01: Entanglements

Inspired from the September 2025 VU Moondani Balluk Research Writing Retreat held on Taungurung Country and Dr. Paola Balla’s prompt to disseminate knowledge in self-determined and multi-modal ways, students and staff gathered over several sessions at Moondani Balluk to re-connect with each other through our individual and collective research projects. Through dialogue and creative play, we were guided by co-created prompts. A sample of these included:

  • What are you bringing to your research from the stories you hold (spaces/places, entities, ancestors, narratives, objects etc)?

  • How does your research make you think about your own histories and relationships?

  • What have we learned from other in thir room?

  • How has this manifested in our research process and our lives?

  • What are the lineages that inform our work?

  • How do we see the others in the space reflected/living in our work?

Form these prompts and discussions, a central theme of “Entanglements” was chosen, exploring the entanglements of research, identity, belonging, psychologies, coloniality, and relationships. Collaboratively we joined our individual collages, zines and inquiries to form an 80-page zine from 12 authors across Moondani Balluk and CIDRN.