Drawing on contemporary transition pedagogy, this paper provides a case study of a suite of transition activities piloted by The Belonging Project in collaboration with a creatively oriented academic program in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Through qualitative research, this case study demonstrates the importance of adopting Kift, Nelson and Clarke's (2010, p. 6) notion of transition "as a process, not an event." This paper argues that a sustained program of low cost transition activities that bridge the formal and informal curriculum fosters an essential "sense of belonging" among first year students. It provides a successful example of an approach that embeds essential social and academic literacies while facilitating positive social, cultural, and academic transitions.

This paper presents some preliminary findings from The Belonging Project-a longitudinal learning and teaching research project seeking to develop and define a new approach to student engagement. In this project, the concept of belonging is used as a tactic to engage both staff and students in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University as part of the project's aim to improve the student experience. This paper maps the way in which we use belonging-defined in relation to the educational experience-as a point of departure to achieve this outcome. Having established our definition of belonging and its purpose in our project, we then discuss some key results of focus groups with students, outlining the way in which students navigate issues of transition, interdisciplinarity, and notions of space and place, in their relationship to university and campus life.

In this paper, five authors account for the rethinking of a conference as a series of postcards, letters, rules and silent moments so that traditional hierarchies of knowledge could be overturned or, at least, sidelined. We recount how the place we convened was enlisted as an actor and the dramas and devices we applied to encounter it. We use this accounting to problematize the conventional practices of goal-oriented meetings and co-authored papers as forms of academic meaning-making. In finding a meeting point where expertise was disorientated and status undressed, we were able to investigate the idea of co-being between human and nonhuman realities as the step social theory needs to take to become a point of connection with the social world, instead of an escape from it. We conclude that this involved silence and necessary fictions as a means to consider the future and past in the moment of meeting.

With PhDs in creative writing becoming more valued and valuable in both local and international contexts, the question of models that are fit for purpose has never been more pressing. This paper discusses a case study of an approach to PhD pedagogy underway with writers from across the Asia-Pacific. It is a model of advanced practice-led research in creative writing, which helps established and mid-career writers to deepen their oeuvres and careers. The model poses the question: What if a PhD in creative writing focused its site of research on a practitioner's ongoing practice as a writer? How might this deepen the practitioner's engagement with the processes of and contexts for writing, and enable shifts in and for their future writing practice? This paper invites educators and writers to reconsider how a PhD by practice in creative writing contributes new knowledge -on literary approaches, forms, genres and cultures -to the discipline, at the same time as it provides a writer with insights to transform their practice. Faculty and student perspectives of a transcultural, multidisciplinary, low-residency program, based in Vietnam and Australia, reveal how this unconventional approach is making a difference to PhD pedagogy and creative practice research.