itellyouarise

JUDE KELLY

My grandmother did two things for me: let me use teatowels as costumes (we had no dress-up box) and encouraged my singing… she taught me that I was entitled to dreams and hopes and that those hopes and dreams were valid.

What have we done to make the
umbilical cord of history so thin?
[of voice/story]

We have a WOW because we want to celebrate what women are doing.
It starts with a “Think In” – what does WOW look like where you are?
They are a network of caring.  Two things you can say about women:
they are tired and they’re frightened.

When Somaliland’s First Lady wanted to
build a maternity hospital
the builders said they didn’t have time.
She answered: “Teach me to make a brick”.

HANA ASSAFIRI

Social justice is not discretionary.

The future is ours to make.

Intersectionality is embodied in the margins.
Social context, empowerment, employment and education
are where social change meets intersectionality in a practical way.

Where we feel an intuitive connection
we have an intuitive intelligence. We need
to back ourselves on what we feel and what we know.

Communities are strengthened through diversity.

MARIA KATSONIS

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” – Joan Didion

I have to be authentic to who I am.

The nature of my ambition has changed.
I believe in the power of one to affect social change.

TANIA CANAS

We are theory and theory is ours.
Arts, politics… theory is everyday life.

Education in Australia separated self and theory.  
Theory became externalised from the body.
It went from everywhere to nowhere.
Not ‘by us’ but ‘to us’. Not changing, but static.
Institution imposed a hierarchy of knowledge.
The indigenous people of Central America knew  astrology, geography, how to make chocolate.  They wrote in hieroglyphics and were writers, philosophers, theorists… there has been a genocide of knowledge = epistemicide.
They have colonised not just our bodies but our minds.

In my culture, cooking is at the centre of community.
With white feminism – I didn’t want to learn my mother’s cooking.
Now I am looking to bruja feminism, because the white feminism didn’t
acknowledge my ancestors, my mother or the role of hospitality as resistance – my mother cooked for the group that met at the house.

Not buried, didn’t die, not lost –
these ways of knowing are resistance.

It’s not known or recognised how strong women of colour are.
You will be marginalised: you need to ask:
will I notice, will I do something?
It’s hard. That’s why we need you to be there.

Research is embodied.  We write struggle.
When we theorise, we write with our bodies.
To write/use a theory, you need to embody it. Resist epistemicide.  
You write and exist in the in-between. Don’t lose yourself.