Reading with Reciprocity: A Feminist Move Towards Reviewing with Generosity (2021)
Mindy Blaise | Jane Merewether | Jo Pollitt
Reading with Reciprocity is an initiative by The Ediths inspired by the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research’s (CLEAR) blog post, #Collabrary: a methodological experiment for reading with reciprocity (2021), which draws on the scholarship of Joe Dumit (2012), Zoe Todd (2016), and Eve Tuck (2017) to learn reading practices that are “humble, generous, and accountable” (CLEAR, 2021). We were interested and impressed with the ways in which this methodological experiment was creating reading practices grounded in a feminist ethic committed to making room for diverse knowledges.
We thank all of the authors for the labour and care they took in writing these books, and are also thankful to The Ediths members who took the time to read and review with such thoughtfulness and generosity that they become a gift to each book author. Thank you for being part of Reading with Reciprocity and The Ediths.
In what follows we present the Reading with Reciprocity responses. We see this collection as a generative continuation of the original call out for responses and invite you of course, to read with reciprocity.
Exploring Child-Soil Relations in the Anthropocene
Jane Merewether | Mindy Blaise | Stefania Giamminuti
Exploring Child-Soil Relations in the Anthropocene explores soil-human ecologies and examines how children engage with soil in their local contexts. The project examines the roles early childhood educators play in working with children to respond to soil. It aims to draw children’s and teachers’ attention to the crucial role soil plays in ecological systems and human lives, and seeks to help to create effective and engaging new curricula, pedagogies, and policies which attend to living well with a damaged world.
Feminist Responses to Climate Change: Unruly Experimentations for Unstable Times
Lyndall ADAMS | Lilly BLUE | Yabini KICKETT (Esther MCDOWELL) | Cissi TSANG | Sebastian CRITTI-SCHNAARS + Gabriel CRITTI-SCHNAARS | Sam FOX + Children of Perth Montessori College | Maitland SCHNAARS + Jo POLLITT
Exhibited: Gallery 25 (ECU Galleries)
Curatorial Statement: Dr Jo Pollitt
Below Image: Lilly Blue
An exhibition in two overlapping parts, the first features a suite of five new works from emerging and established artists commissioned by Professor Mindy Blaise, responding to anthropogenic crisis in unruly ways. An exhibition in two overlapping parts, the first features a suite of five new works from emerging and established artists commissioned by Professor Mindy Blaise, responding to anthropogenic crisis in unruly ways.
Inspired by an edited collection in the Australian Humanities Review by Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren (2011) entitled “Unloved Others: Death of the Disregarded in the Time of Extinctions” the five artists were invited to respond to the provocation of ‘the unloved and disregarded’.
Each of the artist’s works are a response to creatures (blowfish, mud snail, djenark, and moonjelly) that children encountered while taking part in a research project that involved walking-with Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River). The second part of the exhibition features two video works developed across two Western Australian research collaboratories: Weather and Waste, undertaken as projects of The Ediths.
The movement running through each of the artworks speaks to the increasing instability of the world we are living with. Forging new research practices to extend reparative possibilities for alternative climate futures via multispecies worldings, what has emerged is a set of ethical propositions for living well together in these uncertain times. Whether in Lilly Blue’s unpredictable pouring of ink jellies to the page, the personalities of Lyndall Adams’ lively blowfish, Maitland Schnaars’ inhabiting of child-made rain, a class of children embodying building demolition with Sam Fox’s animations, stories of djenark sounding with Cissi Tsang and yarning with Gabriel & Sebastian Critti-Schnaars, or the eerie resting of Yorga bones by Yabini Kickett (Esther McDowell), human and nonhuman bodies connect through this work in relational (e)motion.
The intersections of feminist grappling in our times situates these works as unfixed and imperfect responses to a world in unjust crisis. In attending to climate crisis through an intersectional lens, care is taken to open conversations and provoke creative ways for acknowledging and living with where we are.
This collected body of work asks how prioritising intersections and movement might make room for thinking otherwise about the worlds we are a part of and how investing in connections might allow for change. We invite you to take the time to interact with the artworks…to make connections …to feel…to ask questions …and to think with your own responses and experimentations.
Photographs: Marziya Mohammedali
The Ediths Press:
Making it together in 2021
Following Dr Astrida Neimanis’s (University of British Columbia) inspiring workshop, Living a Feminist Academic Life, held in November 2020 at ECU, we invited Ediths participants to come together and contribute to a newspaper we had begun. Fifteen contributors participated in the making of the paper and many others gave feedback and responses to a draft of the work during a real time responsive ‘walk around’ on ECU’s Mt Lawley campus. The purpose of the newspaper is to make visible what feminism is, how feminism is part of our survival tool kits, and how it is necessary for living a feminist academic life. Fifteen contributors participated in the making of the paper and many others gave feedback and responses to a draft of the work during a real time responsive ‘walk around’ on ECU’s Mt Lawley campus.
The purpose of the newspaper is to make visible what feminism is, how feminism is part of our survival tool kits, and how it is necessary for living a feminist academic life. The Ediths Press is available in print form only as a strategy for connecting with people differently during these online times and to destabilise the dominant printed press conglomerates. The paper includes cartoons, commentary, fun facts, quizzes, puzzles, QR codes to podcasts, book club readings, advice columns, job advertisements, and of course…obituaries. Now ‘hot-off the press’, the Newspaper has been slipped under doors of university academics and shared via mail. If you would like a limited edition print copy please send your best mail address to theediths@ecu.edu.au
Collective Thinking-with Feminist Researchers: A Practice of Enfolding
Collective Thinking-with Feminist Researchers: A Practice of Enfolding is a series of lively entries in response to feminist methodologies explored during the Ediths Roundtable Series 2021. As an ongoing project of collective thinking-with, we churn, turn-over, expand, and add-to feminist research practices that are always in motion.
The blog is situated as part of the Common Worlds Research Collective. Links to each of the nine blog posts below:
theediths.org 