Art, community and knowledge flows

In this chapter I explore knowledge mobilization and educational research in the policy context of water conservation. The chapter is based on Indigenous partnership research about water in the drylands of the Murray-Darling Basin in south-eastern Australia. The research was collaboratively designed with U'Alayi researcher Chrissiejoy Marshall as an emergent, arts-based project. It began as a study of the Narran Lake in north-western New South Wales (NSW), a Ramsar-listed wetlands, and an iconic site in the connection between the northern and southern Basin. Through a series of emergent circumstances, the project moved and changed with the flow of the waters, ending at the Murray River in Victoria. The emergent nature of the methodology that enabled the flow of knowledge between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers was the basis for the learning and knowledge exchange that happened between the project and the wider communities with which it engaged. One of the main features of the project, which emerged in its making, was a series of art exhibitions in regional galleries. It is the role of these art exhibitions in the mobilization of knowledge that I focus on in this chapter. I use the metaphor of water to track the ways that different knowledge systems block or facilitate flows of knowledge in parallel to the ways different storylines and cultural practices block or facilitate the flows of water.