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The Ediths are a feminist interdisciplinary research collective. We use socially engaged creative methodologies to conduct ecologically responsive research.

Our projects attend to three interrelated concerns: 
1) Entwined cultural and environmental dimensions of colonisation
2) Situated Common Worlding frameworks that resist the natureculture divide
3) Expanded understandings of inclusion and belonging.

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CO-FOUNDERS

Professor Mindy Blaise
ECU Vice Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow

current research:
– Human-environment relations
– Education for future survival
– Everyday sexisms in higher education
– Postdevelopmentalism, feminisms, anti-colonialisms, and interdisciplinarity for reworking humanist ontologies
– More-than-human & creative method/ologies

Email: m.blaise@ecu.edu.au
Blog(s): Perth Water Collaboratory | Walking-with Derbarl Yerrigan
Twitter: @BlaiseMindy
ORCID ID: 0000-0003-2476-9407

Dr. Jane Merewether
Post Doctoral Research Fellow

current research:
– Post-anthropocentric pedagogies in early childhood education
– Feminist New Materialisms
– Environmental Humanities
– PoReggio Emilia
– Pedagogical documentation

Email: j.merewether@ecu.edu.au
Blog(s): Wandering with Wetlands
Twitter: @janemerewether
ORCID ID: 0000-0001-5860-9255

Dr. Jo Pollitt
Post Doctoral Research Fellow

current research:
– Creative arts methodologies
– More-than-human education
– Feminist, anti-colonial, queer, embodied and interdisciplinary perspectives
– Practice-led scholarship and research-creation
– Art-environment pedagogies

Email: j.pollitt@ecu.edu.au
Blog(s): Conversations with Rain
Twitter: @JoPollitt4
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-2821-7768

Vanessa Wintoneak
Doctor of Philosophy Candidate

current research:
– Radically relational pedagogies
– Education for future survival
– Walking-with practices
– Embodied, embedded, relational, and affective methods
– Diffractive analysis

Email: vwinton0@our.ecu.edu.au
Website: www.vanessawintoneak.wordpress.com
Twitter: @vwintoneak
Instagram: @vanessawintoneak

POST-GRADUATES

Emma Fishwick
School of Education

I am a PhD candidate, a lecturer in Dance History at WAAPA, ECU and a practicing independent artist. My research to date has examined how choreographic and multi-art form works can form a conversation around how to re-frame and re-direct ways of seeing, sensing and being. My PhD project is part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Understanding and Addressing Everyday Sexisms in Australian Universities, co-led by Professor Mindy Blaise (ECU), Dr Emily Gray (RMIT) and Associate Professor Jacqueline Ullman (WSU). My project works with feminist spatial, public pedagogy and gender theories, with a focus on art as a consciousness-raising tool and a means for intervention within the academic institution.

Title of PhD:
Slow Choreographies: Addressing everyday sexisms through creative interventions

Supervisors:
Professor Mindy Blaise (School of Education, ECU), Dr Jo Pollitt (School of Education & WAPPA), Dr Emily Gray (School of Education, RMIT), Associate Professor Jacqueline Ullman (Western Sydney University)

Contact:
Email: e.fishwick@ecu.edu.au
Website: www.emmafishwick.com

Kylie Wrigley
School of Arts and Humanities
Member of Centre for People, Place, & Planet

I am an activist-researcher with experience in climate movement campaigning, community organising and sustainability strategy and policy development. My PhD research project is informed by a decolonial and feminist Participatory Action Research paradigm and entails a collaboration with the Climate Justice Union of Western Australia (CJU). Through the cooperative inquiry method, which generates both action and knowledge with local activists/advocates, we aim to document, develop, test and evaluate effective community organising approaches for climate justice.

Title of PhD:
Community Organising for Climate Justice: a Feminist Participatory Action Research Collaboration in WA

Supervisors:
Dr Naomi Godden (School of Arts & Humanities), Professor Mindy Blaise (School of Education)

Contact:
Email: k.wrigley@ecu.edu.au

Ali Blackwell
School of Education
Member of Centre for People, Place, & Planet

I am a designer, teacher, and PhD Candidate. My practice-led research investigates the potential for relational design to resituate Secondary Design Education within more sustainable human-environment relations. I teach Arts, Design and Technologies to adolescents, write Design curriculum and am exploring the potential of transition, speculative and more-than-human participatory design for informing response-able practices. Alongside my teaching and research, I also run a Design Studio and am passionate and driven to make a creative space for learning to design with Earth.

Title of PhD:
Relational Design Education by Proximity

Supervisors:
Associate Professor Lennie Barblett, (School of Education), Professor Mindy Professor Mindy Blaise (School of Education), Associate Professor Lyndall Adams, School of Arts & Humanities)

Contact:
Email: ali@alib.com.au
Website: www.alib.com.au

Bobbi Henry
Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts

I am currently studying for a Masters in Performing Arts. My research is focused on feminist standpoint theory, combined with puzzle as method. I am wanting to highlight and raise the profile of Indigenous women in performance and theatre narratives. I am looking at and discussing Indigenous women in the arts, and how their lives and work give rise to debates of Indigenous Feminism.

Title of Masters by Research:

Supervisors:
Dr Jo Pollitt (School of Education & WAAPA) Dr Jonathan Marshall (WAAPA), Dr Clint Bracknell (WAAPA & Kurongkurl Katitjin)

Contact:
Email:

Karen Nociti
School of Education
Member of Centre for People, Place, & Planet

I am a PhD candidate and lecturer in Early Childhood Education at ECU. Prior to this role, I was an early years educator where I taught in a range of contexts and with various age groups for over 15 years. My PhD thesis is situated within a Common Worlds framework and draws from feminist new materialisms and posthuman theories of literacy knowing, becoming and doing. I am particularly interested in troubling normative place-based practices that separate children from place with the intention of generating new pedagogies and that ‘(re)situate’ place and children within shared common worlds.

Title of PhD:
Place Literacies: Literacies emerging in Place-child(ren) common worlds

Supervisors:
Associate Professor Lennie Barblett, (School of Education), Professor Mindy Blaise (School of Education), Dr Gill Kirk (School of Education)

Contact:
Email: k.nociti@ecu.edu.au
Blog(s): Encountering Place
Twitter: @KarenNociti

Vanessa Wintoneak
School of Education
Member of Centre for People, Place, & Planet

I am a PhD Candidate and lecturer in the School of Education at ECU. My PhD project explores climate change pedagogies with young children in response to calls for new ways of thinking and producing knowledge in times of rapid environmental change. It is framed by a Common Worlds and Feminist New Materialisms lens and is grounded in feminist philosophy. The research methodology takes an experimentalist orientation through enacting emergent practices that engage propositionally, speculatively, and experimentally with early childhood pedagogy while walking with a significant river in Western Australia, Derbarl Yerrigan.

Title of PhD:
Walking with Derbarl Yerrigan: Generating climate change pedagogies through feminist, creative, and experimental walking practices in early childhood

Supervisors:
Professor Mindy Blaise (School of Education), Dr Jane Merewether (School of Education), Dr Jo Pollitt (School of Education & WAAPA)

Contact:
Email: vwinton0@our.ecu.edu.au
Twitter: @vwintoneak
Instagram: @vanessawintoneak

PAST GRADUATES

Claire O’Callaghan
School of Education (2021)

My project explored climate pedagogies with particular interest in Western Australia’s current water crisis. I explored human and more-than-human relations with young children and educators from an early learning centre in Perth, Western Australia, with a view to reimagining education in the context of rapid environmental change. The project was grounded in feminist new materialist knowledge and framed by an attentive focus to capture the non-binary nature of both human and more-than-human counterparts.  My research focused on challenging colonial ways of knowing water, by decentring the child, unsettling norms, and reinstating reciprocity between human and more-than-human others.  Poetic inquiry as curious practice was explored by conducting experimental, creative, and inventive arts-informed explorations with a lens of keeping water in sight and in mind, using tools of pedagogical documentation.

Title of Masters by Research:
Paying Attention to Water Relations: Poetic inquiry and pedagogical documentation as curious practices

Supervisors:
Professor Mindy Blaise (School of Education), Dr Jane Merewether (School of Education), Dr Jo Pollitt (School of Education & WAAPA)

Contact:
Email: clocalla@our.ecu.edu.au
Twitter: @ClaireOcalla

Celebrating Claire’s examiner reports (2021)
[Jane Merewether, Jo Pollitt, Claire O’Callaghan, Mindy Blaise]