Agents of regional-global transformation: Federation university gippsland education (fugue) researchers

Abstract

The lived particulars of Gippsland, the region, the land, the people and all life, are the heart and impetus of Federation University Gippsland Education (FUGuE) researchers, the chapter and collection authors. To us, Gippsland is portentous as both a wonderful place and prophetic of the transformations required for a sustainable and just regional-global future. The Latrobe Valley, for example, home of our small, new, regional university campus, is both bucolic rural locale and site of several coal-fired power stations. For many years, non-Indigenous residents enjoyed a fairly self-contained place of financial and intergenerational security.However, decades of seismic shifts have written new layers of trauma onto the Gippsland palimpsest that began with European invasions.With global imperatives to transition to a low-carbon economy, Gippsland is a canary in the global coal mine. Assertively locating our research in this region, we address moral and institutional imperatives to act as agents in generating a new regional-global modus vivendi from hinterland and a range of other minority positionalities. To set the regional scene, we map territorial and ideational incongruences that the toponyms of 'Gippsland' and 'region' conjure.We narrate how FUGuE contrapuntally emerged from this context and argue that through 'word and deed', FUGuE challenges hegemonic positivist and dominant discourses of what counts as notable research. Like a Bach fugue masterpiece in which each voice has intrinsic integrity but in counterpoint transforms into something new, our interwoven research voices of transformative agency through educational research, disruptively reveal our appreciable, but largely underappreciated, 'impact'.