Weather under pressure

kin/aesthetic practice and dancerly scores for unstable times

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.11.18131

Keywords:

kin/aesthetic, writing as dancing, choreographic thinking, improvisation, climate connection, artist-led activism

Abstract

This paper will offer a re-scored version of my creative presentation given at Recentring the Region. It is a return of sorts to a methodological dancing body that has been taken up with university mechinacia but is remembering again differently my trust in artists, and trust in knowledges under words, under skins. As an artist,  I’m interested in the kind of unquestioned extractivism that artist scholars such as Singer (2023) and van Neervan (2021) write of in the academy,  I notice it to. And I think about what artists practice invites, expects, and how it contributes in the ecopoliticalpoetic mix particularly as pertaining to increasing kin/aesthetic attention of human-environment relations. The paper harnesses writing as dancing through a practice of improvisation developed over 20years as a honed kind of staying with leaving (in Place), and as a mode of kin/aesthetic attention to support the urgent need for manifesting connection, climate activism, and care with both immediate and speculative climate futures. 

Author Biography

  • Jo Pollitt, Edith Cowan University

    Dr Jo Pollitt is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar with the Centre for People, Place, and Planet at Edith Cowan University working across both the School of Education and Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. Her work is grounded in a twenty-year practice of working with improvisation as methodology across multiple performed, choreographic and publishing platforms. Jo is co-founder of the feminist research collective The Ediths, artist-researcher with #FEAS -Feminist Educators Against Sexism, co-director of BIG Kids Magazine, and convenor of Dance Research Australia. 

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cover image with white text on an orange background: Swamphen a journal of Cultural ecology is written at the top. there is an outline of overlapping circular lines that create a floral shape. at the bottom is text that says Swamphen

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Published

2025-06-19

Issue

Vol. 11 (2025): Recentring the Region

Section

Essays

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