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Academic underachievement of students from disadvantaged backgrounds is an ongoing and unresolved problem. Schools serving vulnerable communities often fail to meaningfully engage their students who are often exposed to significant family and environmental adversities. However, where the educational landscape is overwhelmed with neoliberal processes of accountability and testing, education generally comes to be understood as a cognitive process with little attention to the bodily or affective dimensions of learning. This paper draws on new theoretical ideas in affect and embodiment to build a case for an embodied, affective and creative pedagogy for students who live with poverty and adversity. Specifically, I report on research that investigates how two teachers utilised "Creative and Body-based" (CBL) provocations to redesign curriculum for disadvantaged students in their sites. In utilising the analysis of two narrative portraits, I highlight examples of bodily affectivity as well as affective pedagogical practices that impact on students' capacity to learn and teachers' capacity to teach. Analysis suggests that embodied and creative approaches enable new forms of communication and learner identities through bodies, senses and imaginings. Such approaches provide much needed affective conditions that 'hook' students in, encourage dialogue and help them to realise their potential as learners. Outcomes of this work signal an epistemological and pedagogical shift toward understanding bodies and creativity as agents of learning and knowledge production. By engaging with notions of a 'learning body' potential exists to challenge neoliberal practices in complex classrooms and support young people to foster stronger connections, hope and a re-inspired aspiration to learn.

How do we dwell tenderly in the ruins of the modern university? This paper engages a hopeful, collaborative, and sensory methodology to imagine possibilities for research and researcher. As academic women navigating the decay of the neoliberal university amid the shadowy spectre of the 'ideal' academic, we explore our lived experiences, identities, and questions. For us, managing modernity's disorientation and dislocation means showing up differently, with new tools, new theoretical frames, and new ways of relating. From our experiential and aesthetic inquiry, tendrils of possibility for what research does, has been, is, and could be, are emerging. Our dwelling together (co-sensing in radical tenderness) helps us see beyond the thicket of institutional requirements towards a more hopeful and collective existence -- for if the sense of separation instilled by modernity is a social disease, healing must be a communal endeavour.

This paper takes up Howard's (1999) suggestion that sentimentality can be a lens on self-world relations. It focuses on human-bird relations in a Facebook site dedicated to Australian wild birds: Birds in Backyards (Australia). We argue that the traditional ideal of intellectual and affective distance through which critiques of sentimentality are still so often couched is not very useful in understanding and valuing the dynamic, interactive and immersive forms of social media. A study of Birds in Backyards suggests that there quite different ways that the love of wild birds can manifest and that sentimentality is not inimical to the generation of a community of care for, and celebration of, birds. Moreover, an older assumption that sentimentality might be the opposite of, or an impediment to, practical action seems hard to justify in the discursively and emotionally complex milieux of the digital age. Today, there is no place for an opposition between feeling and doing, and scientific action often requires and mobilizes emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]