No abstract

Graduate students are often plagued by stress and anxiety in their journeys of becoming researchers. Concerned by the prevalence of poor graduate student wellbeing in Australia, we share our experiences of kin-making and collaboration within #aaeeer (Australasian Association for Environmental Education Emerging Researchers), a collective of graduate students and early career researchers formed in response to the Australian Association for Environmental Education (AAEE) conference in Hobart, Tasmania, in 2014. In this article, we begin to address the shortage of research into graduate student wellbeing, led by graduate students. Inspired by Donna Haraway's work on making kin in the Chthulucene, we present an exploration that draws together stories from the authors about the positive experiences our kin-making collective enables, and how it has supported our wellbeing and allowed us to work collaboratively. Specifically, we find that #aaeeer offers us a form of refuge from academic stressors, creating spaces for ‘composting together’ through processes of ‘decomposing’ and ‘recomposing’. Our rejection of neoliberal norms has gifted us experiences of joyful collective pleasures. We share our experiences here in the hope of supporting and inspiring other emerging and established researchers to ‘make kin’ and challenge the potentially isolating processes of becoming researchers.

She has shared her passion for environmental education and raising awareness for sustainability strategies while facilitating learning in subjects related to language, art, film, academic writing and cultural issues across high school and tertiary levels. She has a strong interest to explore place identity linked to the environment, and this was a major feature of her PhD research, titled 'Ethno-Eco Dialogue: Filmmaking for Sustainability'.

This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for a degree or diploma by the University or any other institution, except by way of background information and duly acknowledged in the thesis, and to the best of my knowledge and belief it contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due acknowledgement is made in the text or the thesis, nor does the thesis contain any material that infringes copyright.