Date of Award
2024
Document Type
Thesis
Publisher
Edith Cowan University
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
School
School of Education
First Supervisor
Mindy Blaise
Second Supervisor
Jo Pollitt
Third Supervisor
Emily Gray
Fourth Supervisor
Jacqueline Ullman
Abstract
Everyday sexisms within Australian universities are like shape shifters that move between bodies, hide inside policies and behind closed doors. This interdisciplinary research project examines how a slow choreographic methodology enables embodied creative processes to give social phenomena a tangible dimension. Centrally situated within an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Understanding and Addressing Everyday Sexisms in Australian Universities (Everyday Sexisms), this research project thickens, extends, and informs the development of the Everyday Sexisms’ methods and findings in two ways. First, by highlighting how bodies, movement, and objects are involved in the choreography of institutional everyday sexisms. Secondly, by utilising creative data emergent from four artworks to contribute to each phase of the Everyday Sexisms. These artworks include a set of three short Video-Vignettes, a participatory artwork Here There Again, a suite of textile sculptures, and a 40-minute choreographic work, titled and Again. This PhD threads the data from these artworks through the Everyday Sexisms phases, weaving a slow interdisciplinary landscape that contributes how to practically re-frame, re-imagine and resist sexisms.
The project’s slow theoretical framework is grounded in feminist phenomenological, material, and pedagogical discourses. Held by choreographic thinking, the project’s creative processes allow for an exploration of different literacies that engage everyday sexisms beyond the vanishing point of their occurrences. The digital editing, tufting, mapping, and choreographic methods work to continuously move the creative data beyond the pages of this exegesis. Utilising a slow relational approach to meaning making, data analysis and public engagement, the project opens the door to alternative encounters with the who, what, when and where of everyday sexisms felt effects. This project’s multiple threads hold and move the creative data, demonstrating through practice, the value of choreographic thinking to spatially and imaginatively tune-in to the felt effects that everyday sexisms provoke. It offers the provocation that to stay longer with the felt effects of everyday sexisms is not to sit in their slow and violent realities, rather it is a powerful undertaking that makes visible the actions, spaces, and materials that enable sexisms to reproduce.
DOI
10.25958/wf34-dk48
Recommended Citation
Fishwick, E. (2024). Slow choreographies: Addressing everyday sexisms in Australian universities through embodied creative methods. Edith Cowan University. https://doi.org/10.25958/wf34-dk48