Jo_Pollitt

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. Her debut novella The dancer in your hands was published in 2020.

Her current WA Weather Studios project brings artist, scientists and educators together to respond to two pressing issues of our times: human physical disconnection from their environments, and the planetary crisis of climate change. Centred on artist-led and kin/aesthetic practices to ignite collaborative responses and transdisciplinary conversations, WA Weather Studios disrupts singular narratives and engages multiple perspectives toward developing generative responses to climate crisis. These artist-led processes make it possible to sit with complexity, and not-knowing to create opportunity for deepened listening, heightened attention and increased agility in responding with unstable worlds. Weather Studios: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-04/weather- studio-to-fight-climate-change-nannup/101062682

WA Weather Studios builds on Conversation with Rain – a collaboration with the Art Gallery of Western Australia exploring children’s creative relations with weather as a way of potentially transforming our climate futures. This research harnesses multisensory, non-linear and experimental poetic pedagogies as an alternative to didactic learning.