Publications

Book chapter | Peer reviewed

Unsettling critical literacy: Indigenous climate fiction and relational reading practices ↗

by Sandra R. Phillips, Larissa McLean Davies, Clare Archer-Lean, Sarah E. Truman and Melitta Hogarth

2026
A Research Agenda for Critical Literacies

It is well understood that the climate crisis and global racial injustice are inextricably linked and tied to the practices of colonisation and the enduring imperial project of education. This chapter draws on a research project called "Reading Climate: School English, Indigenous Writing and Sustainability" which seeks to support teachers in Australia to address the imperative for critical approaches to climate education and racial justice across the curriculum. This chapter draws in the insights of Indigenous writers and Indigenous speculative stories, which, as Cherokee scholar Sandra Muse Isaacs notes, can always be understood as climate fiction. We explore the ways that critical literacy, as a justice pedagogy that traditionally pivots on Western binaries, might be productively unsettled and expanded by reading practices that foreground Indigenous relationality and Indigenous futurism. To do this we juxtapose two events: the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum and our team's international symposium centralising Indigenous writers' voices in dialogue with questions of climate action. In concert, these two events embody the crises and potential futures of critical literacy in Australia today. Reflecting on these events clarifies the issues facing anti-colonial relational reading practices for teacher professional learning at the intersection of literacy, social justice, and climate education.

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Journal article | Peer reviewed

Reading Beyond Extraction?: More-Than-Human Regions in Melissa Lucashenko's Mullumbimby (2013) ↗

by Clare Archer-Lean and Sandra R Phillips

2025
Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature

It is this idea that is relentlessly battered by international capital, as we are asked to forgo belonging, and to accept that any place is the same as any other, that apart from purely functional aspects, the land has no personality, no infusion of spirit. Big stories are failing us as a nation and will probably not save our natural environment (i.e. us) from the greed and stupidity and indifference that assail it. (Lucashenko, "Not Quite" n.p.)

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Journal article | Peer reviewed

Reading climate: subject English beyond the colonial ↗

by Clare Archer-Lean, Sandra R. Phillips, Larissa McLean Davies and Sarah E. Truman

2025
Discourse

This paper outlines the emergent findings and theoretical foundations of Reading Climate: Indigenous literatures, English and Sustainable Futures, cross disciplinary research in Indigenous Studies, Education, and Literary Studies. Our team investigates epistemologies for the teaching of secondary subject English and tertiary courses and how they might be productively reworked. We draw on ‘Indigenous relationality’ as proposed by Mary Graham, Elder Scholar of the Kombumerri clan of the Yugambeh Nation as a core principle in shifting English pedagogy from text-focused close reading. We investigate how a move from exclusively close-reading approaches is important because of the ways in which such a scholarly practice is premised on both potentially canonical and thus Eurocentric intertexts, and the abstraction of the text from cultural and authorial sovereignty. Further, close reading limits the use of textual artefacts, and the knowledge contained within them, to literary concerns of structure, features, devices, effects, and audiences. Here we show how reader relationality involves the reader's reflective stance, the writing's contexts, the guidance of the writer, and the function of the reading process. This paper contributes to and extends approaches to English arguing that inclusion of Indigenous writing in curriculum includes but must go beyond text selection and adoption.

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Journal article | Peer reviewed

‘Need to Know They’re Doing the Right Thing’: Exploring Secondary English Teacher Approaches to Indigenous Climate Fiction ↗

by Melitta Hogarth, Clare Archer-Lean, Larissa McLean Davies, Sarah E. Truman and Sandra R Phillips

2024
Journal of Language, Literature and Culture

This paper shares findings from a 2022 pilot project called ‘Reading Climate'. Indigenous speculative and climate fiction was centred to contribute to existing research on anti-colonial approaches to secondary school subject English in Australia. The broader project (continuing through 2024–2026) is a collaboration between Indigenous and white settler researchers based at universities across two Eastern Australian states. The core research questions of the pilot study were: How do English teachers engage with Indigenous ways of knowing and understanding Country? How do English teachers engage with Indigenous fiction in the content of climate education? What, if any, factors prevent teachers from engaging with Indigenous fiction, particularly speculative and climate fiction? Findings from the book clubs show significant diversity in terms of teachers’ pedagogical confidence with and knowledge of Indigenous climate fiction and highlight the ways in which a lack of confidence can both perpetuate the colonial project of school English and limit the interdisciplinary potential of literary study. Further, findings from the book clubs offer insights into the kinds of approaches to teacher professional learning that might support anti-colonial, climate-aware approaches to school English.

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Journal article | Peer reviewed

World Expanding Outcomes for English Literature Graduates ↗

by Peter Innes, Adelle Sefton-Rowston and Clare Archer-Lean

2024
Journal of Language, Literature and Culture

This essay reports the findings of a survey of almost 300 respondents from every Australian State and the ACT1, all of whom had graduated in the past two decades with a graduate or postgraduate qualification in English Literature. We asked participants to reflect on their experience as tertiary students: what had studying English meant to them at the time? How has studying English affected their working and their personal lives post-graduation? The data collected counters neoliberalist myths about the lack of value in humanities education. Using a mix of quantitative and thematic analysis of the survey data, we argue for lifelong benefits for students graduating with a major in English.

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Explore all Clare Archer-Lean's publications in UniSC Research Bank

Grants

25 June 2025

Sunshine Coast First Nations Creative Arts Strategic Plan

Sunshine Coast Council (Australia)
Grant no. 0980030567.

Maria Raciti, Catherine Manathunga, Harriot Beazley, Clare Archer-Lean, Leah Barclay and Rachael Dwyer

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30 June 2024

Reading climate: Indigenous literatures, school English and sustainablity

Australian Research Council (Australia, Canberra) - ARC
Grant no. LP220200724.

Melitta Hogarth, Sarah E. Truman, Clare Archer-Lean, Marcia McKenzie, Larissa McLean Davies and Sandra Phillips

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15 September 2022 - 15 December 2023

Australian Teens, Global Screens: A Pilot Audience Study

University of the Sunshine Coast (Australia, Sunshine Coast) - UniSC
Grant no. 0980027642.

Harriot Beazley, Phoebe Macrossan, Clare Archer-Lean and Anna Potter

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31 March 2015 - 24 October 2016

The Iconic Dingo: valuing their future on K'gari-Fraser Island

Queensland Department of Science, Information, Technology, Innovation and the Arts
Grant no. 0980023027.

Angela Wardell-Johnson, Jennifer Carter, Umi Khattab, Yoko Shimizu and Clare Archer-Lean

Teaching

• Environmental Studies

Supervision

Masters Thesis Supervision - Current

Reading Hope and Grief in the Coastlines of Australian Ecogothic Fiction

Students: Research student (name withheld)

Associated Researchers: Clare Archer-Lean and Ginna Brock

2026

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Doctoral Thesis Supervision - Current

Haunting her place: Exploring feminist spaces in the Australian Gothic to address gender-based violence.

Students: Research student (name withheld)

Associated Researchers: Ross Watkins and Clare Archer-Lean

2025

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Masters Thesis Supervision - Current

Seeing Beyond the Human: Photo Poetry as a Transcendental Practice for Ecological Consciousness

Students: Research student (name withheld)

Associated Researchers: Ginna Brock, Christine Rogers and Clare Archer-Lean

2025

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Thesis Supervision - Completed

Monstrous Women, Gruesome Girls, and the Beastly Wilds: Wild ways of seeing fairy tales through a feminist ecocritical lens ↗

Students: Shannon Horsfall

Associated Researchers: Dyann Ross, Clare Archer-Lean and Ross Watkins

2021 - 2024

The oppression of women and girls in fairy tales has been the subject of much scholarly (and public) debate over recent decades with numerous creative reimaginings redressing the females’ positioning in the traditional tales. Significantly less attention, however, has been paid to the representation of nature and non-human animals in both traditional and contemporary retellings. While literary animal studies recognise the place of the animal in fables, and their prevalence in children’s literature in general, the animal figure in fairy tales requires further investigation. Reimagining fairy tales as a form of ecofeminist creative praxis, this thesis untangles problematic tropes of dominion of marginalised women and the non-human, and investigates how positive and agentic renderings of interspecies relationships may be constructed within this genre. The PhD comprises a creative artefact and accompanying exegesis. The creative artefact consists of seven reimagined fairy tales in the picturebook form, written to speak back to the well-known traditional tales of the Western European corpus. Situated within a genre that commonly isolates female characters – by placing them in deliberate danger, foregrounding female antagonism, and presenting nature as Other – each of my reimaginings takes elements of the traditional tale and employs strategies to give agency to those oppressed, including women/girls, and the non-human. Through visual and verbal techniques of counterpoint, complement, and enhancement, I centralise female characters and the natural world as potent sources of narrative power. The placement of words and pictures in relation to and with each other inevitably changes the meaning of both, enhancing each mode to tell the greater story. In this interweaving, in this interanimate relationship, the reimagining can challenge traditional tales. The exegesis contextualises the creative works within traditional tales’ and contemporary retellings’ representations of women and nature. Both exegesis and artefact identify and expose the containment, the reduction and the material implications of that containment and reduction of women and non-human animals in fairy tales. In the process, I seek to invoke spaces for new articulations in order to free the non-human animal and children, particularly female children, from conflation with each other which reduces the individuality of both. I strive to go beyond the exposing of children’s picturebooks to feminist scrutiny or to see them, on the other hand, as a mode of environmentalist education. Instead, I endeavour to initiate a radical ecofeminist deconstruction – radical because of its acknowledgement of the subjectivity of the non-human animal. Analyses of this kind has been conducted on media, including film, advertising, and literature, but into picturebooks is rare. And yet picturebooks often inform humans’ earliest understanding of the world in which they live (Nikolajeva & Scott, 2001: 3). Approaching the creation of picturebooks through the lens of radical ecofeminism, literary animal studies proffer understandings of interspecies relations to children in their formative years in ways that may impact future interactions in the material world. In unravelling and reimagining what has been acculturated for generations before through children’s literature, a new fabric of human-non-human interconnection can be woven.

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Doctoral Thesis Supervision - Completed

Searching for Rivers ↗

Students: Tully Prentice

Associated Researchers: Clare Archer-Lean, Ginna Brock and Dr. Shelley Davidow

2016 - 2024

This exegesis and creative work contributes to knowledge by creatively enacting the naïve and ultimately impossible pursuit of freeing a biographical subject, in this case British polymath William Halse Rivers Rivers (1864–1922), from creative conjecture and illusion. The exegesis is, principally, a prospective account of a research journey. It establishes what is known about W.H.R. Rivers, and through a variety of methods, seeks insights to further that knowledge. Primary records and contemporaneous sources from within the archives are interrogated for generational and other vital links. The genealogical method proved essential for determining family connections and origins, and prosopography indispensable in several investigations for establishing common characteristics. A finding from this research is that, for practitioners, immersion in the archives may produce results that influence the intended direction of a creative work. Supplementary, or ghostly, voices from the past, transformed the anticipated pragmatic biography into a narrative in which the original subject, Rivers, was decentred. A creative composition appropriated by ghosts demanded an accommodating space. In tracing such, various potential frameworks of the biographical genre were examined, and both irony and paradox consistent with that of the creative artefact were employed in experimentation with form. Practice-led, the creative artefact develops the outcome of this process. It demonstrates the results of the ‘small world’ model of research (six degrees of separation), and the meta-narrative complexities of adapting archival voices to the historical account of a life.

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Explore all Clare Archer-Lean's supervisions in UniSC Research Bank