Living Concepts: Invoking a Culturally Regenerative University by Reconnecting Language to Country and Place

This article is an invitation to join in ongoing conversations about living concepts of cultural regeneration. The invitation comes from an open collective of academic and professional staff working at an urban university on the unceded lands of the Eastern Kulin Nation in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia). The phrase “cultural regeneration” was given to us as a prompt and anchor by the wider co-operative inquiry convened by Sandra Wooltorton and Len Collard at Nulungu Research Institute. Over the past year, we have gathered weekly to collectively inquire into what a university might become, and how it might operate, through principles and practices of cultural regeneration. Our polyvocal conversation moves in and out of the place-times when we think and write together. This includes the “everywhen” of Country which recognises past and future as always alive and agentic in the present. This involves working towards the re-connection of language and social relations to land, Country, and the place-times of the university in which we work. As an invitation into the emplaced work of making concepts live in the university, this paper urges us to come together, to think change, in order to mobilise our collective and diversely situated agency.