Western Australian Institute for Educational Research 34th Annual Research Forum A Climate of change: Research-informed education for the future The University of Notre Dame, 1.00 pm to 6.00 pm, Saturday 3 August 2019 Keynote presenter: Professor Mindy Blaise

Professor Mindy Blaise [Profile] is a Vice Chancellor's Professorial Research Fellow at Edith Cowan University. 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-founder and principal researcher of the Common Worlds Research Collective and #FEAS Feminist Educators Against Sexism. She has recently co-founded The Ediths, an ECU group of feminist interdisciplinary researchers currently researching children's waste, water and weather relations. Their embodied, affect focused, and ecologically responsive research aims to carry on the legacy of Edith Cowan, by working for better more-than-human relations in times of climate crisis. The Ediths are interested in transforming how research cultures can be driven and thrive through a collective feminist ethic.

Becoming-with Merri Merri: Experimental multispecies storytelling as an ethical practice

Drawing from an ecologically responsive, multisensory, and affect-focused multispecies ethnography of children's water relations, I experiment with ways of listening to and telling nature-culture stories that are not just about the human. Instead of telling human exceptional and discovery stories that we already know, such as the child taking care of nature or learning all the facts about a creek, radically different kinds of stories are needed for transformation. Guided by feminist common worlding methods, the multispecies stories I share are experimental, embodied, situated, non-innocent, and imperfect. These nature-culture stories show how children's lives are always already folded into multiple entanglements with wind, water, possums, rocks, settler colonialism, and much more. I show how experimental multispecies storytelling can activate new understandings, relationships, and accountabilities that are needed in these times of climate crisis.