The Roundtable is a regular event when The Ediths and guests come together to think collectively. The Roundtable is informal, convivial, rigorous, and generative; an unapologetically feminist practice. All who are interested in critical thinking and developing new habits of inquiry are welcome. Just show up!
Roundtables are held via Zoom.
Please join our mailing list for your invitation to each Roundtable:
2022
2021
Responsive Roundtable Series: Ecologies in-the-making
The Ediths (ECU), Centre for People, Place and Planet (ECU), Boodja Justice Group (ECU), Nulungu Research Institute (University of Notre Dame Australia, Broome Campus) and Common Worlds Research Collective
Twitter: #Responsiveroundtable
Building on The Ediths’ Roundtable series, the Responsive Roundtable Series: Ecologies in-the-making (August 10-November 30, 2021) is inspired by Isabelle Stengers’ (2005) proposition that an ecology of practice is a tool for thinking through the present ecological and climate crisis we are facing. As a tool for thinking, rather than just recognising, an ecology of practice is capable of generating new practices that “are about the production of new relations that are added to a situation already produced by a multiplicity of relations” (Stengers, 2010, p. 33). In the spirit of Stengers’ scholarship, this Responsive Roundtable Series 2021 brings together different ideas, disciplines, people, methods, and research projects to encourage us to approach practices “…as they diverge, with attention and appreciation to difference(s)” (Stengers, 2005, p.192).
Stengers, I. (2005). Introductory notes on an ecology of practices. Cultural Studies Review,11 (1), 183-196.
Stengers, I. (2010). Cosmopolitics I. Translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis/London: The University of Minnesota Press.
If you are interested in attending any of the Roundtables, please sign-up to The Ediths and a zoom-link will be emailed to you approximately one week prior.
Responsive Roundtable 1 [#64]:
9-10 am AWST, 10th August 2021
Reading(s): Isabelle Stengers. (2014) Gaia, The urgency to think (and feel). Os Mil Nomes De Gaia, do Antropoceno a Idade da Terra, pp. 1-14.
AND
For our French Speaking colleagues, you might want to watch this lecture, with the same name: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaS6HtkH7UU
Invited Roundtable Participants: Dr Jo Pollitt (School of Education/WAAPA, ECU; The Ediths), Professor Pierre Horwitz (School of Science, ECU; CPPP), Professor Iveta Silova (Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University; Common Worlds Research Collective)
(Date/time for Arizona: 9th August, 6pm UTC)
Responsive Roundtable 2 [#65]:
9-10 am AWST, 24th August 2021
Reading(s): Val Plumwood, (2008). Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling, Australian Humanities Review
AND
Invited Roundtable Participants: Dr Jane Merewether (School of Education, ECU; The Ediths), Associate Professor Affrica Taylor (University of Canberra/ECU; Common Worlds Research Collective), Associate Professor Justine Dandy (School of Arts & Humanities, ECU; CPPP)
Responsive Roundtable 3 [#66]:
9-10 am AWST, 7th September 2021
Reading: Deborah Bird Rose, (2012). Multispecies knots of ethical time. Environmental Philosophy 9 (1), 127-140.
Invited Roundtable Participants: Professor Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, (Faculty of Education, University of Western, Ontario, Canada; Common Worlds Research Collective); Dr Brad Gobby (School of Education, Curtin University; The Ediths); Lilly Blue (artist and Head of Learning and Creativity Research, Art Gallery of Western Australia)
(date/time for Toronto: 6th September, 9pm UTC)
Responsive Roundtable 4 [#67]:
9-10 am AWST, 21st September 2021
Reading(s): Max Liboiron (2021), An anti-colonial pollution science. In Pollution is Colonialism, pp, 113-156, Duke University Press
AND
Invited Roundtable Participants: Associate Professor Sandra Wooltarton (Nulungu Research Institute, University of Notre Dame Australia), Dr Aaron Jenkins (School of Science, ECU; CPPP), Alex Berry (Faculty of Education, University of Western, Ontario; Common Worlds Research Collective)
Responsive Roundtable 5 [#68]:
9-10 AWST, 5th October 2021
Reading(s): Zoe Rimmer and Theresa Sainty (2020 June). Palawai kani: Expressing the power of language in art and the museum context. Art Link 40 (2) 32-35.
This coincides with The Exhibition, Feminist Responses to Climate Change: Experimentations for Unruly Times.
Gallery 25, Mt Lawley. In person and online.
Invited Roundtable Participants: Members from the ECU Centre for People, Place and Planet.
Responsive Roundtable 6 [#69]:
9-10 am AWST, 19th October 2021
Reading(s): Elizabeth Povinelli, podcast When Rocks Speak, on Countersign, 8th July 2020.
If interested, this podcast makes reference to excerpts from her book, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, particularly chapter 5, The fog of meaning or the paper found in the special issue.
AND
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APGYBgwat2I
Karrabing Film Collective, “Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams (2016), excerpts on The struggle of existents in geontopower. As featured in e-flux journal no 78, Geontologies: The Figures and the Tactics.
Invited Roundtable Participants: Dr Tonya Rooney, (Faculty of Education & Arts, Australian Catholic University; Common Worlds Research Collective), Professor Angus Morrison-Saunders, (School of Science, ECU; CPPP), and Dr Nancy Mauro-Flude, (College of Design & Social Context, RMIT; The Ediths)
Responsive Roundtable 7 [#70]:
9-10 am AWST, 9th November 2021
Reading: Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017). Soil times: The pace of ecological care. In Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds, pp. 169-215.
Invited Roundtable Participants: Associate Professor Anna Hopkins, (School of Science, ECU; CPPP), Katie Pitchford (Como Children’s Centre, Perth, WA; The Ediths), Narda Nelson, (Faculty of Education, University of Western, Ontario, Canada; Common Worlds Research Collective)
(date/time Vancouver: 8th November, 5pm UTC)
Responsive Roundtable 8 [#71]:
9-10 am AWST, 23rd November 2021
Reading: Martuwarra RiverOfLife, Unamen Shipu Romaine River, Anne Poelina, Sandra Wooltorton, Laurie Guimond, Guy Sioui Durand (2021). Hearing, voicing and healing: Rivers as culturally located and connected. Special Issue, Voicing Rivers, in River Research and Applications.
Invited Roundtable Participants: Dr Fikile Nxumalo (OISE, University of Toronto, Canada; The Common Worlds Research Collective) and Pablo Montes (PhD candidate, UT Austin College of Education), Vanessa Wintoneak, (School of Education, ECU; The Ediths), Associate Professor Jonathan Marshall (WAAPA, ECU; The Boodja Justice Group)
Responsive Roundtable 9 [#72]:
9-10 am AWST, 30th November 2021
Reading(s): Meredith Evans, (2020). “Becoming Sensor in the Planthroposcene: An Interview with Natasha Myers.” Visual and New Media Review, Fieldsights, July 9
AND
the embedded video that is in the above article, ALCHEMICAL CINEMA, Take 1: Nightfall in an Urban Oak Savannah. Film by Ayelen Liberona and Natasha Myers, 2017
Invited Roundtable Participants: Dr Nicole Land, (X University, Common Worlds Research Collective), Ali Blackwell, (School of Education, ECU, CPPP), Professor Mindy Blaise and Dr Jo Pollitt (School of Education, ECU, The Ediths, Common Worlds Research Collective, CPPP)
(Date/time for Vancouver: 29th November, 5pm UTC)
(Date/time for Toronto: 29th November, 8pm UTC)
Feminist Responses: Thinking with Feminisms
Tuesday 22nd June. Time: 9am-10am AWST via Zoom
The Ediths’ Roundtable 63: Sweet, sweet sweaty play
Please join us in welcoming Tatiana Zakharova, an emerging scholar pursuing her doctorate at Western University (London, Canada). With a background in landscape architecture, Tatiana looks at the materiality of play by summoning methods of speculative fiction, feminist ethnography, and research creation. Tatiana will introduce her doctorate work which asks how entangling design and pedagogy might help us work at the question of living well with others. In working on developing a design for a playground space at an early-years centre in Ontario, Canada, Tatiana considers playgrounds as sites of pedagogical failures and possibilities. Sweating (as inspired by Sara Ahmed) with the concept of play in early childhood education, she considers how might we warp the notion of ‘play’ from a naturalized shape of public marvel (at playing children) to a distorted struggle that resonates against the public institutions of ‘good’ teaching and parenting? This invitation to think and do play in more complex ways, since neither the binary categories of safe≠risky, free≠guided, nature≠playground, outdoor≠indoor, toys≠loose parts, nor the non-critical adjectives like fun, voluntary, adventurous, constructive, appear capable of exploring its otherwise-worlds-making possibilities. Instead, what might become possible in early childhood education if we take up play not as yet another dress rehearsal of already existing social norms, but as propositions of constructing worlds (good, bad, ugly, and different), powers, knowledges?
Reading: Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary Affects (pp.1-13) . Duke University Press.
Bio: Tatiana Zakharova is a playground designer, and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at the Faculty of Education at Western University (London, Canada). Working with Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Tatiana’s research focuses on the entanglement of pedagogy and design. In her multidisciplinary work, Tatiana thinks with feminist post/ scholars to trouble the notion of play as a means of progress, imagining instead relationship-attuned play as worlding. Tatiana’s work is a collaborative experimentation, as it wishes to reimagine play/grounding potentialities in wondering how can we respond, through design, to the question of living [well] together? With gratitude, Tatiana lives, walks, plays, and writes on the traditional territories of the Anishnabek, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), and Ojibway/Chippewa peoples.
Tuesday 1st June. Time: 9am-10am AWST via Zoom
The Ediths’ Roundtable 62: Climate Justice Transitions
Please join us in welcoming Kylie Wrigley, who will present her PhD proposal, “Climate Justice Transitions: Community Organising through Feminist Participatory Action Research in Western Australia”. Underpinned by social eco-feminist theory, an agenda for intersectional, decolonising and transformational action-research and the participatory research paradigm, the study recognises that the prevailing climate policy and governance in WA (and Australia) is top-down, patriarchal, colonial, capitalistic and techno-optimistic; it does not offer deep or genuine solutions to our Earthly predicament. Kylie’s study entails a community partnership with the Climate Justice Union of WA (CJU) – a new social movement organisation that aims to build grassroots power to accelerate a fair and just transition that reduces and responds to warming in a way that leaves no one behind. The study, informed by Feminist Participatory Action Research, uses the Cooperative Inquiry (CI) method to work with co-researchers to develop, test and evaluate effective community organising approaches over several iterative cycles of action and reflection. In the first CI cycle, co-researchers will co-design the study’s scope, methods and values to be culturally responsive, deeply ethical and inclusive. The study aims to create Place-based knowledge and develop replicable and effective actions for climate justice.
Reading: The Climate Justice Union’s Acknowledgments page CJU. (2021). Acknowledgments. Climate Justice Union WA. https://climatejusticeunion.org/acknowledgements
Tuesday 11th May. Time: 9am-10am AWST via Zoom
The Ediths’ Roundtable 61: Thinking-with Whimsy
Please join Helen Clarke and Sharon Witt (Attention2Place, UK) as they offer a thinking provocation that grapples with the notion of whimsy for developing a journal article. They explore whimsy as a significant force for emergent pedagogical possibilities. Whimsy offers new ways of thinking and doing that present a feminist challenge to logical, rational, and habitual ways of being-with the world.
Helen and Sharon draw on Mann (2014) to explore thinking-with whimsy and consider what whimsy can offer to children’s ecological encounters and response-ableness. In this Roundtable they share lively research collaborations of field visiting, where attention is paid to sensory and embodied experiences while waiting in ‘chaotic place[s] of unknowing’ (Somerville, 2008) to see what is revealed. Helen and Sharon will share stories of whimsical happenings and will wonder at novelties generated through whimsical provocations and their value in/out of place. Through an ethics of care, they seek to make connections and deepen knowings. What alternative practices might be inspired by shifting emphasis to expanded notions of flourishing? How might whimsy unfold new insights into learning and living with the climate crisis in our common world?
References: Mann, J. (2015). Towards a politics of whimsy: Yarn bombing the city. Area, 47(1), 65-72
Somerville, M. J. (2008). ‘Waiting in the chaotic place of unknowing’: Articulating postmodern emergence. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 21(3), 209-220.
Reading: Mann, J. (2015) Towards a politics of whimsy: yarn bombing the city. Area, 47 (1), 65-72.
Bio: Helen Clarke and Sharon Witt work in the UK as independent scholars with Attention2Place. They engage in interdisciplinary work, with backgrounds and interests in science, geography, sustainability, climate change and global citizenship education. They explore posthumanist /new materialist feminist perspectives to consider relational thinking and place-responsiveness. Helen and Sharon are currently thinking with ‘pedagogies of place attention’ which seek to disrupt fieldwork-as-usual. They engage in experimental research through participatory, situated, and embodied approaches documenting elemental, more-than-human encounters.
Tuesday 27th April. 9am-10am AWST via Zoom
The Ediths’ Roundtable 60: The Challenge of a Woman in Charge: Dancing the Gillard Years
Join Sally Richardson, Western Australian theatre director and PhD candidate, in a discussion of the vilification of Julia Gillard. Julia Gillard’s Prime Ministership in Australia from 2010-13 evoked a form of media “stalking” and trial by an Australian public whipped-into a frenzy of “poisonous hatred”. This interlude was regarded as a particular low-point in political coverage and commentary, as author Samantha Trenoweth notes, “the political conversation was a soap opera broadcast at deafening decibels…” (1) Gillard’s “Misogyny Speech” delivered in parliamentary question time went viral due to its international resonance from so many who identified with her experience of misogyny and sexism. This Roundtable will share insight into Sally’s solo dance theatre work JULIA and discuss how women artists and feminist academics might work with and respond to the vilification of a parliamentary leader “portrayed as someone who should be burned at the stake…”(2)
1. Bewitched and Bedevilled: Women Write the Gillard Years. Samantha Trenoweth (2013 p. 8)
2. ibid, Tracy Spicer, p 280
Reading: VARNEY, D. “‘Not Now, Not Ever’: Julia Gillard and the Performative Power of Affect”. Performance Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times, edited by Diamond, E, and Varney, D, et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 25-38. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-59810-3
Bio: Sally Richardson is a Western Australian based director, writer, dramaturg, consultant and producer working across the performing arts. Her PHD research focuses on processes and approaches to the creation of Australian contemporary performance by women redressing colonial histories and stereotypes.Through her company Steamworks Arts (since 2001) she has sought to champion the voice, presence, agency and vision of women in the Arts.
Tuesday 13th April. 9am-10am AWST via Zoom
The Ediths’ Roundtable 059: Exploring the ugly as part of feminist creative practice
Please join Emilie Collyer, poet, playwright, and PhD candidate at RMIT, as she shares her creative writing practice with us. Drawing on Ngai and other theorists such as Halberstam and Ahmed, Emilie will use examples of her own poetic experiments into failure to discuss how language, writing, and reading can be fertile ground for feminist exploration. This Roundtable will explore the following questions: What role do notions of failure, doubt, disappointment, and competitiveness play in feminist creative practice? Eschewing the narrative of failure as part of a pathway to success, this presentation aims to focus on how ‘negative’ affects and emotions can be a driver for feminist creative practice and can shed light about the value of feminist creative texts.
Biography: Emilie Collyer is a poet and playwright currently undertaking a creative practice PhD at RMIT (Melbourne). Her area of research is how questions of failure and success intersect with sustainable feminist creative practice. Emilie comes to the academy from industry, with more than twenty years’ experience as a writer. As a new researcher, she is interested in how examining questions around feminist creative practice may benefit other writers, as well as students and teachers of creative writing, and also how such research might flow back to industry in terms of insights into sustainability of practice.
Reading: Introduction from: Ngai, S. (2005). Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press.
For a response by The Ediths to this Roundtable please see our blog series COLLECTIVE THINKING-WITH FEMINIST RESEARCHERS: A PRACTICE OF ENFOLDING: http://commonworlds.net/libraries-of-irritations/
Tuesday April 6th. 9am AWST via Zoom
The Ediths’ Roundtable 058: Relational Design Education by Proximity
Please join Ali Blackwell, Designer, Secondary Educator and Researcher as she practises her PhD proposal and discusses the potential for Relational Design practice to [re]frame Secondary Design Education. Her proposal, Relational Design Education by Proximity, adopts a posthuman view of nature, culture and agency and a relational ontology that considers Design as world-making, but also complicit in our ecological crisis.
This proposal is an example of a Creative Exegesis Model using proximity as provocation to focus material-discursive practice on relationality and explore alternative ways to teach Design to young people. This situates design practice as entangled in meaningful relations with more-than-human others and new knowledge embodied in material ways of knowing. Boundaries are dissolved between theory|practice, where knowing and doing are enmeshed together and discovery is produced in collective praxis. Emerging areas of Participatory Design, Transition Design and Speculative Design will also be discussed as showing potential for promoting change and informing teaching practice.
Reading: Escobar, A. (2018). Out of the Studio and into the Flow of Socionatural Life. In Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.
Bio: Ali Blackwell is a Designer, Teacher and Researcher in Perth, Western Australia. She teaches Arts, Design and Digital Technologies to young people in Years 7-12, writes Design Curriculum and strives to enrich Design learning with her Creative Doctorate Research. Her favourite design tools and materials are the pen tool, terracotta clay and brush pens.
Alongside her Design teaching and research, Ali also runs a Graphic Design business and an Arts Studio focussed on bringing curiosity back into learning. She is passionate about creativity and driven to make an open and creative space for everyone.
Tuesday March 30th. 9am AWST via Zoom
The Ediths’ Roundtable 057: Activism for climate justice through feminist participatory action research
This Roundtable discussion will examine the methodological paradigm of Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR), and how feminist activists can use FPAR to mobilise women’s movements for climate justice. Dr Naomi Godden, ECU, together with Kavita Naidu, international human rights lawyer from Fiji-Australia, will draw from a recent participatory evaluation of a Climate Justice-Feminist Participatory Action Research Programme with women’s rights groups in Asia (see reading Godden et al., 2020) to consider how feminist research and climate justice activism can intertwine. Some questions explored will include: Can FPAR enable grassroots activists to claim their power in the techno-patriarchal space of climate policy? What are the roles of a feminist academic in FPAR for climate justice? What are some ethical issues of FPAR in this context? Naomi and Kavita will also reflect on the following statement from a grassroots Bangladeshi activist researcher for climate justice: “Many women realise that resistance is the only way to survive…” (cited in Godden et al., 2020).
Reading: Godden, N., Macnish, P., Chakma, T., & Naidu, K. (2020). Feminist participatory action research as a tool for climate justice. Gender & Development, Special Issue: Climate Justice, 28(3), 593-615.
Biographies:
Naomi Joy Godden is a Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow at Edith Cowan University, Australia. She has a PhD in social work from Monash University. Naomi is an activist researcher, and she engages in Feminist Participatory Action Research with social movements in Australia, Asia and the Pacific to collectively understand the intersecting injustices of climate change and develop and implement actions to demand feminist responses in policy and practice.Naomi has 17 years of experience in community development, feminist research and activism in areas such as gender justice, poverty alleviation, and environmental justice, in grassroots community organisations, local government, international development agencies, universities and United Nations advocacy.
Kavita Naidu is an international human rights lawyer from Fiji-Australia working in feminist climate justice. She works with grassroots women in all their diversity from Asia and the Pacific to build a feminist climate justice movement. Currently, Kavita is working as a consultant with Edith Cowan University and Plan International Australia on a feminist participatory action research for Pacific Girls in a Changing Climate in Fiji and Kiribati. Kavita has published and presented widely on the gendered impacts of the climate crisis, movement building, development justice and COVID-19. Kavita also represents the Women & Gender Constituency at UNFCCC. Recently, she joined Progressive International as a Council member to work with activists, academics and political leaders from around the world to help shape a new progressive international order centered on all people’s well being.
For a response by The Ediths to this Roundtable please see our blog series COLLECTIVE THINKING-WITH FEMINIST RESEARCHERS: A PRACTICE OF ENFOLDING: http://commonworlds.net/resistance/
Tuesday March 16th 9am AWST via Zoom
The Ediths’ Roundtable 056: Colour me, Beautiful: knowledge creation in arts-based research
Join us as we welcome Dr. Vahri McKenzie, from the University of Canberra, as she leads us on a visit to Colour me, Beautiful, that is part of Bunbury Biennale 2021, a major contemporary art exhibition in Western Australia. For the first time in the history of the Biennale, artists were invited to explore a theme, HE | SHE | THEY. Colour me, Beautiful is a work of performance art that creates an intimate and playful experience with gallery visitors, accumulating visual traces of this engagement over the course of the project.
This Roundtable will discuss insights into process, technique and method, taking inspiration from Erin Manning’s ‘Against method’, which concerns the knowledge-creating potentials of arts-based research and models the technique of close reading as a creative act that is attentive to thought-feelings.
Reading: Erin Manning. (2015). Against method. In P. Vannini(ed.), Non-representational methodologies: re-envisioning research (pp. 52-71). Routledge.
Bio: Dr Vahri McKenzie is a Research Fellow within University of Canberra’s Centre for Creative and Cultural Research. Her projects combine creative practices and critical enquiries that illuminate the value of collaborative and creative encounters as models of, and practice for, ways of being together in a complex world.
For a response by The Ediths to this Roundtable please see our blog series COLLECTIVE THINKING-WITH FEMINIST RESEARCHERS: A PRACTICE OF ENFOLDING: http://commonworlds.net/participatory-practices-a-collective-close-reading/
Tuesday March 2nd 9am AWST via Zoom
The Ediths’ Roundtable 055: Alchemy with Paper: Exploring agentic relations
A participatory creative online workshop with Dr Miriam Potts (Victoria University, Melbourne)
Sometimes doing a creative activity helps me understand a theoretical concept (Potts, 2017). This workshop/presentation investigates emergent agencies between paper, people, metal, and water by experimenting with one of the activities in Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind, and Kocher’s (2016) book chapter entitled ‘Paper’. Attendeesare invited to participate in a short activity that will be augmented by a discussion of the emergence of agencies between materials and people, referring to Taylor, Pacini-Ketchabaw, and Blaise’s (2020) Common Worlds Microblog (see https://commonworlds.net/why-is-it-so-challenging-to-understand-the-agency-of-the-material-world-and-other-beings/). Miriam hopes relations will emerge between the ideas shared in the microblog, doing the activity described in the chapter, and discussing experiences between people, paper, metal, and water in this online workshop/presentation.
Materials needed: paper, scissors, water, towel. Please join the Zoom prepared!
Bio: Miriam is an independent artist/researcher based in Gippsland in south east Australia. She recently completed a doctoral project entitled Making with Bird… , a companion species study focusing on bird-human relations in urban areas of south east Australia. Her feminist practice attends to everyday encounters with common urban birds. Miriam’s creative practice experiments with feminist and posthuman research methodologies and is theoretically based on Donna Haraway’s work. Miriam is currently participating in a collaborative installation about species loss.
For a response by The Ediths to this Roundtable please see our blog series COLLECTIVE THINKING-WITH FEMINIST RESEARCHERS: A PRACTICE OF ENFOLDING: http://commonworlds.net/alchemy_of_becoming_unstuck/
Tuesday February 16th 9am AWST via Zoom
The Ediths’ Roundtable 054: Deep mapping a river: Watery relations
Please join Dr Jo Jones, Senior Lecturer in the School of Writing and Cultural Studies at Curtin University, in her discussion of the relationship between literature, rivers and deep mapping through the first two chapters of Olivia Laing’s, To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface (2011).
The anthropologist Veronica Strang (2020) reminds us that water is good for thinking with and through. In my current project I collect and map the literature of Perth rivers in order to trace interrelations between the Swan and Canning rivers (Derbarl Yarrigan and Djarlgarra) and their human and non-human inhabitants. Narrative and poetic texts continue to immerse readers/listeners in embodied and abstract concepts through watery figuration, whether they are Nyoongar songs that pre-date colonisation or more recent works. Often, the texts navigate relationships to place that trouble the instrumental structures of colonial expansion and the ensuing environmental devastation. I argue that, when read as a dense collection of works, the literature of rivers can be interpreted as a type of “deep map”, a palimpsestic method of connecting to place that is “voluminous, multivocal, open-ended …[and] pays attention to the patina of place … the interpretations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and poetic, the factual and fictional, the discursive and the sensual” (Pearson & Shanks, 2001, p. 54)
Reading: Laing, O. (2011). To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface. Canongate. https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/To_the_River/ZT7QihwxmVkC?hl=en&gbpv=0 [Please click on Preview and read to the end (33pages)]
Ref: Pearson, M., & Shanks, M. (2001). Theatre/archaeology. Routledge.
Bio: Dr Jo Jones is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Writing and Cultural Studies at Curtin University. Her research interests address the complex connection between literature, history and place. Dr Jones has worked on a number of projects that have addressed Australian historical novels, spatial pedagogies in Australian classrooms, and most recently she has edited a book on a deep mapping and the four rivers in Perth, Australia and Aberdeen, Scotland (in process UWAP, 2021). Her current research continues to map the literary connections of the Swan and Canning Rivers. Her monograph Falling Backwards: The Australian Historical Novel and the History Wars (UWAP, 2018) won the 2019 Niall Lucy Award.
For a response by The Ediths to this Roundtable please see our blog series COLLECTIVE THINKING-WITH FEMINIST RESEARCHERS: A PRACTICE OF ENFOLDING: http://commonworlds.net/movements-and-moving-thinking-feminist-practices-with-rivers/
Tuesday February 2nd 9am AWST via Zoom
The Ediths’ Roundtable 053: The feminist killjoy in early childhood education
Please join Professors Mindy Blaise, ECU and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Western University, Canada as they share an excerpt, K – Killjoy, from their upcoming book, ‘A postdevelopmental lexicon for 21st century childhoods’. Drawing from the work of feminist cultural studies scholar Sarah Ahmed (2017) they suggest to think with the figure of the killjoy as an alternative to the solitary and polite activist leader who tries to make everyone feel comfortable and to get along. They argue that the killjoy activates the feminist work that must be done if their aim is to transform education. They also explore Ahmed’s notion of survival, as a necessary shared feminist act, and discuss how the research collectives and networks they have co-founded, such as the Common Worlds Research Collective, #FEAS Feminist Educators Against Sexism, The Ediths, and the Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory are part of these collaborative survival tactics. Making links to their own practice, they highlight feminist killjoys that have influenced their work.
Reading: Ahmed, S. (2017). Conclusion 1: A Killjoy Survival Kit. In Living a feminist life, pp. 235-249. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
For a response by The Ediths to this Roundtable please see our blog series COLLECTIVE THINKING-WITH FEMINIST RESEARCHERS: A PRACTICE OF ENFOLDING: http://commonworlds.net/making-room/
EOI call for Ediths Roundtable Presenters in 2021
Are you interested in discussing feminist concepts, theorists, and practices that have informed your work with a group of feminist interdisciplinary researchers concerned with climate change? If so, we invite you to submit a 250-word Expression of Interest to facilitate an Ediths Roundtable in 2021 based on a reading that grounds your work.
The Ediths Roundtables are held over Zoom, fortnightly, and are for one-hour. In 2021 they are scheduled to occur on Tuesdays 9am Australian Western Standard Time.
The Ediths are a feminist interdisciplinary research collective. We use socially engaged creative methodologies to conduct ecologically responsive research. As an interdisciplinary research collective, we aim to broaden our understandings around feminist responses to climate change and what this means for pedagogy. We welcome presentations from established, mid and early career scholars, as well as graduate students from any discipline.
Why present at an Ediths Roundtable?
- Connect with an international and interdisciplinary network
- Share your knowledge, passion and responses toward generating collective social and ecological justices
- Develop your scholarly ability to grapple with ideas and make connections between feminist theories and practices
- Contribute to the producing and generating of knowledge and practices in a collegial, collaborative, and rigorous way
How to submit your EOI:
If you are interested in the opportunity to present at an Ediths Roundtable, please submit your EOI via email to The Ediths c/- j.pollitt@ecu.edu.au by 15th Jan 2021. Your email should include:
- Your place of work or study.
- A 100 word bio, which includes your name, affiliation, and disciplinary area. Also include a brief summary of your research background/experience/interests.
- A 250 word (max) Expression of Interest which includes the title of your presentation and the title of the proposed reading. Please outline the concepts and theorist that will frame the Roundtable and how the reading informs or relates to your/other feminist work.
Please consider the date/time of the Roundtables and if this works for you. Unfortunately, the day/time might not work for all of our international colleagues. Please also note these sessions will not be recorded.
Due Date for EOI: Jan 15th, 2021.
Thank you!
Look out for an EOI call to contribute to our 2021 Roundtable series.
2020
Tuesday November 10th 1.15-2.15pm AWST via Zoom
The Ediths’ Roundtable : 052 Conversations with Rain: How poetic pedagogies contribute to transforming human-environment relations
Join us to hear Lilly Blue, Learning and Creativity Research Manager at the Art Gallery of WA, and Jo Pollitt, Postdoctoral Research Fellow share their work on the award-winning Conversations with Rain project. Deliberately eschewing didactic learning ‘about’ climate crisis, this research explores poetic pedagogies as key in transforming human-environment relations. Discussion will focus on the value and application of creative arts practice in deepening relations with more-than-human worlds. The collaboratory (collaboration + laboratory) model of child/artist/researcher/gallery as co-researchers in attending to the materiality of rain will also be discussed.
Reading: Harriet Hawkins and Anja Kanngieser (2017) Artful climate change communication: overcoming abstractions, sensibilities, and distances. WIREs Climate Change 2017, Vol 8, Issue 5.
Tuesday October 27th 1.15-2.15pm AWST via Zoom
The Ediths’ Roundtable : 051 Presenting-as-thinking with pedagogies of humility with Vanessa Wintoneak, School of Education, ECU.
Pedagogies of humility is an idea emerging from the persistent condition of not knowing as Vanessa thinks-writes-walks as a settler body on Aboriginal Country. She sees pedagogies of humility as a radically relational practice that offers counterhegemonic movements against current epochs of power in the field of education. In this Roundtable, Vanessa will discuss how and why the condition of not knowing is important in expanding her current conceptualisation of humility. She will do this by untangling a specific encounter from her walking based research to highlight moments of humility and engage in critical reflection to demonstrate how pedagogies of humility are always in development, uncomfortable, messy, and generative.
Tuesday October 13, 1:1.5-2.15pm AWST via Zoom
The Ediths’ Roundtable 050: ‘Unlearning and Sentipensando (Feeling-thinking) with Decolonial Feminisms’ with Dr. Laura Rodriguez Castro, Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University. Please see the Events page for more details.
Tuesday September 29, 1:1.5-2.15pm AWST via Zoom
The Ediths’ Roundtable 049: ‘Research-Creation: Queer-Feminist Methods in Arts and Pedagogy Research’, with Dr. Sarah E. Truman, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Melbourne University. Please see the Events page for more details.
Tuesday September 15, 1:1.5-2.15pm AWST via Zoom
The Ediths’ Roundtable 048: ‘Tender Places: Reflections on place based creative research’, with Kelly Lee Hickey, Institute for Sustainable and Liveable Cities, Victoria University. Please see the Events page for more details.
Tuesday September 8, 1:1.5-2.15pm AWST via Zoom
The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable 047: String Figuring as Methodology: Noticing and Engaging ‘Down the Back’ in Early Childhood.
Join Katie Pitchford as she practises her MEd proposal. Katie’s project takes inspiration from Donna Haraway’s (2016) String Figures as thinking-with and doing-with practices that seek to offer alternative ethical arts-informed pedagogical practice for early childhood settings. Situated as a feminist post-qualitative project, and using a Common Worlds framework, this project resituates the more-than-human in early childhood education as lively and engaging collaborators in children’s worldings. The proposed project is set ‘down the back’, in an overlooked outdoor area of a childcare centre in Perth, Western Australia. This project hopes to explore the overlooked everyday encounters between humans and more-than-humans through noticing, engaging and string figuring together. Katie hopes this project might offer possibilities for further situated responsive and creative pedagogies that are inclusive toward ethical futures.
Reading: Donna Haraway (2016) “Playing string figures with companion species” in Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Tuesday September 1, 1:1.5-2.15pm AWST via Zoom
The Ediths’ Roundtable 046: ‘Speculative care’ with Dr. Xan Chacko, TC Beirne School of Law, University of Queensland. Please see the Events page for more details.
Tuesday August 25th, 1.15-2.15pm AWST via zoom
In preparation for our upcoming Four-part Interdisciplinary Feminist Research Practices Roundtable Series (1 September – 20 October), we invite you to consider what feminist practices offer and why they are necessary in educational research right now! We will read Cecilia Åsberg & Rosi Braidotti’s Feminist posthumanities: An introduction and Mindy Blaise’s Gender Discourses in Play to identify concepts and ideas that ground feminist practices in educational research.
Readings: Cecilia Åsberg & Rosi Braidott (2018) Feminist posthumanities: An introduction in A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62140-1_1 Mindy Blaise (2014). Gender discourses and play in L. Brooker M. Blaise & S. Edwards The SAGE handbook of play and learning in early childhood (pp. 115-127). London: SAGE Publications Ltd doi: 10.4135/9781473907850.n11p115-127
Tuesday August 18th, 1.15-2.15pm AWST via zoom
The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable 044: Paying attention to water relations for generating new climate change pedagogies in early childhood education
Join Claire O’Callaghan as she practices her MEd proposal: Paying attention to water relations: Poetic inquiry and pedagogical documentation as curious practices. Claire’s project will explore climate pedagogies with particular interest in Western Australia’s current water crisis. Human and more-than-human relations will be examined 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 is grounded in feminist new materialist knowledges and framed by a focus on human and more-than-human relations. The study will engage with poetic inquiry as curious practice, paying attention to present absences and examining the poetics of pedagogical documentation.
Reading: Donna Haraway (2015) “A Curious Practice” in Angelaki, 20:2, 5-14, DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2015.1039817
Tuesday August 11th, 1.15-2.15pm AWST via zoom
The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable 043: Practice and Place
Join us as we welcome Dr Annette Nykiel, maker and practice-led researcher to yarn about practicing amidst place. Annette wanders quietly and slowly in non-urban places, noticing the ground between her feet, gleaning materials and found objects for fibre and textile works. She wonders with Isabelle Stengers (2005) about how to “make present” that which causes her to think, to act and to feel. Making do with natural fibres, pigments and discarded materials she makes marks, creates vessels and site-specific installations relating to her embodied experiences and inviting stories from non-human voices. Please read Annette’s paper ‘How ethical is a ball of string?’ and join us in a discussion focussed on her artwork and the wetlands from which they emerge in the context of the exhibition ‘Unfolding Conversations: Emerging Connections’ currently on show at Gallery 25, ECU Mt Lawley.
Ref: Nykiel, A. (2020) “How ethical is a ball of string” in MacNeill, K. (Ed.), Bolt, B. (Ed.) The Meeting of Aesthetics and Ethics in the Academy. Routledge: London
Tuesday August 4th, 1.15-2.15pm AWST via zoom
The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable 042: Pedagogies of Attention
Please join us this week as we welcome Dr Sharon Witt and Dr Helen Clarke, educators and researchers from the UK to share their emergent and generative encounters with places as ‘Pedagogies of Place Attention’. They will explore the notion of gifting attention as resistance to nature-culture divide. More-than-human elements of place are explored as lively and responsive, in joyful collaboration. They will share principles of practice as ethico-onto-epistemological entanglements, with a focus on playful, imaginative encounters that unsettle some of the contemporary discourses in education. What might attention to place mean in an educational context? The article ‘Returning the Gift’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer, will help us think with the notion of ‘attention as a gift’.
Ref: Kimmerer, R. W. (2014). Returning the Gift. Minding Nature, 7 (2) 18-24.
Tuesday July 28th, 1.15-2.15pm AWST via zoom
The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable 041: Thinking with bias
Join us as we welcome Dr Roxanne Fozard and grapple with negotiating unconscious bias. Roxanne will share the ethical challenges she faced in her project; ‘Repositioning the Denkbild: A painting investigation into deaths in custody in 21st century Western Australia’ as a non-Indigenous, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander person. Beginning by locating her practice as part of settler-colonising society, Roxanne will discuss how she explored her own complicity in the privilege of whiteness, and how unconscious bias contributes to the hegemony of white ways of knowing. The article ‘Old Space and New Place: The Pilbara’ by Britta Kuhlenbeck (2013) will help us think with Roxanne’s development of a methodological praxis to responsibly negotiate sensitive cultural issues.
Tuesday July 21st, 1.15-2.15pm AWST
The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable 040: I WALK TO SEE, I WALK TO KNOW: WALKING TO WONGAWOL
This week we welcome Cim Sears who will share her research into the absence of Western Desert Aboriginal narratives via her own discovered ancestral connections which were historically erased by the State. Cim works from a a place of deep unknowing utilising a methodology of walking (Chinna, 2014) as knowing and making, and as an interconnectivity between body and space/place, supported by Derrida’s ideas of absence/presence and phenomenologist (Merleau-Ponty, 1962) who believes the body and world cannot be separated. Cim’s practice led research is primarily characterised by printmaking processes, photographic techniques and ceramics and draws on Tim Ingold’s (2010) work which examines the difference between walking in the physical landscape and walking in the imagination through painting, music, writing and reading. Ingold describes how medieval monastic practitioners believed that walking and writing emanated from the same source and text and landscape were considered “ontologically equivalent” (Ingold, 2010, p. 17). He also describes how The Yolngu people have no text but they “inhabit their paintings” (Ingold, 2010, p. 19). Please read Ingold’s (2010) article “Ways of mind-walking: reading, writing, painting” and join Cim in grappling with these concepts.
Visit the exhibition by Cim Sears: I WALK TO SEE, I WALK TO KNOW: WALKING TO WONGAWOL at ECU’s Gallery 25 until July 24th: https://www.ecu.edu.au/schools/arts-and-humanities/news-and-events/school-of-arts-and-humanities/2020/06/exhibition-i-walk-to-see,-i-walk-to-know-walking-to-wongawol
Reference: Ingold, T. (2010). Ways of mind-walking: reading, writing, painting. Visual Studies, 25(1), 15-23.
Tuesday July 14th, 1.15-2.15pm AWST
The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 039 Collective-reading practice: Anti-colonial place-naming & counter-mapping practices with water
Join Vanessa Wintoneak as she uses a feminist collective-reading practice to stir up developing ideas for a paper she is writing in relation to anti-colonial place-naming & counter-mapping practices with Derbarl Yerrigan. First Nations scholars Hayman, James, and Wedge (2018), suggest slow activism and narrative ecologies have “the ability to disrupt increasingly entrenched notions and narrow definitions of the Anthropocene(s) that continue to reproduce this mono-cultural imaginary”. This article has been significant to Vanessa’s thinking-with-river for radical climate change pedagogies in the early years. A light pre-reading of the article is recommended.
Reference: Hayman, E., James, C., & Wedge, M. (2018). Future rivers of the Anthropocene or whose Anthropocene is it? Decolonising the Anthropocene! Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 7(1), pp. 76-92. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/30396
Tuesday July 7th, 5-7pm AWST- Special event call for participation in Project P:
Project P: Zine making event: The Political, the Personal, THE PRACTICAL
In lieu of a Roundtable this week, we invite you to participate in a #FEAS intervention that sets out to PAUSE the panic that is affecting many of us at the moment. Struggling to sort your LONG LIST? Finding that focussing on your goals and keeping productive is nigh on impossible during the pandemic?Are you distracted by politics, protests and polarisation? Are your nights wakeful as you worry about the security of your livelihood/health/family in far away places? Do you find yourself over digital meetings where you talk all day and say nothing, achieve nothing, and cross nothing off your list? IF this is YOU join us for the third and final Project P: Zine making event: The Political, the Personal, THE PRACTICAL on TUESDAY 7th JULY at the following times:AWST: 5pmAEST: 7pm Aotearoa New Zealand: 9pmGMT: 10amCET: 11am (Apologies to those of you whose time zones don’t fit this schedule – next time!) TO INDICATE INTEREST in PARTICIPATING and receive an INVITATION email j.pollitt@ecu.edu.au
PROJECT P: focuses on the political, the personal, and the practical as we attempt to slow down the endless accumulating news feeds and unrealistic work expectations about productivity during this pandemic.Project P: has a colon, because it is an emerging project and we encourage you to make your own contribution to the beyond as new ways of being emerge from pandemic living.Project P: Personal is a postal project and part of our newest suite of arts-based interventions that are based on the Political, the Personal, and the Practical. In light of the COVID-19 Pandemic we are setting out to put a PAUSE on the PANIC that many of us are feeling. Now, more than ever we need solidarity. Join us!
Tuesday June 30th, 1.15-2.15pm
The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 038 Land acknowledgement +
Please join us as we engage in a creative Acknowledgement of Country practice with the work of Lisa Bellear, a Goernpil woman of the Noonuccal people of Minjerribah. Bellear was a poet, photographer, activist, spokeswoman, dramatist, comedian, and broadcaster whose “memory continues to inspire” and whose poems offer a challenge to Australia “to grow, through reconciliation and beyond” (Bellear, 2018, p. 18).
We ask you to read the attached document, which is an introduction to Bellear and the collection of poems that we have drawn from, prior to joining the Roundtable. During the Roundtable, please have a device (mobile recommended) that you can read a pdf document on and make audio recordings (ie. voice memos) with as we have planned for an embodied practice! You will also need Vanessa’s email address, instructions to follow at the Roundtable, vwinton0@our.ecu.edu.au.
Reference: Bellear, L. (2018). Aboriginal country (J. J. Brown, Ed.). UWA Publishing
Tuesday 23rd June, 1.15-2.15pm via zoom
You are invited to The Ediths’ weekly Roundtable 037: Experimenting with embodied weather: Weather-making in the early years
This week The Ediths welcomes Dr Tonya Rooney from ACU, in collaboration with Professor Mindy Blaise and Dr Jo Pollitt as they share findings from an ongoing interdisciplinary weather walking ethnography with young children that experiments with embodied weather. Instead of presenting weather as something that exists outside of the human body to observe, measure, and control, embodied weather engages with the entanglement of weathers, bodies (human and non-human), and materiality. To illustrate how experimenting with embodied weather is possible, Tonya, Mindy, and Jo will share three weather-making stories; collaborative clouding, material skies and making rain. These stories interfere with developmental understandings of learning about weather and illustrate the potential of bringing a dance sensibility to children’s weather work in revealing the ways that children are moving and making-with weather across bodies.
Background reading: Weathering : Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality by Astrida Neimanis & Rachel Loewen Walker https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/hypa.12064
PAUSE: The Edith’s are pressing pause on the Roundtables for two weeks – see you all at 037 on June 23rd! Meantime read about Project P:
There has been much cause for pause lately and one response we had was to try and make room for pausing amid the panic. Provoked by the recent panicked flurry to move research and conferences online, and as part of their #FEAS work, Mindy Blaise, Jo Pollitt, and Dr Emily Gray (RMIT), developed a lo-fi hands##-on feminist driven zine-making workshop. In light of the COVID-19 Pandemic we set out to put a PAUSE on the PANIC that many of us were/are feeling. #FEAS Feminist Educators Against Sexism was Invited by the Comparative International Education Society (CIES) to practice arts-based interventions to everyday sexisms at their annual meeting in Miami, we instead pressed pause and launched PROJECT P: the political, the personal, and the practical. After two targeted zoom room sessions, we will be hosting a final version – look out for an invitation mid June, and meantime collect your own pauses in the next two weeks and prepare to share one of them on return with Roundtable #037 on June 23rd.
Tuesday 2nd June, 1:15-1:55pm (please note adjusted time)
You are invited to The Ediths’ Roundtable 036: Sitting spots as in-between spaces for diffractive thinking
Please join Karen Nociti (ECU lecturer and Master by Research student) as she shares her experiences of walking and thinking-with Gabiljee, the watery place at the end of the river. Using blogging as an opening up for thinking differently about data, she is experimenting with the concept of sitting spots as in-between spaces that provokes a shift from reflective to diffractive thinking. At the Roundtable, participants will be invited to think diffractively with and about Place, data and blogging as Karen shares the beginnings of a move towards thinking differently.
Please read Karen Barad’s Chapter 2, Diffractions: Differences, contingencies, and entanglements that matter, in Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, (71-94). Duke University Press.
Tuesday 26th May, 1.15pm-2.15pm via zoom
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable 035: Thinking with Thrombolites, Extinction, and Education
We are living in a time of an unprecedented mass extinction, a time when right on our doorsteps, forms of life are slipping away, often unnoticed. What might this mean for education? Drs Jane Merewether (ECU), Brad Gobby (Curtin), Annette Nykiel (artist-researcher) and groups of young children have been visiting thrombolites, a form of life at Noorook Yalgorup-Lake Clifton (100 km south of Perth) that now teeters on the edge of extinction. Please join them this week in thinking with thrombolites, extinction, and education.
Background reading: Chrulew, M., & De Vos, R. (2019). Extinction: Stories of Unravelling and Reworlding. https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/article/view/6688/7231
Tuesday 19th May, 1.15pm-2.15pm via zoom
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable 034: ‘Come all savage creatures’: Recruiting our affective selves as tools for data analysis
Continuing the Ediths Roundtable explorations into affect and using concept as method, we welcome Dr Vahri McKenzie and Professor Kathy Boxall who will discuss how they sought to change their engagement with focus group data from the applied theatre research project Bakkhai by extending an affective focus from the studio into the study. They pose the question, “How might we further extend these approaches to ‘traditional’ data and be bolder in our applications?”
Please read Vahri and Kathy’s forthcoming chapter and join us to make your own affective moves.
McKenzie, V. & Boxall, K. (forthcoming): ‘Come all savage creatures’: Becoming Bakkhai in the south west of Western Australia. In A. Harris & S. Holman Jones (eds.), Affective Movements, Methods and Pedagogies, Routledge.
See images from Bakkhai here: https://www.vahrimckenzie.com.au/uncategorized/bakkhai-2017/
Tuesday 12th May, 1.15pm-2.15pm via zoom
You are invited to the Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable 033: A challenge to think with ethico-onto-epistemology, relationality and care.
Together with MEd candidate Claire O’Callaghan, we invite you to join us in the challenge of thinking with and through concepts of ethico-onto-epistemology, relationality and care.
Ethico-onto-epistem-ology is a term coined by feminist physicist-philosopher Karen Barad, to describe the entanglement between ethics, ontology and epistemology when engaging in knowledge production with the world and its human and non-human inhabitants. By using the term ethico-onto-epistem-ology, Barad implies that humans are no longer accepted as innocent bystanders looking over the world and its phenomena as separate beings. Instead humans are immersed beings living within the world as co-constructors of knowledge.
With this in mind, please read the recent publication by Fikile Nxumalo with Marleen Tepeyolotl Villanueva – (Re)storying Water: Decolonial Pedagogies of Relational Affect with Young Children in the book Mapping the Affective Turn in Education: Theory, Research, and Pedagogy (Dernikos et al., 2020) and come ready for the challenge!
032 Tuesday 5th May, 1.15-2.15pm
You are invited to the Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 032 Rubbings from Common Worlds Mini-research Internships
Join Vanessa as she shares her experiences from the Common Worlds Mini-research Internships she took part in early this year in Canada. Generously made possible by Professor Blaise’s ECU VC Professorial Research Fellowship, Vanessa’s presenting-as-thinking with these mini-research internships will be developed into a paper for her PhD by Publication and in particular, she is experimenting with the concept of rubbings from these events. At the Roundtable we invite discussion on what might be argued in a paper from these events and reflection on how mini-research internships can be a generative practice.
031 Tuesday 29th April, 1.15-2.15pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 031: What can affect teach us?
Join us in welcoming Dr Maggie McAlinden, who will share how and why affect interests her as she rethinks her program of research on teacher empathy and emotion in language education.
Affect theorists Bessie Dernikos, Nancy Lesko, Stephanie McCall, and Alyssa Niccolini invite us to “feel education differently by dwelling on the sensation of affect” in their recent (2020) edited book on the affective turn in education. They ask us to explore some affective scratchings on what affect does, (not what it is). Educational and cultural theorist, Gregory Seigworth, shares in an interview (Chapter 6: Affect’s First Lesson) that while affect may not be the first condition of any form of existence, it is the first lesson. So what can affect teach us?
Join us as we muddle together through the potentials and possibilities of thinking-with affect in our research.
Please find readings attached and come ready to join the discussion!
030 Tuesday 21st April, 1.15-2.15pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 030 Concepts: Orientations for thinking
Cultural theorist, Claire Colebrook, suggests that rather than seeing concepts as labels or generalisations, researchers instead consider using concepts as methods, or orientations for thinking. This then provokes us to ask, what are concepts and what does it mean to use concepts as methods in educational research? Education researchers Hillevi Lenz Taguchi and Elizabeth St Pierre (2017) take up these questions in their article Using Concept as Method in Educational and Social Science Inquiry. Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman expand these ideas further in their article, On the need for methods beyond proceduralism: Speculative middles, (in) tensions, and response-ability in research.
Join us as we use these articles as a springboard for our Roundtable discussion this week.
029 Tuesday 7th April, 1.15-2.15pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 029 Presenting-as-thinking with a research proposal
Join Vanessa Wintoneak for a presenting-as-thinking Roundtable for her PhD proposal titled Experimentations and Worldings: Radical Relationality and Early Childhood Pedagogy. This project is a response to calls for new ways of thinking and producing knowledge in times of rapid environmental change. The study is framed by a Common Worlds and Feminist New Materialisms lens where living well together in decolonised futures is paramount. The project is grounded in feminist epistemes and framed as having an experimentalist orientation through enacting practices that engage propositionally, speculatively, and experimentally with early childhood pedagogy. At the Roundtable Vanessa will invite lively and generative discussion!
https://ecu.zoom.us/j/972685866?pwd=V3o3RHNJZVgxUm9QT3dkSzlXejRCZz09
Password: 861275
028 Tuesday 31st March, 1.15-2.15pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 028 Responding collectively in these times https://ecu.zoom.us/j/933665300?pwd=UXp1am0zaTBJcFNITHAxK2F6Mll6UT09
Using Otto Scharmer and Bruno Latour’s recent blog posts as jumping off-points for discussion, join us as we consider how to respond in these times. “What if we used this disruption as an opportunity to let go of everything that isn’t essential in our life, in our work, and in our institutional routines? How might we reimagine how we live and work together?” (Otto Scharmer, 2020)
Please read these two attached blog posts and come to the roundtable with questions these readings raise for you and the research you are doing. We will begin the roundtable by sharing your questions.
https://medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/eight-emerging-lessons-from-coronavirus-to-climate-action-683c39c10e8b Otto Scharmer, 2020
https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/26/is-this-a-dress-rehearsal/ Bruno Latour, 2020
027 Tuesday 24th March via zoom, 1.15-2.15pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable via zoom: 027 Oddkin world-making in a preschool https://us04web.zoom.us/j/575551831
Please join Mindy Blaise as she shares part of the plenary she was invited to give in Miami, Florida at the Comparative and International Education Society Conference. With long-time collaborators Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Affrica Taylor, Mindy, Veronica, and Affrica are ‘in conversation’ with Donna Haraway’s thoughts on ‘Education in the Chthulucene’. Mindy’s paper takes up Donna’s interest in kin making and the making of kin by exploring how young children are already making oddkin with multispecies worlds. In light of Haraway’s (2016) argument that “staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaboration and combinations…”(p.4), Mindy’s paper draws from her multispecies ethnographic research that shows how young children’s repeated encounters with dead blowfish are cultivating weird and wonderful more-than-human and non-normative relations. These situated, entangled and worldly collaborations are not about how animals (even dead ones) teach children to care, but they are about all creatures making worlds together in unexpected, zany, and necessary ways.
026 Tuesday 10th March, 1.15-2.15pm
You are invited to the Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: O26 What happens when you pay attention to waste?
Please join Katie Pitchford and Claire O’Callaghan as they share their projects which explored children’s relations with (waste)paper and an algal bloom. These inquiries were part of a larger study involving six early learning centres which investigated children’s relations with waste through dialogue, pedagogical documentation and the creative arts. The project brought to light the limitations of developmentalism, purity and innocence, colonialism and individual responsibility. Come and hear how Claire and Katie were provoked, challenged, and transformed by waste.
025 Tuesday 3rd March, 1.15-2.15pm
You are invited to the Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: O25 Experimenting with and sharing new reading group protocols, with a feminist spin!
Please join Vanessa Wintoneak and Karen Nociti as they share their experiences and insights gained from the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference, held in Brisbane. They were inspired by the Composting Feminisms Workshop, conducted by Astrida Neimanis (University of Sydney) and Jennifer Hamilton (University of New England) and would like to build on what they learned about reading and thinking collectively. They would like to acknowledge that this trip was made possible by the School of Education Strategic Funding for Professional Learning scheme. Come ready to read, discuss, and experiment with a curated set of readings-poems-art. No need to prepare, just show up, readings provided.
024 Tuesday 25 February, 1.15-2.15pm
You are invited to the Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 024 Responding to Ecological Challenges with/in Contemporary Childhoods Colloquium
Please join us as Professor Mindy Blaise shares insights from participating in the above colloquium held in London, Ontario, Canada. This SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada) funded research event, which included keynote speakers Alexis Shotwell, Erica Violet Lee and Affrica Taylor, brought together researchers and educators to engage in cross-disciplinary dialogues while collectively building speculative pedagogies that work to answer to the complex more-than-human places and spaces we inherit with children. Find out about the ways in which collaboratories are producing climate change pedagogies related to food, trees, water, weather, energy, plastics, and much more!
Farewell 2019!
The Ediths would like to thank colleagues for their support and participation during YEAR 1 of The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable, an initiative to support and strengthen a feminist interdisciplinary research program. We wish everyone a safe and relaxing break. See you in 2020.
Need a summer reading recommendation? Why not revisit (or read for the first time), Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s Talkin’ up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism. We will begin 2020 with this important text.
2019
023 Thursday 5 December, 2-3pm
You are invited to the Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 023 Doing Acknowledgement to Country Otherwise
Please join us as we workshop and think through doing Acknowledgement to Country otherwise with guest Simon Stewart, Aboriginal dancer, choreographer and WAAPA lecturer. Proposing a collective and interdisciplinary approach we will table both provocations of protocol and risk in addressing the complexities of ‘belonging and not-belonging’ raised in Emma Kowal’s (2015) piece, Welcome to Country, Acknowledgement, Belonging and White Anti-racism (attached).
022 Thursday 28 November, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 022 Lively dialogues: Resituating and rearticulating Emu relations
Please join us in welcoming Dr Catherine Hamm, Senior Lecturer, LaTrobe University. She and Mindy will share their paper, Lively dialogues: resituating and rearticulating Emu relations.
In early childhood education, it is common for young children and their teachers to take excursions to local zoos. Zoos are often perceived as educational places, where children learn about wildlife, habitats, conservation, and preservation. However, rarely are these educational experiences problematized to question the developmental, colonial, racial, and gendered knowledges that zoos construct about human-nature relations.
Our paper moves beyond acknowledging the human boundary-making and domesticating practices found in modern zoos by enacting a relational (collective) ethic of accountability through practices that resituate and rearticulate ourselves to be ‘… members of multispecies communities that emerge through the entanglements of agential beings’ (Rose et al. 2012, 3). We present resituating and rearticulating practices through a series of lively dialogues based on Emu encounters that we had at a Melbourne zoo. We argue that resituating and rearticulating work towards dismantling the systems that enable human exceptionalism, white privilege, phallogocentrism, and a sense of superiority about the world. Resituating and rearticulating are pedagogies that generate collective ethical relations which are needed in these troubling times.
021 Thursday 21 November, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 021 Reading and thinking-with Indigenous children’s literature to unsettle colonial relations.
Please join us as we read More-than-human kinship relations with Indigenous Children’s Picture Books, by Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Meagan Montpetit and then think together with Australian Indigenous children’s literature. We are thrilled to welcome Helen Adam, who will bring her expertise in children’s books, inclusion, and diversity to help us think with Indigenous children’s literature to unsettle colonial relations. Please bring along some Indigenous children’s literature to inform our discussion.
020 Thursday 14 November, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 020 Q&A Broadside
Please join us as we watch and discuss the recent Q&A program Broadside https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyPHwp5yIzY
The panel featured high-profile feminists – Egyptian-American writer Mona Eltahawy, Indigenous screenwriter Nayuka Gorrie, journalist Jess Hill, business leader Hana Assafiri and anti-ageism campaigner Ashton Applewhite.
We will discuss public perceptions and reactions to this episode of Q&A and will ask how we, as feminist researchers, can create generative and inclusive spaces both within the academy and beyond.
019 Thursday 07 November, 2-3pm
You are invited to the Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 019 #FEAS Feminist Salutes!
Please join us as we host #FEAS Feminist Salutes with co-founders Mindy Blaise, ECU, Linda Knight and Emily Gray, RMIT University.
Letter writing campaigns are common in feminist networks. Instead of writing letters of protest, as a gesture of appreciation, #FEAS invite you to write and send postcards to feminists in our communities who have made a difference. It might be a teacher, an author, a supervisor, an activist, or community member—anyone who has inspired, challenged or supported us along our feminist journeys so far.
018 Thursday 31 October, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 018 Thinking together: Posthuman Knowledges
Please join us as we celebrate paper submissions to the Harvard Educational Review, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Studies in Philosophy and Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, and more!
But wait that’s not all! We will also be thinking-with Rosi Braidotti as we watch together her recent lecture, Posthuman Knowledge, hosted by the Harvard Graduate Design School https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/event/rosi-braidotti/. Join us as we consider what kinds of posthuman critical interventions are necessary during these times of climate crisis, discrimination, and exclusion.
017 Thursday 24 October, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 017 Writing Group: Methodology
Please join us as we discuss methodology and how we position and discuss feminist, experimental, emergent, and speculative methodologies in our work. Please bring your methodology section of your paper to share.
016 Thursday 17 October, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 016 Writing Group: Strengthening your structure
Please join us as we work towards transforming our conference papers to journal articles. Building on last week’s Roundtable, we will be focusing on strengthening the structure of our articles. Please bring printed copies of the outline of your article to share.
015 Thursday 10 October, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 015 Writing Group: Matching your article to suitable journals
Please join us as we continue working on our papers. Building on last week’s Roundtable, we will be sharing how we are advancing our argument in our papers. Please bring a printed copy of your latest draft to share with a writing partner and the name of the journal you will be submitting your paper.
014 Thursday 03 October, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 014 Writing Group: Advancing the argument
Well, it’s official, October is ‘get your conference paper submitted’ month! Please join us as we work together towards developing a conference paper towards submission. Building on last week’s roundtable, we will be focusing on Advancing the argument. Please bring a printed draft of your argument to share.
013 Thursday 26 September, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 013 From concept, conference presentation, to publication in high quality journals
Join us as Mindy, Jo, and Jane share how they began with the concept ‘recalibrating resilience’, created and presented the conference paper ‘Recalibrating resilience: A feminist intervention towards understanding children’s water, weather, and waste relations in uncertain times”, and are now co-writing a paper, “Resilience as expanding relations for the Chthulucene” to be submitted to a high-quality journal (Culture, Pedagogy, & Society). We will discuss what is required to make the shift from conference paper to publication and share our writing plan.
Do you have a conference paper that needs to be developed into a conference paper? If so, bring it to the Roundtable and be part of our international writing support group (with colleagues in Canada) and let’s make October ‘get your conference paper published month’!
012 Thursday 19 September, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 012 Climate Futures
On the day before the Global Climate Strike we invite you to join us in thinking with current and urgent international discourses on climate futures. The theme of The 64th Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society is “Education Beyond the Human”(https://cies2020.org) and we join them in asking “How should education respond to a world of shifting planetary boundaries, collapsing ecosystems, and emerging visions?” Together we will read through the Preamble of “Manifesto For Living in the Anthropocene” (Gibson, Fincher & Rose, 2015, pp. i-iii) (a free pdf is available here) and discuss possibilities for climate action in education prior to marching with the Student Climate strikers and with the climate Friday 20th September. Interested in putting in a paper or creating a panel for the conference? If so, please come with ideas.
011 Thursday 12 September, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 011 Knowledge/power at conferences
Join us as we discuss how knowledge/power plays out at conferences. Using our experiences at the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference in London as a jumping-off point, Mindy and Jane will share what they learned by paying attention to gender politics, presentation styles, high quality discussions, theory, emerging methodologies, and much more. Come be part of the discussion that sets out to demystify how power/knowledge works at conferences.
010 Thursday 5 September, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 010 Enchanted animism: A matter of care.
Join us as Jane Merewether shares her recent paper given at the Royal Geographical Society’s Annual International Conference in London: Enchanted Animism: A Matter of Care (full abstract here). In this paper, Jane proposes children’s animism is a matter of care which opens a door to an ethic of living more responsively and attentively in and with the world.
Questions and discussion will follow.
009 Thursday 29 August, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 009 Conversations with Rain: Interdisciplinary practice and climate futures.
Join us as The Ediths host Lilly Blue, Artist Educator from the Art Gallery of WA, who together with Dr Jo Pollitt will share their current partnership project Conversations with Rain including a sneak preview of a brand new education resource video. Challenging analytical notions of looking and responding to art in the museum, we argue that an interdisciplinary embodied practice-led approach differently sensitises attention towards deepening relations with more-than-human worlds. The research makes visible how the value of imagined experiences is a central conduit to enlivening connection and empathy. Deliberately eschewing didactic learning ‘about’ climate crisis, the research amplifies experimentation and open-endedness toward locating listening and sensing as key in rethinking curriculum.
008 Thursday 22 August, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 008 Recalibrating Resilience
Dissatisfied with developmental framings of resilience that focus on the individual child and linear progress narratives, we are interested in something more. Join us as we set out to ‘recalibrate resilience’ by bringing embodied ecologies (https://culanth.org/fieldsights/introduction-embodied-ecologies) to a piece of data from our weathering walks with young children. By decentring the child and thinking with embodied ecologies we prioritize relations to understand resilience differently in these times of ecological precarity.
007 Thursday 15 August, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 007 Matters of Care
Join us in reading Chapter 1, Assembling neglected ‘things’, from Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s book, Matters of Care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. Mindy and Jane will bring data they will be presenting at the upcoming Annual International Royal Geographical Society Conference in London, UK. Please read the chapter before the Roundtable takes place. https://ecu.on.worldcat.org/oclc/974802850
006 Thursday 8 August, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Weekly Roundtable: 006 Thinking-with Care
Please join us while we discuss ‘Thinking-with Care’, a chapter from Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s, Matters of Care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. Her chapter is based on this important premise: “Relations of thinking and knowing require care and affect how we care” (p.69). Please read the chapter before the Roundtable takes place. https://ecu.on.worldcat.org/oclc/974802850
005 Thursday, 1 August, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Roundtable: WAIER Presentations Practice
Please join us as Jane Merewether and Mindy Blaise practice their presentations they will be giving at the upcoming WAIER Conference. Jane will be talking about care and waste and how they come to matter, and Mindy will be sharing how her walking research upsets classical notions of positivism.
004 Thursday, 25 July, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Roundtable: Listening and thinking together with Donna Haraway
Please join us while we listen together to The Dig Podcast, Cyborg Revolution with Donna Haraway. Donna Haraway’s scholarship, especially how she understands nature to be conditioned by both material reality and cultural meaning grounds how we have conceptualised the W3 projects (children’s relations with water, waste, and weather) we are conducting. In order to deepen and strengthen our work, we will experiment with thinking collectively by listening to a podcast. However, our listening practices will be anything but passive. Instead, through stopping, restarting, what?ing, interrupting, and adding-on practices we will grapple together as we figure out how concepts such as radical science and scientific practices, situated knowledges, response-ability, Anthropocene/ Chthulocene/ Plantationocene, staying with the trouble, contact zones, becoming-with, plus more can strengthen our interdisciplinary research about children’s worldly relations.
003 Thursday, 18 July, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Roundtable with Miriam Potts: The Avian Roundtable: Making Worlds with Birds
Please join us for this roundtable with Miriam Potts, visiting artist and PhD candidate from VU, where we will discuss ways of engaging with philosophical ideas, and why theory matters! Miriam will lead a discussion on Thom van Dooren’s recent article, Making Worlds with Crows: Philosophy in the Field. doi.org/10.5282/rcc/7775
002 Thursday, 4 July, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Roundtable with Mindy Blaise: A living postdevelopmental lexicon for 21st Century childhoods: Generating new pedagogies
Please join us for this Roundtable where we will discuss the ins and outs of preparing a book prospectus, ways of engaging with philosophical ideas, and why theory matters! Mindy Blaise will share part of the keynote she gave at the Social Sciences and Humanities Congress, Canadian Research in Early Childhood Association, in Vancouver, Canada.
001 Thursday, 13 June, 2-3pm
You are invited to The Ediths’ Roundtable with Diane Boyd: Intergenerational Sustainable Skill Cafes
During a beach kindy with 3-4 year olds, it became apparent they had no understanding of the concept “mend” if something was broken. This, along with the death of her mother, made Diane reflect upon the values and skills of the generations before her. As a result, Diane developed a research project, intergenerational sustainable skill cafes, where the elderly came to a children and family centre to teach young children and their families sustainable ‘lost’ skills, such as mending, sewing, knitting, and cooking from scratch, using all aspects of the fruit/vegetables.
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Thank you!
THANK YOU for joining us in 2020! Look out for an EOI call to contribute to our 2021 Roundtable series.
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