Ecofeminist Fridays
A reading group for creative writing scholars and students whose works focus on the intersection of ecological and feminist concerns
We are writers, artists, thinkers, researchers, curators and more. We take reading as a mode of commitment to situated dialogue, ethics and as a dynamic basis for art-activisms of all kinds.
We read as a collective. We read books cover-to-cover. Nothing is skipped. We go slow to go deep. It takes as long as it takes.
We do not read to escape the world. But, drawing on the powerful words of Deborah Bird Rose (‘Slowly’ 2010, 195kb pdf), we read to be pulled into intimate ethical proximity to specific worldly situations, contexts and encounters.
If, as Kate Rigby writes (‘Writing in the Anthropocene’ 2009), idyll chatter dulls the ethical imagination, slow reading might offer an antidote, among others.
We do need time to read. To break down ideas. To breakdown inside of ideas. To recognise connections, mutualisms, relations and tensions.
We do need time to think, to learn and unlearn. To get lost. To dream. To wonder. To wander. To contest. To counter cultures of fragmentation, isolation and separation.
We need time to reckon with our inheritances: the violent and the vibrant, the oppressed and oppressive, the static and the fugitive; time to learn how to own these inheritances, how to live with these inheritances. But first, we need to know what those inheritances are.
Our project is open-ended. There are no deadlines, nothing to pre-prepare.
We meet each week for two hours. We read from the history of critical ecological feminist thinking. We diffract these readings with poetry, novellas, short stories and films.
Come, read along and read aloud, sit, listen, absorb.
For more information email hayley.singer@unimelb.edu.au