The 'neoliberal turn' in the higher education sector has received significant intellectual scrutiny in recent times. This scrutiny, led by many established academics working within the sector, has highlighted the negative repercussions for teaching and research staff, often referred to as the 'academic precariat' due to their tenuous employment prospects within an increasingly market-driven system. This critique of the modern university can also inadvertently position academics as either resisting or complying with neoliberal governance. This does not adequately account for the nuanced and poetic ways in which professional, personal and gendered subjectivities are formulated, intertwined and negotiated. In this paper we draw on the six overlapping yet distinct narratives of the six female authors, all early-career academics from Australia. We capture and analyse these narratives through collective biography, a qualitative methodology underpinned by the work of Davies and Gannon and others, that helps us to move beyond the 'good vs. bad', 'resistance vs. compliance' debates about academic life. We identify aspects of our lived subjectivities that offer rupture through poetic and hopeful ways of understanding how academics construct and negotiate their lives.

Rural, regional and remote (RRR) communities and industries in Australia cannot currently produce or attract the workforce needed to survive, making skills and qualifications in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) increasingly important. Yet student engagement in STEM education in RRR schools remains low, with limited numbers of young people either moving into further STEM education post-secondary, or accessing readily available STEM-related jobs in RRR areas. Currently many rural children and young people are not exposed to, nor recognize the diverse ways in which STEM knowledge is required and used in their world. We propose that if young people are to increasingly engage with STEM and continue onto STEM-related careers, they must be able to see connections between their “school” learning of STEM and the STEM knowledge that is enacted in rural work and life. We also suggest that for this to change, there should be increased visibility of “place-based” knowledges, including Aboriginal STEM knowledges, in RRR communities to promote enhanced student engagement with STEM. In this paper we explore these ideas by drawing on Foucault and Bourdieu understandings to develop a methodological framework – the Place-based STEM- alignment Framework for the purposes of exposing alternate STEM knowledges. We argue that the nuanced and critical methodological approach applied in the development of the Place-based STEM-alignment Framework, is necessary in order to generate this analytical tool and provide data that will allow us the scope to “reset” current understandings of STEM knowledges. The framework design provides us with the methodological vehicle to identify possible reasons for the invisibility of STEM knowledge and practices in the local fabric of RRR communities and to examine enablers and/or barriers to engagement in STEM learning. The framework must be a practical tool for use in the field, one that can be used in RRR communities to engage, children and young people, in STEM, in a way that is meaningful and that aligns with their everyday experience of RRR life. Finally, the framework has to work to enable alternative perspectives to be exposed that will advance methodological considerations of STEM.

Land managers are challenged with balancing priorities for agri-food production, greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement, natural conservation, social and economic license to operate. We co-designed pathways for transitioning farming systems to net-zero emissions under future climates. Few interventions enhanced productivity and profitability while also reducing GHG emissions. Seaweed (Asparagopsis) feed supplement and planting trees enabled the greatest mitigation (67–95%), while enterprise diversification (installation of wind turbines) and improved feed-conversion efficiency (FCE) were most conducive to improved profitability (17–39%). Mitigation efficacy was hampered by adoptability. Serendiptiously, the least socially acceptable option – business as usual and purchasing carbon credits to offset emissions – were also the most costly options. In contrast, stacking synergistic interventions enabling enteric methane mitigation, improved FCE and carbon removals entirely negated net emissions in a profitable way. We conclude that costs of transitioning to net-zero vary widely (-64% to + 30%), depending on whether interventions are stacked and/or elicit productivity co-benefits.

1The use of 'student' refers to our Growing Our Own students rather than school students.It's just a matter of time: The perceptions of growing our own students of the Growing Our Own program

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