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Feminist, Creative & Place-based Literacies for Ecosocial Transformation

This research program recognizes the need for a radical shift in how people reimagine and reconfigure the future survival of human society on planet Earth. To achieve this, it is necessary to relearn how to be a part of the planet’s ecological community, including how people can better live, learn, and connect with place. One way of achieving this is through attuning to and developing feminist, creative, and place-based literacies. These literacies directly engage with the interconnected ecologies of people, place, and planet whilst attending and redressing past and present colonial histories.

The program houses the CPPP artist-scholar, The Ediths, #FEAS Feminist Educators Against Sexism, and The Common Worlds Research Collective.  The research projects are transdiscplinary, and sit at the intersections of art, sciences, and education. Informed by Indigenous relational methodologies and knowledges of place, the research utilizes feminisms, the arts, and more-than-human methods to interrogate, generate and expand place-based literacies for ecosocial transformation.

Weather Studios

Chief Investigator

  • Dr Jo Pollitt

Funding
Early-career Creative and Performance Leadership Fellowship, Forrest Research Foundation, $239,804 (2022-2023)

Description

Weather Studios brings artist, scientists and educators together to respond to two pressing issues of our times: human physical disconnection from their environments, and the planetary crisis of climate change. Centred on artist-led and kin/aesthetic practices to ignite collaborative responses and transdisciplinary conversations, WA Weather Studios disrupts singular narratives and engages multiple perspectives toward developing generative responses to climate crisis. These artist-led processes make it possible to sit with complexity, and not-knowing to create opportunity for deepened listening, heightened attention and increased agility in responding with unstable worlds.

Partners

  • Art Gallery of WA
  • The Bureau of Meteorology

Links

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-04/weather-studio-to-fight-climate-change-nannup/101062682

Intergenerational cultural transfer of Indigenous knowledges.

Principal Investigator

  • Poelina, A.

Chief Investigators

  • Wooltorton, S.
  • Blaise, M.
  • Muecke, S.
  • Coles, A.
  • Horwitz, P.
  • Aniere C.

Funding
Australian Research Council-Linkage Project ($723,000 AUD).

Partners

  • Madjulla Association
  • Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council
  • Millennium Kinds, Inc.
  • Water Corporation
  • WA Museum
  • Yurmulun Aboriginal Corporation

Description

Aboriginal cultural systems hold knowledge of national and international significance for Aboriginal wellbeing and addressing climate change, food insecurity, water scarcity and species loss. However, the continuity and integrity of these knowledges is of considerable concern to Aboriginal people, due to disruptions to Aboriginal lifeways.This Aboriginal environmental humanities research will investigate, describe and compare the transfer of knowledge in a Kimberley and a southwest region of Western Australia to understand how cultural values,knowledge and practices can persist despite on-going colonial interruptions. Outcomes will contribute to Aboriginal wellbeing, enhance biodiversity and advance water communication.

Objectives

  • Conduct two case studies of intergenerational transfer of cultural-environmental knowledge and practice, one in the Western Australian Kimberley and one in the southwest.
  • Present Aboriginal water knowledge and practices for public engagement, learning events and a small exhibition at the WA Museum and dissemination through WA Water Corporation website, campaigns and publicities.
  • Develop and apply innovative research methods informed by Indigenous knowledge and practices through theIndigenous environmental humanities (through storying, song, arts and ceremony).
  • Identify and share knowledge of traditional and contemporary Indigenous practices, with the wider community through the WA Museum and its public programs.

A Whisper, A Chorus

Chief Investigators

  • Dr Cassandra Tytler

Funding
Early-career Creative and Performance Leadership Fellowship, Forrest Research Foundation, ($195,655)

Description

A whisper, a chorus: Artworks, community, and site-specific practice to amplify stories that inspire climate-informed action, empathy, and inclusion.

A Whisper, a Chorus finds ways to awaken understanding around the interconnections between the environment and all people, bringing race, gender, colonisation, and class concerns to the centre of the climate care discussions. A Whisper, A Chorus, uses site-specific practice to amplify stories that inspire climate-informed action, empathy, and inclusion. Its aim is to contribute to creating a sense of the ‘more-than-individual’ in a rhetorically compelling way. Climate care invokes the essence of what an arts-based practice can achieve. Site-specific artwork opens the place and its stories to the viewer-participant in new revelatory ways, unveiling what is at first not recognised. This research is transdisciplinary, harnessing scientists, educators and performance scholars, alongside community members, within its outcomes. Places and people have stories embedded within them. Climate action needs to be grounded at this level of narratives of place.

Vanessa Wintoneak PhD Research

Chief Investigators

  • PhD Candidate: Vanessa Wintoneak
  • Supervisors: Professor Mindy Blaise (ECU School of Education, Centre for People, Place, & Planet), Dr Jane Merewether (Murdoch University), Dr Jo Pollitt (ECU School of Education, WAAPA, Centre for People, Place, & Planet)

Funding
Edith Cowan University HDR Scholarship (awarded through Vice Chancellor’s Professorial Fellowship held by Professor Mindy Blaise and School of Education), $33,000 per annum

Description
Walking-with Derbarl Yerrigan: Cultivating relational worlding methods in early childhood education research is a feminist project that is concerned with new ways of doing, thinking, and producing knowledges with/in the common worlds of young children and the more-than-human. The research methodology focuses on experimentation with theories, methods, and concepts through enacting emergent, situated, and relational practices while walking with Derbarl Yerrigan, a river, and young children.

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

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