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Professor Mindy Blaise

Director, Centre for People, Place and Planet

Staff Member Details
Telephone: +61 8 6304 3875
Email: m.blaise@ecu.edu.au
Campus: Mount Lawley  
Room: ML17.112  
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2476-9407

Mindy is a Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow and Director of the Centre for People, Place, & Planet, a strategic research centre at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. Mindy is a transdisciplinary researcher whose scholarship is at the forefront of feminist knowledge making, and anticolonial and activist research that creatively and generatively responds to the ever-growing injustices of sexisms, racisms, ecocide, and neoliberal capitalism.

She is the lead CI on the Australian Research Council, Discovery Project, Understanding and Addressing Everyday Sexisms in Australian Universities, and a Co-CI on the Australian Research Council, Linkage Project, Intergenerational Cultural Transfer of Indigenous Knowledges (lead CI, Anne Poelina, UND)

She is also co-editor-in-chief of Gender and Education.

Background

Before becoming an academic, Mindy was a kindergarten and early years teacher in the USA. She has held university positions in the USA (University of Texas, Austin), Hong Kong (The Education University of Hong Kong), and Australia (RMIT, Monash University, Victoria University).

She is a co-founding member of several feminist research collectives including  Common Worlds Research Collective (with Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Western University, Ontario, Canada and Affrica Taylor, Canberra University), (with Emily Gray, RMIT and Linda Knight, QUT) the international and interdisciplinary collective, #FEAS, Feminist Educators Against Sexism. (co-founded in 2016 with Emily Gray, RMIT and Linda Knight, QUT), and The Ediths (co-founded as part of Mindy’s VCPRF in 2019 with Jo Pollitt, ECU; Jane Merewether, Murdoch University, and Vanessa Wintoneak, ECU).

#FEAS, Feminist Educators Against Sexism is the winner of the 2023-2025 Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) Raewyn Connell Award - Gender, Sexualities and Cultural Studies.

Professional associations

  • Australian Association of Research in Education (AARE), member
  • American Educational Research Association (AERA), member
  • Gender and Education Association, member

Research interests

Creating and practicing experimental and innovative pedagogies for the Anthropocene; interdisciplinarity; postdevelopmentalism; queer theory; feminism; post empiricism; multi-species ethnography.

Mindy is interested in bringing together early childhood education and feminist environmental humanities to generate new pedagogies for the Anthropocene. In particular, she is curious about what we might learn by paying attention to children’s relations with place, materials, and the more-than-human and how this might activate pedagogies that can ethically attend to the common worlds we share.

Potential research students interested in creative practice, interdisciplinarity, environmental issues (water, waste, weathering), and pedagogies for the Anthropocene are encouraged to get in touch.

Qualifications

  • Doctor of Education, United States of America, 1999.

Research Outputs

Book Chapters

  • Blaise, M., Gray, E., Pollitt, J., Acton, R., Barraclough, S., Bodén, L., Cullen, F., Dekker, K., Gröndal, H., Leon-Dyer, S., Murray, P., Nordstrom, S., Rahm, L., Sjödin, ES., Tudor, R. (2024). Creatively attending to unfinished business, everyday sexisms, COVID-19, and Higher Education: The #FEAS FAKE JOURNAL. The Routledge International Handbook of Transdisciplinary Feminist Research and Methodological Praxis (380-412). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003303558-45.

Journal Articles

  • Nociti, K., Blaise, M. (2024). Vulnerable reading practices for ecosocial justice in environmental education. Environmental Education Research, 2024(Article in press), 16 pages. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2024.2349274.
  • Mereweather, J., Pollitt, J., Blaise, M. (2024). Young Children Moving through Ecological Anxiety and Grief: Dancing with Demolition. Journal of Dance Education, 2024(Article in press), 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1080/15290824.2024.2403757.
  • Gray, E., Ullman, J., Blaise, M., Pollitt, J. (2024). Masculinism, institutional violence and #MeToo: understanding Australian University responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 2024(Article in press), TBD. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2024.2317386.

Books

  • Rooney, T., Blaise, M. (2023). Rethinking environmental education in a climate change era: Weather learning in early childhood. Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003150411.

Book Chapters

  • Nociti, K., Blaise, M. (2023). Hacking Observational Literacy Tools in Early Childhood Education. Postdevelopmental Approaches to Pedagogical Observation in Childhood (57-79). Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350369672.0010.
  • Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Blaise, M. (2023). Common worlding pedagogies in early childhood. Postfoundational Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry (119-129). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003298519-12.

Journal Articles

  • Gray, E., Ullman, J., Blaise, M., Pollitt, J. (2023). ‘I'm broken but I'm alive’: gender, COVID-19 and higher education in Australia. Higher Education Research and Development, 42(3), 588-602. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2022.2096576.
  • Gardiner, J., Singer, H., Hamilton, J., Neimanis, A., Blaise, M. (2023). Reading Group as Method for Feminist Environmental Humanities. Australian Feminist Studies, 2023(2023), TBD. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2023.2267759.
  • Gray, EM., Pasley, A., Blaise, M., Ullman, J., Fishwick, E. (2023). Sexisms and Un/welcome Diversity in Australian Universities. The Australian Educational Researcher, 2023(2023), TBD. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-023-00673-1.
  • Blue, L., Pollitt, J., Blaise, M. (2023). Conversations with rain: Proposing poetic and non-linear interpretation strategies in the Art Gallery. International Journal of Education and the Arts, 24(1.2), 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.26209/ijea24si1.2.
  • Pollitt, J., Gray, E., Blaise, M., Ullman, J., Fishwick, E. (2023). Performing feminist research: creative tactics for communicating COVID-19, gender, and higher education research. Gender and Education, 35(5), 487-504. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2023.2213727.
  • Sparrman, A., Hrechaniuk, Y., Smith, OA., Andersson, K., Annerbäck, J., Arzuk, D., Bodén, L., Blaise, M., Castañeda, C., Coleman, R., Eßer, F., Finn, M., Gustafsson, D., Holmqvist, P., Josefsson, J., Kraftl, P., Lee, N., Lesnik-Oberstein, K., Mitchell, S., Murris, K., Orrmalm, A., Oswell, D., Prout, A., Rosen, R., Runswick-Cole, K., Sjöberg, J., Smith, K., Spyrou, S., Stockton, KB., Taylor, A., Zehavi, O., Zotevska, E. (2023). Child Studies Multiple – Collaborative play for thinking through theories and methods. Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, 15(1), 53 pages. https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.3529.
  • Poelina , A., Wooltorton, S., Paradies, Y., Mulligan, E., Guimond, L., Jackson-Barrett, L., Blaise, M. (2023). Learning to care for Dangaba. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 39(3), 375-389. https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2023.30.
  • Merewether, J., Blaise, M., Pitchford, K., Giamminuti, S. (2023). Unsettling “reduce-reuse-recycle”: the provocation of wastepaper and “discarding well”. The Journal of Environmental Education, 54(3), 199-212. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2023.2179585.

Creative Arts Research Outputs

  • Blaise, M., Gray, E., Ullman, J., Fishwick, E. (2023). The Oppressive Grind: Understanding and Addressing Everyday Sexisms in Australian Universities 2021-2024. . https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.26183/8dwm-pc13.
  • Poelina , A., Wooltorton, S., Paradies, Y., Guimond, L., Jackson-Barrett, L., Blaise, M., Mulligan, E. (2023). Learning to Care for Dangaba. [You tube Clip]. DaveLaslett.com.

Book Chapters

  • Blaise, M., Pollitt, J., Merewether, J., Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2022). Resilience as More-Than-Human. Young People and Thinking Technologies for the Anthropocene (17-30). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
  • Pollitt, J., Blaise, M., Gray, E. (2022). Enacting a feminist pause: Interrupting patriarchal productivity in higher education. Creative Approaches to Health Education: New Ways of Thinking, Making, Doing, Teaching and Learning (28-40). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003126508-3.

Journal Articles

  • Merewether, J., Gobby, B., Blaise, M. (2022). Common Worlds Justice in Post-Anthropocentric Education: Attuning to the More-Than-Human through Walking with Sound and Smell. Equity and Excellence in Education, 55(3), 203-216. https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2022.2131198.
  • Giamminuti, S., Merewether, J., Blaise, M. (2022). Pedagogical documentation and the refusal of method: troubling dogmas and inviting collective obligations. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 30(2), 213-226. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2022.2046834.
  • Blaise, M., Hamm, C. (2022). Lively Emu dialogues: Activating feminist common worlding pedagogies. Pedagogy Culture and Society, 30(4), 473-489. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2020.1817137.
  • Gray, EM., Pollitt, J., Blaise, M. (2022). Between activism and academia: Zine-making as a feminist response to COVID-19. Gender and Education, 34(8), 887-905. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2021.1931045.
  • Wooltorton, S., Guenther, J., Poelina, A., Blaise, M., Collard, L., White, P. (2022). Learning regenerative cultures: Indigenous nations in higher education renewal in Australia. Asia Pacific Education Review, 23(4), 639-651. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-022-09789-y.
  • Poelina, A., Wooltorton, S., Blaise, M., Luz Aniere, C., Horwitz, P., White, PJ., Muecke, S. (2022). Regeneration time: Ancient wisdom for planetary wellbeing. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 38(3-4), 397-414. https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2021.34.
  • Wintoneak, V., Blaise, M. (2022). Voicing Derbarl Yerrigan as a feminist anti-colonial methodology. River Research and Applications: an international journal devoted to river research and management, 38(3), 435-442. https://doi.org/10.1002/rra.3822.
  • Kelly, O., Illingworth, S., Butera, F., Dawson, V., White, P., Blaise, M., Martens, P., Schuitema, G., Huynen, M., Bailey, S., Cowman, S. (2022). Education in a warming world: Trends, opportunities and pitfalls for institutes of higher education. Frontiers in Sustainability, 3(2022), article number 920375. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsus.2022.920375.

Journal Articles

  • Godden, N., Farrant, B., Yallup Farrant, J., Heyink, E., Carot Collins, E., Burgemeister, B., Tabeshfar, M., Barrow, J., West, M., Kieft, J., Rothwell, M., Leviston, Z., Bailey, S., Blaise, M., Cooper, T. (2021). Climate change, activism, and supporting the mental health of children and young people: Perspectives from Western Australia. Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, 57(11), 1759-1764. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpc.15649.
  • Pollitt, J., Blaise, M., Rooney, T. (2021). Weather bodies: Experimenting with dance improvisation in environmental education in the early years. Environmental Education Research, 27(8), 1141-1151. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2021.1926434.
  • Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Blaise, M. (2021). Feminist ethicality in child-animal research: worlding through complex stories. Children's Geographies, 2021(Article in Press), 12p.. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2021.1907311.
  • Blaise, M., Wintoneak, V. (2021). (Re)forming River-Child-Blowie Relations: Questions of Noticing, Caring, and Imagined Futures with the Unloved and Disregarded. Feral Feminisms, 10(2021), 137-145. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecuworkspost2013/11890.
  • Giamminuti, S., Merewether, J., Blaise, M. (2021). Aesthetic-ethical-political movements in professional learning: encounters with feminist new materialisms and Reggio Emilia in early childhood research. Professional Development in Education, 47(2-3), 436-448. https://doi.org/10.1080/19415257.2020.1862277.
  • Rooney, T., Blaise, M., Royds, F. (2021). With shadows, dust and mud: Activating weathering-with pedagogies in early childhood education. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 22(2), 109-123. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949120939202.

Book Chapters

  • Knight, L., Gray, E., Blaise, M. (2020). Powerful dressing: Artfully challenging sexism in the academy. Transdisciplinary feminist research : Innovations in theory, method and practice (43-58). Routledge. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecuworkspost2013/8317.
  • Blaise, M., Ryan, S. (2020). Engaging with critical theories and the early childhood curriculum. Curiculum in Early Childhood Education: Re-examined, Reclaimed, Renewed (80-95). Routledge. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecuworkspost2013/8218.
  • Blaise, M., Rooney, T. (2020). Listening to and telling a rush of unruly natureculture gender stories. Disrupting and countering deficits in early childhood education (151-163). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315102696-10.

Book Chapters

  • Blaise, M., Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2019). Enacting Feminist Materialist Movement Pedagogies in the Early Years. Feminists researching gendered childhoods: Generative entanglements (109-120). Bloomsbury Academic. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecuworkspost2013/6635.
  • Blaise, M., Knight, L., Gray, E. (2019). Punk Feminism and #FEAS: A Low-Brow Protest of Academic Sexism. Strategies for Resisting Sexism in the Academy: Higher Education, Gender and Intersectionality (269-286). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04852-5_15.
  • Greishaber, S., Blaise, M. (2019). Making room for more: Complexity, diversity, and the impact of alternative perspectives on early childhood care and education. The Wiley Handbook of Early Childhood Care and Education (617-640). John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119148104.
  • Blaise, M., Hamm, C. (2019). Shimmering: Animating Multispecies Relations with Wurundjeri Country. Feminist research for 21st-century childhoods: Common worlds methods (93-100). Bloomsbury Academic. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecuworkspost2013/6941.

Journal Articles

Creative Arts Research Outputs

Journal Articles

Book Chapters

  • Banjerjee, B., Blaise, M. (2017). Data provocations: Disappointing, failing, malfunctioning. Disrupting data in qualitative inquiry: Entanglements with the post-critical and post-anthropocentric (49-60). Peter Lang Publishing.
  • Taylor, A., Blaise, M. (2017). Queer Departures into More-Than-Human Worlds. The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education (591-609). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40033-8_29.

Journal Articles

  • Blaise, M., Hamm, C., Iorio, JM. (2017). Modest witness(ing) and lively stories: paying attention to matters of concern in early childhood. Pedagogy Culture and Society, 25(1), 31-42. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2016.1208265.

Book Chapters

  • Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Blaise, M., Taylor, A. (2016). Decentering the human in multi-species ethnographies. Posthuman Research Practices in Education (149-167). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137453082.

Journal Articles

Journal Articles

  • Bone, J., Blaise, M. (2015). An uneasy assemblage: Prisoners, animals, asylum-seeking children and posthuman packaging. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 16(1), 18-31. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949114566754.

Book Chapters

  • Blaise, M. (2014). Gender Discourses and Play. The SAGE Handbook of Play and Learning in Early Childhood (115-127). SAGE Publications Ltd.

Journal Articles

Journal Articles

  • Blaise, M. (2013). Charting new territories: re-assembling childhood sexuality in the early years classroom. Gender and Education, 25(7), 801-817. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2013.797070.
  • Banerjee, B., Blaise, M. (2013). There’s Something in the Air: Becoming-With Research Practices. Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 240-245. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708613487867.
  • Blaise, M., Leung, VW., Sun, C. (2013). Views from Somewhere: situated knowledges and partial perspectives in a Hong Kong kindergarten classroom. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(1), 12-25.
  • Yelland, N., Andrew, Y., Blaise, M., Chan, YO. (2013). ‘We spend more time with the children than they do …’: education, care and the work of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong. Globalization Societies and Education, 11(4), 443-458. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2013.807079.
  • Blaise, M. (2013). Situating Hong Kong Pet–Dog–Child Figures within Colonialist Flows and Disjunctures. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(4), 380-394. https://doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2013.3.4.380.
  • Taylor, A., Blaise, M., Giugni, M. (2013). Haraway's ‘bag lady story-telling’: relocating childhood and learning within a ‘post-human landscape. Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 34(1), 48-62. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2012.698863.

Research Projects

  • Cassandra Tytler - A whisper, a chorus: Artworks, community, and site-specific practice to amplify stories that inspire climate-informed action, empathy, and inclusion., Forrest Research Foundation, Early-Career Creative and Performance Leadership Fellowships, 2023 ‑ 2026, $354,840.
  • Understanding and Addressing Everyday Sexisms in Australian Universities, Australian Research Council, Grant - Discovery Projects, 2021 ‑ 2026, $322,643.
  • Intergenerational cultural transfer of Indigenous knowledges, Australian Research Council, Grant - Linkage (Projects), 2022 ‑ 2026, $137,294.
  • Climate change and the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people, Healthway (WA Health Promotion Foundation), Health Promotion Research - Exploratory Research Grants, 2023 ‑ 2025, $74,993.
  • Transformative Aboriginal agriculture methods: Maaman Marra Boodja, Grower Group Alliance, South-West WA Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub grant, 2024 ‑ 2025, $199,000.
  • 2021 Nationally Quality Framework Approved Learning Frameworks Update, Australian Children's Education Care and Quality Authority, Grant, 2021 ‑ 2024, $96,726.
  • Implementing and researching education outcomes through the Reggio Emilia educational philosophy, Perpetual Ltd, IMPACT Philanthropy Application Program, 2021 ‑ 2023, $86,964.
  • Re-thinking the Rs through arts: transforming waste practices in early childhood education, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Insight Grants, 2018 ‑ 2022, $32,643.
  • Using creative arts, pedagogical documentation, and dialogue to transform children's relations to waste, Perpetual Ltd, IMPACT Philanthropy Application Program, 2018 ‑ 2021, $43,000.

Research Student Supervision

Principal Supervisor

  • Doctor of Philosophy, Relational design education by proximity

Principal Supervisor

  • Master of Education, PAYING ATTENTION TO WATER RELATIONS: Poetic Inquiry and Pedagogical documentation as curious practices
  • Doctor of Education: In search of an aesthetic pathway: young children's encounter with drama improvisation
  • Master of Education: Sexy girls and handsome boys: Popular cultures, representations of gender, sexualities, and childhoods
  • Master of Education: A case study of everyday family care and education practices in Hong Kong
  • Master of Education: The role of struggle in teachers' beliefs about learning and instruction
  • Doctor of Philosophy: Fat(s), muscle(s), movement, and physiologie(s) in early childhood education
  • Master of Education: Guidance and governing: Managing, the behaviours of children, educators, and families
  • Doctor of Philosophy, Walking-With Derbarl Yerrigan/Swan River: Experimentations With Methodological and Pedagogical Practices in Early Childhood Education
  • Doctor of Philosophy, Slow Choreographies: Addressing everyday sexisms in Australian Universities through embodied creative methods.

Associate Supervisor

  • Doctor of Philosophy, Place Literacies Emerging from the Common Worlds of Place and Children
  • Master of Education: Application of effective strategies to early childhood education: Focusing on minority children learning English as a Second Language
  • Doctor of Philosophy: Sowing the seeds of care in teacher education: Incidental or intentional?
  • Doctor of Philosophy: The ambiguity of early childhood preservice teachers' beliefs about practice
  • Doctor of Philosophy: Young children's experiences and understandings of family
  • Master of Education: The child in nature
  • Doctor of Philosophy, Care-full climate justice organising: Movement-based participatory action research on Noongar Boodja
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