We are very lucky for this month’s New Materialisms (NM) Special Interest Group (SIG) to have Geraldine Harris (Griffith Uni, PhDer) presenting aspects of her experience of working with feminist New Materialisms in child-centered leadership and more specifically, some visualizations she has created based on her emerging data analysis.
Geraldine has extensive professional experince as a child advocate working with collective action and leadership facilitation. She is the Director of Equitable Childhoods Consultancy.
Diverse plateaus + visualisations of place-based child-centered leadership
Her PhD topic is: Place based leadership & Social Innovation (Child & Family).
Her recent writing and work contributes to discussions around what are the key trends and principles emerging from the process of implementing a whole of community and government approach to supporting families at risk of vulnerability. Geraldine is an expert in collaborating with professionals, practitioners and researchers to explore early intervention and prevention strategies developed through the Australian Communities for Children initiatives and their efficacy.
Using feminist New Materialisms, Geraldine’s work supports community services, education and child welfare practitioners and policymakers to implement place-based collectives and and suggests alternative ways to look at impact approaches to child development, wellbeing and protection.
For this session, Geraldine shared some of her current PhD musings, visualizations and emerging NM understandings. She also spoke of the challenges and blockages she has experienced which was both reassuring and disheartening to hear.
Current New Materialisms musings
In line with PhD intellectual property and confidentiality (the visualizations and content Geraldine’s shared in this session is her original work and makes up her PhD ‘data’), I’m not sharing details or images of this session – you had to be there to see it. Awesome work!
Below are some other New Materialisms ideas and visuals Geraldine has been thinking-with.
Session Resources
Prior to her presentation, Geraldine recommended the below 3 stimuli to get the juices flowing as each provides interesting but diverse plateaus in which to encounter the complex entanglements of NM – two academic papers and 1 video.
Geraldine set these resources as she found them to be fruitful provocations for NM work, especially after initial readings of Barad, Deleuze & Guattari, Ingold, Massumi & Braidotti.
Iris van der Tuin (2017) presentation at Manchester Metropolitan University Summer Institute of Qualitative Studies (which Geraldine was lucky enough to attend in person!) on Epistemology in a Speculative Key – see below.