This session: Key to addressing human impacts on climate change is changing human demands on ecologies. My project is exploring how participating in ocean sports shapes peoples’ relationships to and knowledge of ecologies, and their ways of thinking about our responsibilities for environmental care (Olive). In particular, this project is aimed at challenging white-settler relationships to place (Kimmerer, Kwaymullina), and the ontologies that underpin how we understand ourselves in relation to the world.
Swimming and surfing remind us in deeply personal ways that we are part of ecologies, not separate from them. This includes learning to make kin (Haraway) with threatening aspects of place and space, such as sharks and various forms of pollution (Tsing).
For this discussion, I have suggested a lot of quite short readings, often from much longer texts. I have also set a recent essay that gives a good overview of my current work. You might not get to them all, but reading across at least a few of them will be helpful.
As part of this meeting, we dicussed: How can we better communicate knowledge with relevant communities and the public?
Image: Rebecca Olive
My session notes and thoughts
Below are two worldings I wrote about this session to give sense of what emerged.
Nature returns revisited
We’re discussing nature revisited and tainted returns. I’m traversing Ecofeminisms and thinking in habit(at)s. ‘Proper’ places. Sarah Jaquette posits climate anxiety is a white-person’s phenomenon. A culture of denial. Our vulnerability offsets our humility. Confusion about Margaret Howe Lovatt and Peter the dolphin’s more-than-pleasurable interspecies relations. People actively speaking about creative connections and kinships beyond family and humanness. Healing traditions. Tsing’s challenge of ‘living in the precarious ruins’. Reassuring exclusionary ethical participation. Hydrofeminisms. Definitions and distinctions between ‘locals’ and ‘imports’. PolesApart. Activists, stewards, custodians, collectors. Val Plumwood resituates humans in ecological terms. Putting humans back on the inside of nature.
Surfing ontological waves
I’m considering Rebecca Olive’s work. Surfing intensities. Reflecting on human impacted climate change and changing human demands on ecologies. Briny netroot polemics. Explorations of environs question peoples’ relationships, knowledge and responsibilities of ecologies and environmental care. Transnatural perspectives.Much needed challenges of white-settler relationships to place and the ontologies of how we understand ourselves and our actions in relation to the world. Moving Oceans. Natural environments affect us in deeply personal ways. Making kin. We are ecologies-with, not ecologies-from. Facing fears.Choices that either support or threaten ourselves, each other, creatures, plants and environments. The benefits of swimming with sharks.
Our New Materialisms (NM) Special Interest Group (SIG) is back on!
The March NM SIG is our first meeting back for 2021. I’m so happy!
Because we are reconvening after the New Year break, we wanted to offer the opportunity for participants to reconnect more directly. So instead of going straight into guest presentations, we decided to have a writing-process open forum to ‘warm-up’ our ideas, discussion and writing-with NM approaches.
So, in this session, we gave breathing space for a topic we all wrestle with: how to ‘write up’ or ‘present’ New Materialisms research.
We invited participants to bring a piece of writing/data/something you are working on to share.
This NM forum encouraged cross-pollination, stimulate new ideas, spark some inspiration, offered some new skills and probed what im/possibilities might emerge for stretching your NM research writing-data.
In this meeting, we asked: How might researchers who are working with New Materialisms ‘write up data’?
We had two readings to get the juices flowing.
Readings:
Somerville, M. (2016) The post-human I: encountering ‘data’ in new materialism, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29:9, 1161-1172, DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2016.1201611
Niccolini, A. D., Zarabadi, S., & Ringrose, J. (2018). Spinning yarns: Affective kinshipping as posthuman pedagogy. Parallax (Leeds, England), 24(3), 324-343.
5 mins warm-up: Delicious Research(er)s. NM SIG March 2021.
March NM SIG notes
Our warm-up NM writing activity was on: Delicious research(er)s. I developed my Delicious Research(er)s warm-up into a 25mins, 100-word worlding – and this is what emerged:
Delicious research(er)s.
Delicious research(er)ing is an open-ended kitchette of inquisitiveness, capabilities, ingredients and alchemy. Folding, passing, mixing and blending: foundational blisters pop into syrupy-sweet intellectual nectar. Flavour(ful) data fragments over tongues, in eyes, and on minds. Delicious researchers are lightning rods for the unexplained. They stand tall: chins up, ears swivelling, noses twitching, eyes roving and skin electrified with buzzing intensity. They dive deep into salty pedogological soups, spin with umami-rolled embodiment, and languish in astringent-infused relationalities of common wor(l)ds. Delicious researchers are sexy, amorous, desirable and magnetic, heated yet ‘cool’ – and prone to spontaneously combust in moments of exquisite flambé rupture.
See images below for some of our other NM lines of flight.
Spinning Yarns. NM SIG March 2021.
Post-human ‘I’. NM SIG March 2021.
Discussing NM problematics. NM SIG March 2021.
NM SIG collaborative notes. NM SIG March 2021.
NM ‘data’-research-writing discussion. NM SIG March 2021.
March is Women’s Month. March 8th was International Women’s Day and throughout the month there are many other events highlighting a range of social and gender justice issues.
There were major March4Justice protests organised in all major cities (and elsewhere) around Australia on March 15th.
It was epic!
So I headed to the Brisbane protest to march!
Nina (with her subtle placard) and JenNina with inclusive side of her placard
I brought my own two-sided sign.
One side was super inclusive, the other a little more ‘confrontational’.
A friend called the controversial side the ‘the thinking person’s sign.’ GOLD!
Heaps of people said the loved the sign (both sides) and I go lots of COVID Hi-5s.
It uses bicycle inner tubes, wheel spokes and bike parts, broken jewellery, second-hand objects and curb-side barbie dolls. The sash is reminiscent of a beauty pageant, yet echoes the idea that even though women may feel free to move (the barbies bodies swing – but only as I move), they are in many ways still ‘keep in line’ (strangled by the confines of the sash’). The blondes are at the top, while the brunette (representing any/every ‘other’) is at the bottom of ‘the beauty hierarchy’. The headpiece mixes themes of gender expectations, worship, money, sex, religion, plastic surgery and armour together into a quasi-tiara-cum-pagan headdress which is deliberately a little ‘off'(-set) and awkwardly constructed.
It was very challenging hearing so many stories of disadvantage, abuse, injustice and oppression – difficult, but also very important.
There is so much that needs to change.
To find out where, when and why the protests were hitting the streets, Alicia Nally (ABC) here.
And some good commentary, Like Hayley Gleeson’s for the ABC looking at what happened after the protests as well.
Alyx Gorman wrote a good outline of the Australian protests for The Guardian wrote:
Across Australia, survivors and their allies will be calling for gender equality, and justice for victims of sexual assault, through a series of protests under the banner March 4 Justice.
The focal point of the protests will be a rally outside Parliament House in Canberra on 15 March, which many people have stated they are travelling from interstate to attend.
There, March4Justice organiser Janine Hendry alongside Dr Anita Hutchison and Dr Kate Ahmad from Doctors Against Violence Towards Women, will be presenting parliament with two petitions outlining both broad and specific requests for further action.
Outside of Canberra, there will be approximately 40 local events around Australia, starting in Perth on Sunday 14 March. Organisers are projecting that 85,000 people will participate across the country.
The protests follow a wave of allegations of sexual assault, abuse and misconduct in some of the highest offices of Australian politics.
Start of Brisbane Protest
Nina and friends
Source: ABC News
Brisbane March 4 Justice
Brisbane March 4 Justice
Source: March4Justice
Brisbane protest
Source: March4Justice
Nina and friends
Source: ABC News
All Brisbane protest march and ‘Nina with friends’ photos by Nina Ginsberg.
In anticipation of Griffith’s New Materialisms (NM) Special Interest Group (SIG) starting back up very soon for 2021, I’m looking back over what we have done so far.
I am the co-convenor of Griffith’s New Materialism SIG. The aim of the New Materialisms Special Interest Group is to provide asupportive space for students, HDR candidates, ECRs, mid-career and more senior Academics to explore, discuss, experiment and share complex and emerging post-qualitative/post-humanisms ideas, methods and approaches.
I am particularly proud of the diverse and transdisciplinary nature of the current group which includes members from the Health Sciences, Humanities, Education and Psychology and from multiple Universities Australia-wide and internationally.
This SIG is a fertile environment for sharing ideas, research experiences and synergies with multiple projects and possible papers benefiting from the ideas and expertise made available.
We started out with 13 members in 2019 spread evenly across Griffith University and other Universities in South East Queensland (UQ, QUT, Sippy Downs). After four 2019 monthly meetings, interest in the SIG expanded significantly as word spread.
August 2019 – Inaugural meeting
The inaugural session of the Griffith New Materialist (NM) Special Interest Group came together to support researchers and academics to engage more deeply, critically, collaboratively and creatively with NM thinking and practice. This first meeting was semi-structured with the readings and discussion focus being on: The emergence of feminist New Materialisms.
In this second NM SIG meeting, we had a guest presentation by Prof Simone Fullagar and Dr Wendy O’Brien whose book (cowritten with Dr Adele Pavlidis who could not make it), Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery, had just been published. In this meeting, we discussed feminist New Materialisms and how the book traces the complex material-discursive processes through which women’s recovery from depression is enacted within a gendered biopolitics. Within the biomedical assemblage that connects mental health policy, service provision, research and everyday life, the gendered context of recovery remains little understood despite the recurrence and pervasiveness of depression.
In this session we had PhD researcher Geraldine Harris share some of her emerging New Materialisms thoughts, approaches and inroads from her research looking at early intervention and prevention strategies for child-centered leadership. This meeting was called Diverse plateaus + visualisations of place-based child-centered leadership and it was a great presentation for many reasons. Geraldine shared some of her unique data analysis visualisations that have helped her think-with, process and communicate the complexity of her work (they were amazing!). We also got to hear about her current PhD musings and emerging NM understandings, as well as tips, challenges and blockages she has experienced using New Materialisms approaches in educational and workplace settings.
Our SIG New Materialisms Garden Retreat was for HDRers only. This was a special event. For the NM Garden Retreat, I invited five New Materialist and Posthumanist PhD friends to a full-day group/workshop in my garden where we collaborated to create and share knowledge. I wanted to get out of the uni confines and have the (literal) time and space to work, think and share more generatively and deeply with others – without time constraints or other pressures. The garden provides an alternative ‘learning context’ that deliberately disrupted and displaced traditional notions about academic knowledge, performances, educational spaces, and who is ‘an expert’. Each participant nominated an NM tropic to share/teach the group. We also had time for writing, teaching-learning discussions and reflection. We had a musician friend of mine come to play and stay for lunch and the afternoon (so awesome!). Everyone brought a lunch plate to share and each participant went home with a garden box bursting at the seams. A wonderful day of collaborative NM work.
Instead of having a guest presenter, we invited everyone to ‘present’ by bringing a piece of data that ‘glows’ for them – a piece they would like to ‘re-turn’ with and share with some suppotive-critical friends. The idea here is that we are all working on different research projects, with different applications and with different data. This was our last meeting before the holidays, so we thought it might be interesting for participants to share a part of their research with others as a way of mining alternative insights – and to give each researcher some fresh ideas and considerations to mull over during the holidays. It was a huge success and wonderful to hear what everyone was working on, wrestling with and how they were thinking-with and processing. Super helpful and inspiring! A great end to our first year as a SIG!
Some people are still away in January. February is busy orientating and getting prepared for the year, so we start our SIGs in April after people have had a chance to settle back in at Uni.
In 2020 we had 6 meetings from March – November and our membership expanded to 40 members – not only Griffith and other Queensland-based universities, but Australia-wide and internationally.
April 2020
I had just returned from my bicycles-for-education PhD fieldwork in West Africaand the other SIG members were keen to hear how it went and what/how I was thinking of moving forward to frame the experience as a posthumanist research project. Great questions! So, to kick off the NM SIG for 2020, I presented my project to date. I outlined what I did during fieldwork and some initial ideas for moving forward and putting to work NM approaches. It was wonderful hearing people ideas, comments and suggestions on possible ways to process and think-with all that had transpired. I brought a lot of (actual) materials and realia from Sierra Leone – and my bike – into the session.
In this session, we had Dr Lazaroo return to her PhD work (two years ago) to untangle the mess in order to make new discoveries. Her project was: Making Noise: An Ethnography of a Community Performance Project between Vulcana Women’s Circus and People with Disabilities. In this session, Natalie reflected on her early methodology and locates a poem titles ‘Expressions of longing’ which she wrote in response to NM SIG provocations. This return poem captures the essence of articulations that emerged during her artistic collaboration over a 4-month period of fieldwork with Vulcana Women’s Circus to create a community performance called Stronghold, which involved people with disabilities.
Our presenter (referred to as X) for this session had just submitted her Griffith EPS Master’s thesis two days before this meeting. In this session, X shared some insights, ‘data’ and narrative moments from her latest research project which was an exploration of workplace sexual harassment on teacher identity. Now that X’s Masters was submitted, she was interested in feedback from the group on what resonates and how she might build the project into a PhD using a New Materialisms lens. Specifically, X was keen to explore how the sexual harassment complaint has its own agency and to get feedback from the SIG on how she might approach this. A very unsettling and moving session for all.
For this session, we had the incredible Melbourne-based PlayTank Collective – Alicia Flynn, Sarah Healy and Allie Edwards present a session entitled Lessons from the Play Tank: Adventures in playful scholarship. In this session, we discussed enacting NM theories and how to provide a playful and collaborative space to re-think, re-imagine, re-( ) research for others. We looked at using art education and design as opportunities to create workshops that attended to the joys and curiosities experienced while working/playing together in a material way. A key focus was on collaboration, intentionally responsive and response-able practices. And we had lots of fun playing, making and learning!
For this session, we had Griffith PhD candidate Janis Hanley take us on a creative and analytical exploration of Milieu, Territory, Atmosphere, Agency & Culture. Using written and visual excerpts from her current PhD research-in-progress on the historical Queensland textile industry, Janis provoked us to consider how milieu, chi, concepts of ‘home’ and atmosphere resonated with us and in our research. We did a number of individual and collaborative activities that helped activate and draw out interesting aspects such as how a piano, political graffiti in a factory and participant appreciation of research diagrams reveal new opportunities. We also looked at how conceptions of ‘home’ feature in our own work and life.
For this session, we had our first international guest presenter, A/P Tom Reynolds (Dept of Writing Studies, Uni of Minnesota, USA). Tom’s interested in critical theories of writing instruction, histories of popular literacy, and intersections of literacy and cultural movements. He is currently working on multimodality with his students, who are making group digital videos that advocate for issues. In this session, he shared some ideas (and wanted feedback for) how these projects might involve greater NM engagement with both discursive and non-discursive elements. Hells yeah! Did the SIG have some good ideas on how to do that!
For this session, we held aNew Materialist’s Writing Party!This session provided time and space for thinking-writing-playing and to shift the focus from ‘academic’ reading and presentations into a different positive and exploratory space. Many of us are hard at work writing alone at our desks, so this was an opportunity to come together, share ideas and get some serious NM writing done. I hosted the party – it was close to my birthday so it was an extra academic birthday treat and celebration for me! We had a few fun warm-ups, a few open-ended guided writing activities, and some research-focused timed writing time. We also had time to chat, reflect and share as much or as little as people wanted. Great fun!
For our last session of 2020, we had Patricia Ni Ivor who works in Project Management at RMIT (Melbourne) present a session with the amazing title: Feeling success in project teams: Travelling from the domain ruled by the supreme God-of-Things to the fresh air of Sensation and the Ineffable. Patricia explored the concept of affect as used by Deleuze and Guattari, drawn from Spinoza’s Ethics and the work of Henry Bergson. She outlined the fit between the theoretical paradigm of Self-inquiry (Spinoza’s synergy with eastern spiritual traditions and Bergson’s notions of consciousness) and how the emphasis on embodiment or somatic inquiry reflects the yogic basis of Self-inquiry (central to Patricia’s thesis) and more recent theories in social science, psychology and physical movement studies in art and wellbeing. The participants got to practice with one of Patricia’s self-inquiry/meditation exercises during the session.
Image: NIH Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
Internationally, March is known as women’s history month.
The aim of this initiative is to redress previously omitted women’s participation and achievements from being known by celebrating women’s contributions to history, culture and society.
There are many exhibitions, projects, protests and events run during March that raise awareness for the significance, roles, struggles and issues of women and girls.
So to kick off ‘Women’s Month’, here are three more-than-usual initiatives that are exemplary in celebrating a range of women’s achievements.
This page celebrates March being Women’s History by highlighting a range of Australian women and the diverse contributions they’ve made to Australia’s history.
What I like about this particular page is that it is inclusive and immediately understandable in what it is trying to achieve. Having a simple photo album-style layout showcasing significant women (with names and dates) makes it quick and easy to get a sense of the range of cultural backgrounds (Indigenous, Australian-Chinese, European immigrants, white) and their contributions (politics, literature, arts, sport, law and many others) over time – ranging from Fanny Balbuk Yooreel (1840) to Everly Scott (2017).
I think it is imperative to not only name the person but also to give each woman just identity. Consider how many times you’ve seen historical male figures of significance. There is ALWAYS a photo of them to reinforce their status as ‘important’ and that ‘this individual is not only someone you should know the name of, but you should know what they look like.’
Including images of women is a political move in this regard. It’s a critical move to shift past erasures of significant women from not just naming them (whereby their name is ‘listed’ and therefore at risk of being yet again ‘lost’ in the density of descriptive discourse), but so that the uniqueness of each woman is also recognised – as well as their name.
Photos are especially important given that surnames are patrilineal (assigned by fathers and husbands) so it is usually only first names that distinguish individuals from others. Linking women to their first and surnameswith their photoshelps to identify AND personalise these women beyond a perfunctory mention by name in passing. This is what the RAHS site does well.
There are so many incredible women listed on the RAHS – and many that most Australians have probably never heard about. For example: Muruwari Community worker and filmmaker Essie Coffey (otherwise known as the Bush Queen of Brewarrina), or Ruby Payne-Scott who was Australia’s first woman radio Astronomer, or one of Australia’s first great actors Rose Quong, who was a breakthrough given her Chinese heritage during the Australian White Policy, or WWI war correspondent Louise Mack.
I’m following Dr Katie Phillips’ Twitter account for all of March.
In an act of radical generosity and support, each day, Katie uploads a different post each day that shares the voices, work and contributions of highly influential, but lesser-known Native, First Nations and Indigenous women from what is now called the USA.
This project was a real eye-opener for me. Not only did I appreciate the forethought, planning and process that Katie applied to make this happen, but it was also an incredibly educational initiative that has far-reaching scope and implications.
Twitter’s limited text allowances meant that each day, Katie provides the name, image and brief synopsis about ‘the woman of the day’ and her significant contribution. I not only learned about these incredible women (which, as an Australian, I would have not have been exposed to), but this approach is also an invitation (and reminder) to keep learning about amazing women elsewhere around the world.
I found myself following up on many of the women Katie posted, wanting to know more about their conditions and experiences.
As a teacher, researcher, creative, and someone with half a brain and a heart, I was impressed by Katie’s approach. It showed a genuine commitment to decolonizinghistory and better accounting for diverse women’s experiences.
F@*king incredible work!
Dr. Kat Jungnickel – Bikes and Bloomers
Image: Kat Jungnickel’s book cover “Bikes and Bloomers”
Kat’s specific interest area is reinvigorating Victorian women investors and their amazing cyclewear. She published a book based on her PhD research called Bikes and Bloomers. Here’s a description of the book from Kat’s portfoilo:
The bicycle in Victorian Britain is often celebrated as a vehicle of women’s liberation. But much less is known about another critical technology with which women forged new and mobile public lives – cycle wear. Despite its benefits, cycling was a material and ideological minefield for women. Conventional fashions were inappropriate, with skirts catching in wheels and tangling in pedals. Yet wearing more identifiable ‘rational’ cycle wear could elicit verbal and sometimes physical abuse from parts of society threatened by newly mobile women.
In response, pioneering women not only imagined, made and wore radical new forms of cycle wear but also patented their inventive designs. The most remarkable of these were convertiblecostumes that enabled wearers to secretly switch ordinary clothing into cycle wear.
This highly visual social history of women’s cycle wear explores Victorian engineering, patent studies and radical feminist invention. Underpinned by three years of in-depth archival research and inventive practice, this new book by Kat Jungnickel brings to life in rich detail the lesser-known stories of six inventors and their unique contributions to cycling’s past and how they continue to shape urban life for contemporary mobile women.
Talk about raising awareness for previously hidden women’s achievements! Go Kat!
Recently, I attended a very unique opportunity: a 4-part virtual Geography, Art and MemoryWorkshop co-convened by Griffith’s Centre for Social and Cultural Research Dr Laura Rodriguez Castro, Dr Diti Bhattacharya, Dr Kaya Barry and Prof. Barabra Pini.
As a New Materialisms community bike researcher working in Sierra Leone, my work is embedded with post(de)coloniality, cultural dynamics, current-past experiences, gender, geography, mobility and space-time-matterings.
So I was excited about this workshop! Right up my (v)alley! (Get it? Geo joke!)
This workshop invited us to examine and experiment with the cultural and political potentials of ‘memory through art’ in geography inquiry. We looked at creative practices, collaborated and had discussions on some key and pressing issues related to our specific research. There was also the added bonus of an invitation to contribute to a Special Issue of Australian Geographer(2022).
In this session we asked:
What does art do to geographies of memories?
Image: Memories Through Art
A workshop in 4 parts
The workshop was structured in four parts:
Part 1 – 1st February 2021 by 5:00pm: In the week leading up to the event, workshop participants submitted a 1 page (A4 portrait or landscape) response to the question: ‘What does art do to geographies of memory?’ The response could be written, creative, drawn, mapped, photos, collage, text, prose, or more. We will share these on our website, and will form a key discussion point for the interactive workshop event.
Part 2 – 4th February 2021, 3:00pm-5:00pm: We attended the keynote presentations by Libby Harward (Australia) and Virgelina Chara (Columbia). These two artists (see below) work with the current pressing issues of geographical research, treating them as a threshold point for their own creative responses and provocations that they may choose to share during parts 3 and 4. We focused on artistic interventions from Southern epistemologies as these continue to be underrepresented in Australian geography.
Part 3 – 5th February 2021, 9.30am – 12:30pm: Each participant gave an informal 5-minute talk about their creative response which they submitted prior to the workshop. (See my submission is at the end of this post).
Part 4 (optional) – 5th February 2021, 12:30pm – 1:30pm: In the final hour, we collectively discussed how to take these ideas and discussions forward as a Special Issue ofAustralian Geographer integrating some of the workshop themes.
Keynote speakers
Virgelina Chara
Virgelina Chará is a human rights defender, educator, embroidery artist and protest music composer from Colombia. She coordinates the ‘Association for the Integral Development of Women, Youth and Children’ (ASOMUJER y Trabajo) which works with forcibly displaced families and victims of the armed violence in Colombia. She is also the leader of the Embroidery Union at the Memory Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in Bogotá, Colombia. She is a world-renowned educator on the pedagogy and power of memory for the construction of peace.
She was born in Suárez, Cauca, which is a region where armed conflict, extractivism and neoliberal development have meant many people, including Virgelina and her family, have had to confront violence and displacement. Since 2003 Virgelina has resided in Bogotá. In 2005 she was proposed as a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.
You can read more on Virgelina’s work here (left click to Google Translate to English).
Libby Harward
Artist Libby Harward is a descendant of the the Ngugi people of Mulgumpin (Morton Island) in the Quandamooka (Morton Bay Area).
Known for her early work as an urban graffiti artist under the pseudonym of ‘Mz Murricod’, and her performance-based community activism, Harward’s recent series, ALREADY OCCUPIED, engages a continual process of re-calling – re-hearing – re-mapping – re-contextualising – de-colonising and re-instating on country that which colonisation has denied Australia’s First Peoples.
This political practice engages Traditional Custodians in the evolution of ephemeral installations on mainland country which has become highly urbanised and calls for an artistic response that seeks to uncover and reinstate the cultural significance of place, which always was, and remains to be there. Her current place-based sound and video work engages directly with politically charged ideas of national and international significance.
You can find on Libby’s work here and read more on her project DABILBUNG here.
Workshop foucs
During this workshop we discussed themes of memory, art, and geographical knowledge in order to motivate a creative dialogue among geographers, artists, and activists.
We talked about the key question and looked at how to move beyond methodological debates and how to use art mediums as approaches to bring to light the affective and political forces of place speaking to timely and important issues such as colonialism, climate change, migration and peace and conflict.
There was a strong focus on Indigenous and Southern epistemologies and discussions on how to decolonize feminist research involved with geography, power, labour, art, and memory.
Image: Still taken from Virgelina Chará’s keynote.
Workshop convergences, notes, artifacts and ideas
I was heavily invested in the discussions, which were provocative, rich and challenging. Out of respect for the content and participants present, I have chosen to deliberately deviate from the traditional blog ‘reportage’ style of summarising the workshop. Instead, I am using a non-linear, fragmented, messy, (in)process(un)complete, more New Materialist approach to ‘throw up’ a few random snippets, thoughts and connections I noted during these sessions. The below content is a deliberate post-human shift from presenting content as if it is ‘right’, ‘accurate’ or ‘makes sense’ to humans-participants-knowers. While some content may make sense – some may not. There are no mistakes or errors in these notes. So for the below notes, you dear reader, are implicated in the reiteration and (re)co-creation of the workshop ‘matters’ ….. here we go!
This story is ‘sew’ important …memory, history and life for so many, but new information for others (like me) elsewhere..truthtelling, invasion, pollution, academic violence and extractivism…The ‘Justice ‘ dept, The Memory Centre, the Power of Memory, parent-teacher-adult time with student-children-learner, ‘education is so square now’, pedagogy of memory, to the teachers: ‘do you realise you are the useless ones here?’… we don’t do it through writing, we do it through sewing and food, they have had massacres in every country, ‘ (Duque) he’ is just the model..creative outputs that help us think about these issues…
Some participants linked Virgelina‘s keynote to other textile protests, work and exhibitions, such as:
Libby shares with us her visionary bloodletting, deadstream and saltwater reflections. Flow. Sand Crunch. Lying in grass. Forms and textures. Listen (more) carefully. Birds-eye views. Film as experiential documentation. Art that moves and breathes. Unexpected. Tasmanian salvaged timber. Art(work)s. lying – lying. Post-colonisation – Decolonisation.
Mike is a chairmaker and researcher. Listening to Mike makes me think about how the ideological state apparatus presents a ‘version of collective memory-truth’ (ie statues & iconoclasts) – that is literally set in concrete (or other material) and associated forms of patriarchal, colonistic (tee-hee..get it?! not now, stay focus(ed), be serious!), political issues that go along with that kind of art …and that the artist is rarely? clearly? identified or acknowledged….after all it is their output/work/….
BI re(views) the memory artifacts produced: Proserpine Ambulance Depot (1990), Proserpine Hospital Outpatients Department (1939-1999), Proserpine RSL Club (1950-1990), and the Eldorado Picture Theatre (1927-1985).
Janis literary maps and remaps the Queensland Wollen Manufacturing Company floorplan(s) with mill(field)work, mill(i)visits, millscapes and milieus. Overlaying Coral’s draft interpretations of Mud Maps. Ron’s List across the ages – staff payroll (50?) years on.
Embodiment -moving through time-space-places
Public art
Art, bike, memory and geography
Institualization of memory – academic violences – uni mapping vs uni tracing
As I work on my bicycling PhD, time seems to lengthen, flatten and conflate.
Timestamps such as teaching semesters, due dates, and Public Holidays mean little to me as I continue to work independently on my self-directed community bike research.
But today is different.
January 26th stands out for me (as it does for many others): ideologically politically, socially and culturally as a very challenging day.
This is because two significant events occurred on this date that continue to have reverberations – and both of which have a particular link and meaning to me and my research. (Read to the end of this post to find out why).
Trouble in Australia
Where I live in Australia and around the world, January 26th historically and currently continues to be a date on which a number of transgressive and contested struggles have been brought to the surface.
Here are two main reasons society should be engaging with challenging conversations on January 26th.
In Australia, January 26th is a VERY controversial date.
This date is the official national (holi)day of Australia – what many call ‘Australia Day’.
It has also been called Anniversary Day, First Landing Day and Foundation Day.
It was on this date in 1788 that the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Cove* and white colonisers ‘claimed’ sovereignty over Australia.
Australia Day has been positioned in politics and the media as being a day to celebrate national pride and the diverse Australian community.
But such ‘celebrations’ negate Indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and First Nations peoples who were here well before European colonisers arrived, but who suffered the brutal and fatal hostile take-over of colonisers, the legacy of which is still very much alive today.
Despite what your position is on this issue, it is important to keep engaging with a range of voices, ideas and perspectives. It is unconscionable to simply reject, disengage or ignore that this debate is going on – such a social issue demands attention and action.
Image: Namila Benson (Instagram)
This blog has thousands of readers, many of whom are outside Australia and may not be aware of this debate.
So I’ve put together an initial list showcasing a range of indigenous, academic, educational and news commentaries below for our international friends and those interested in learning more:
But January 26th is not only a day of confrontation in Australia.
*Many of us growing up in Australia were taught in school that it was Captain Cook who landed the First Fleet in January 1788, but in actual fact, it was Captain Arthur Phillip. Captain Cook had been dead for nine years at that point. Just goes to show there are serious discrepancies in the so-called factual reporting and historical educational/news reproductions of this event that needs to be interrogated and revised to be more accurate… and most important of these is the truthtelling, recognition, experiences, and the standing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders peoples.
Trouble on January 26th (2000) in the USA
Elsewhere, this date is also infamous, but for different reasons.
On this date, 21-years ago in New York, American rock band Rage Against the Machine (famous for their provocative and revolutionary political views and lyrics) played on the steps of the US Stock Exchange.
They had a permit to play and were recording a music video with Michael Moore for their song ‘Sleep now with the fire’ (which is about capitalism and greed).
The video pretty much shows what happened.
It is essential viewing and I set it for homework for my students.
Yup…it’s (still) that good!!
Essentially, with several hundred fans watching on, the protest-concert-flash mob-recording was considered so disruptive and ‘dangerous’ that the cops were called in and scuffles broke out. During the confrontation, security made the call to shut down the New York Stock Exchange – a move that had never happened before in its 200-year history…and one that many saw as a successful, direct political challenge to halt capitalism.
These two events are very important individually, but there is a specific link for me between the two as well.
A particularly unsettling link
As a middle-aged, temporarily able-bodied, Australian, white, educated, female conducting research located in disadvantaged communities in Sierra Leone (West Africa) issues of power, gender, race, and ethics are paramount.
As a researcher, I constantly need to revisit my relationality to my research from the point of view of:
Subjectivity: to what degree this research is influenced by my subjective, personal perspectives, values, preferences, opinions, feelings, and experiences.
Positionality: What is the stance or position of me (researcher) in relation to aspects of the study (participants, places, communities, organizations)
Ethics: To uphold ethical conduct and the highest integrity for the design, conduct, activities and reporting of the research.
Postcolonialityis another ongoing tension I wrestle with in my research.
Forefront in my mind is to avoid being another white person (benefiting from) doing research ‘on’ a southern, disadvantaged community – and thus reinscribing the very exploitative colonial practices and not the empowering/progressive alternative my research claims to be.
So on January 26th, I am ideologicallyand culturally engaged and moved by both these events and ongoing challenges – and the kicker for me is this:
Although I am not specifically named after Columbus’ ship The Nina (I’m named after a great Aunt), the intertwining link between these two events AND my name PLUS the inherent (post)colonial challenges inherent in my research adds extra complexity and assumed accountability for me based on past-present implications of/for colonization, greed, extractivism, and exploitation.
Such a link is a weighty reminder for me.
And I take it very seriously.
This is why January 26th has an even greater significance for me.
So, I am not ‘celebrating’ today.
Instead, I’m taking time to think deeply about these events (and around the world) and look at who has power, who does not, and to consider my role in situations where social injustices occur.
We should all be engaging more directly, intelligently and honestly with such events.
In 2018, I did my own Happy New Gear! review looking at key moments related to international events, human rights, the environment and, Health and Science.
It’s been a very challenging year for all. While most people have time off over the holiday and new year period, this year I am working on a Summer Intensive course called Gender and Literacy for undergrad teaching students at Griffith Uni. It’s a great course and I am thoroughly enjoying discussing gender common Australian identity, Shakespeare and how to have more generative conversations in classrooms about gender.
but it also means no break for me and I’m right in the middle of marking major assessments. so unlike previous years where I would go hell for leather, this year I am living vicariously through other riders’ ‘year in review’ and conserving my energy.
Having said that the end of the year is a big deal!
Doing a year in review
Many people like to do a year in review.
It a great way to look over the past 12 months and take stock of accomplishments, challenges and key aspects that stood out. Some riders do it with Strava, metrics and statistics to gauge overall riding results. Others like to do a more qualitative approach and look at what they learned from a year of riding.
Go to any mainstream, popular cycling blog and it will be filled with news, events and highlights that are no doubt collated into an overall ‘year in review’ consumerscape post.
Personally, I like the annual reviews that are not mainstream…the more personal, relatable or unusual ones.
Other riders: 2020 A year in review
So, to celebrate the end of 2020, here’s four few less common bike-centered 2020 year in reviews that made me smile and feel good about riding bikes. Enjoy!
Image: pbandbagels.com
pbandbangles. The first is an older, but heartfelt entry about getting back into biking by Peanut Butter and Bagels. I love the conciseness, simplicity and personalization of this post. We all have our own ‘Dennis’ who encourages us to ride and this post reminds me of the humble beginnings of riding a bike and the love and dedication many have in making it more accessible for others.
Image: Firstpost
2. The year 2020 in a bike ride. This is a thoroughly entertaining (cringe-worthy?) rant by Harsh Pareek. In this review, Harsh shares the finer points of getting it right (and wrong) when it comes to bike riding, teenagers, city living and early morning rides at 3C when it just isn’t ‘your day’. I love the humour, detail and ever-unfolding litany of calamities that Harsh has to content with – we’ve all been there!
Image: BikeIOWA
3. BikeIOWA year in review. For something a little different, this post is written by Scott Sumpter and Jess Rundlett from Bike IOWA. BikeIOWA is a bike advocacy and network hub. I like this bike-themed year in review as they broke the year up into digestible highlight chucks: wowsers, anniversaries, the year ‘by the numbers, a restatement of their bike commitment and finish off with a month-by-month audit. I like it – very comprehensive!
Image: David Trumpore (pinkbike)
4. Photo Epic – Homebound. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then sports photographer and writer Dave Trumpore’s 2020 collection speaks volumes. Given COVID impacted EWS and so many international MTB (and other sporting) events, this photo collection of the year in review pays homage to not only Dave’s skill and range of work – but foregrounds the riders in some of the most stunning locations we don’t usually see. It’s also great to see Kori Gargano, Laura Slavin and Anne Henderson featuring prominently seeing as female riders are often severely underrepresented in mainstream cycling news/blogs ‘year in review’ articles. For me, this collection takes me straight back to my EWS competition days – good times! Great work Dave.
However you are finishing off 2020 – be it a ‘year in review’, goal setting for a killa riding year ahead, going for a few final bike rides before the NYE clock ticks over, or any thousand other ways to close out 2020 – may yours be generative, nourishing and always-already with you smiling, with bikes, in nature, and alongside beloveds.
This year, I‘ve signed up to ride the #Festive500.
The #Festive500 is an international annual bike riding challenge that takes place over the Christmas-New Year period.
The premise is simple: registrants ride 500 kilometers over the eight days from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Eve.
Where I live and ride (Brisbane, AUST) it is summertime – with endless warm days that are perfect for long early morning/late afternoon (and night) rides. But, elsewhere in the world, (like the US and UK) it is peak Winter – freezing cold and snowing. I spare a thought for these riders and the extra seasonal challenges they face.
Considering the festive time is often one of excess, overeating and recreation, this event is a genuine challenge for those who want to try something a little different.
It’s the first time I’ve done this event. Each year, I have a different festive focus: one year we indulged, another we retreated like hermits to a bush hideaway, another we used bikes to visit family and friends in another city. Given its still COVID-ish, this year we are staying close to home and minimising social contact. Instead, we are spending our time together riding bikes around our local area – so the Festive500 fits perfectly with our plans.
It also conveniently overlaps with our riding a century (100kms) each full moon for a year (13). We started riding full moon centuries in November 2020. On Tuesday, Dec 29th there will be a Gemini Wolf full moon (which we would be doing anyway), so that will count towards our Festive500. That, plus riding every day and cycling to-and-from the one and only Christmas dinner party we are going to (the long way round) will definitely clock up the kilometers needed. No worries here!
Each rider needs to consider how they want to achieve the 500. Some, (like Beloved) will go all out and smash themselves and do a few super long days in the saddle, others will pace themselves and work on an average of 63kms per day, and others will mix up days and distances depending on time, energy, weather and family commitments.
We don’t have a strong culture of celebrating Halloween in Australia. But given many readers of this blog are in countries that do celebrate Halloween – this post is for you!
Previously I have shared Halloween-themed posts – like the super-fun Homewood Witch’s Ride (Alabama, USA) where everyone dresses up in awesome outfits and go for a ride around town.
Also, the Mala Bruja Alleycat (New York City, USA), which is held the night before Halloween, on Witch’s Eve which is an all-women’s courier-inspired alleycat fun-but-serious race-ride where you tick off checkpoints along the way. (More events like this please!)
Halloween Bikes 2020: Ideas for events & costumes
So for a fun bike-themed Halloween 2020, you will need a bike-and-costume and a kick-ass bike event to go to….so here two ideas to encourage you to get your ‘spooky self’ (and family + friends) on bikes and riding your local neighbourhood for Halloween 2020.
2020 Zombie Bike Parade
The 2020 Zombie Bike Parade (what a wicked idea!) was a collaboration between local bike shop Davis Cyclery and BIKE City Theatre Company (Bike City USA). This event invited the local community to dress up and join in for an afternoon ride around the Davis Bike Loop for a massive Zombie Bike extravaganza.
As well as mixing with locals, the Bike City Theatre Company and their team of sketch writers, directors and actors provided entertainment and an event like no other! The dancers did a great job of zombifying dance moves that keep everyone humming along. They had fun, laughs, socially distanced photo ops and an unforgettable community bike-themed Halloween experience. Here are a few snaps from the event and you can see more here.
Bike-Themed Characters & Costumes
If you are just cruising around your neighbourhood for general spookiness (and not a themed event – like the Zombie Ride above) then you can diversify your costume – and anything goes!
Online, you can find heaps of websites, pictures and DIY videos of creative and fun bike-themed costumes. Some websites have links to buy the products featured – but like most people, I will ALWAYS opt to make my own version out of recycled materials.
Any mum’s DIY YouTube video is great for tutorials on how to make costumes at home. More sustainable, more personal! Here are a few of my favs from Bikes Reviewed.
Headless Horse (Biker) Man
Pac Man Pair
ET & Elliot (a classic!)
Evel Knievel
Pee Wee Herman
Image: aby7ny.com
So what ever you do for Halloween 2020 – have heaps of fun doing it on ya bike!
