stories begin when Aelfraeda is 16 years old, with her escape from the confines of the walled-in Red City. Her grand-mother, who had been the elven matriarch, had died, and Aelfraeda’s brutal, despotic step-father had seized power in the Red City, turning it into a cruel place riddled with fear.

Aelfraeda’s story is not only a feminist version of the hero-journey, though it is that, and more. The young Aelfraeda is transient. She moves between multiple cultures and languages and physical spaces, shedding the binary categories that might originally have shaped what she could become. Not solely male or female, but gender-fluid, not solely elven or animal, but both. Not separate from the landscapes she travels through, but integral to them. Those landscapes, themselves, have life and power. The wetlands she travels through, and the forests, are alive with humans/elves/dragons/ birds/rivers/trees. Aelfraeda learns new languages, and she develops an extraordinary capacity to listen to others. In the Red Forest she meets ancestral beings.

Through her adventures, and her responsiveness to others—those human, elven, earthen and animal others, Aelfraeda emerges through these 13 stories; she transforms herself and the lives of others.

Aelfraeda and The Red City is inspired by current feminist questions such as gender and trans-gender transformations, human-animal and human-earth relations in a time of global warming, evolving understandings between indigenous and colonial peoples; and communication across species and across language differences. These issues are not presented in a morally ascendant or pedantic way; they do not intrude on, or detract from the stories, but serve to enrich and inspire them, and so to inspire the reader through characters who come vividly to life on the pages.

Aelfraeda’s story is set in an unknown time and place—it could be anywhere and any time—and it has the song-like quality of ancient, oral stories passed on over centuries. In this it is inspired by the historical/magical stories of the Celtic Mabignion.[1] It is similar to the Mabignion, insofar as it involves magic, deep spirituality and the search for wisdom, and it includes characters who are other-than-human.

 

[1]Guest.C. (1838  /13th century ) The Mabinogian: https://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/history/sites/themes/society/myths_mabinogion.shtml

 


Books

 

Entanglements in the World's Becoming and the Doing of New Materialist Inquiry Forthcoming January 2021 with Routledge

This book explores new materialist concepts and the ways in which they provoke an opening up of thought about being human, and about being more-than-human. The more-than-human refers, here, to the world that we are of—a world that includes humans, who are emergent and permeable, and all of the animal and earth others they intra-act with. It explores how we affect those others, and are affected.

This book engages intimately in encounters of various kinds, some drawn from the author’s everyday life, some from the research projects she has engaged in over several decades, and some from others’ research. It works at the interface of living- and writing-as-inquiry, delving into the rich seam of conceptual possibilities opened up by Deleuze & Guattari and Barad, and by new materialist inquiry more broadly. It brings not just words to the task, but also art, photos, movement, memories, bodies, sound, touch, things.

It delves into the ways in which the entangled dynamics of social, material and semiotic flows and forces make up the diffractive movements through which life emerges, assembles itself, and endures. New materialist concepts, as they are explored here, offer new and emergent approaches to life itself, and to ways in which we might research our lives as they are intricately enfolded in the life of the earth.

 

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