Earlier this year, I was invited by The Ediths to participate in a new project they are undertaking called: A feminist initiative towards reading with reciprocity.
The Ediths are a feminist interdisciplinary research collective based out of Edith Cohen University (WA, AUS). I’ve been an active member of The Edith’s for over a year now as we have crossover interests of adventures into New Materialisms and working with socially engaged creative methodologies to conduct ecologically responsive research. Their Responsive Roundtable Series is always engaging and interesting.
This project is inspired by CLEAR’s #Collabrary: a methodological experiment for reading with reciprocity.
The Ediths wanted to explore what it might look, feel and be like to work with #Collabary practices as a way towards becoming generous and accountable scholars.
I was delighted that they asked me to take part in this initiative that involves reading and ‘reviewing’ generously – especially considering thinking-writing-doing feminist research is a central interest of my work.
So, I am excited to see what emerges!
Here’s how it works
1) Read the blog post about Collabrary and Dumit’s How I Read (2012) to get a sense of that what underpins this project and what the project entails.
2) Then you look at the reading list provided (see end of post) and chose the title you would like to read and review with reciprocity.
Here’s the book list options (so many good ones!) as provided by The Ediths project:
- Living on Stolen Land by Ambelin Kwaymullina
- Rethinking environment, materiality, and media in children’s lives by Peter Kraftl
- Decolonising place in early childhood education by Fikile Nxumalo
- Inefficient Mapping by Linda Knight
- Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place: Sentipensando with Rural Women in Colombia by Laura Rodríguez Castro (who regular readers will know from other projects Laura and I have worked on together such as the Affect, Knowledge and Embodiment (AKE) Zine and the more recent Geography and Collective Memories through Art Workshop).
- Homecoming by Elfie Shiosaki
- Us Women, Our Ways, Our World Edited by Darlene Oxenham by Jeannie Herbert, Jill Milroy & Pat Dudgeon
For me, it was a toss-up between A/P Fikile Nuxmalo and Dr. Laura Rodríguez Castro. Both these scholars work have direct overlaps with my research interests.
Regular readers will know Laura from other projects she and I have worked on together such as the Affect, Knowledge and Embodiment (AKE) Zine and the more recent Geography and Collective Memories through Art Workshop).
In the end, given the direct application of Post-humanist/New Materialist approaches and because of the place-base(ness) of site-specific work (aligns with emplaced bike trails and accounting for other-than-academic/outside environments) with a deliberate engagement with First Nations, Black and People of Colour perspectives (which I have an ongoing interest in), I chose:
Nxumalo, F. (2019). Decolonizing place in early childhood education. (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429427480
Image: Decolonising Childhood Discourses.org
Once chosen, you get sent a copy of your selected book – and of course, that copy is yours to keep as a token of appreciation for participating in the project. Woohoo!
3) Using the Collaborary and Dumit resources/links above as inspiration, we are encouraged to experiment with one or more of these reading practices (close reading, constructive reading, positive, generous, slightly genealogical, methodological in focus, and ethical).
4) Then write a 600–800-word review that is informed by one or more of these above reading practices to show how a reciprocal, generous, and accountable review might be done.
We had a generous 6-weeks turn-around to get out work back to the organiser-editors who will then feedback our piece before release.
Once finalised, all project contributions will be publicly available on The Ediths website.
I’ll let you know how it goes!