Uncanny Powers is the latest outcome from the Creative Arts Strand of the Aberdeen-Curtin Alliance. This special issue of the international open-access creative writing journal Axon: Creative Explorations features scholarly papers and creative production from seven University of Aberdeen staff and doctoral research students (HDRs) and thirteen Curtin University staff and HDRs, including the work of two Curtin Home HDRs enrolled in the Aberdeen-Curtin Collaborative PhD Program.
Uncanny Powers is the result of crossing thresholds—geographical, as well as intellectual and emotional. Researchers from Curtin University travelled to Scotland for a symposium at the University of Aberdeen in June 2017. Recognising that themes and troubled questions of cultural cost, ethical responsibility and creative possibility have become vital stimuli to both creative practitioners and academic thinkers in relation to our fraught experiences of space, place, community and history, the symposium aimed to bring together new creative practice and critical thought from Western Australia and north-east Scotland. Although geographically distant, these regions are haunted by many shared intellectual, cultural and aesthetic intersections. Uncanny Powers is one outcome of these hauntings and intersections.
The special issue was devised and edited by Dr Rachel Robertson, School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University and Dr Wayne Price, School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen and can be found at: https://www.axonjournal.com.au/.