Dr. Katherine Wright

Kate Wright’s research is situated at the interface of environmental humanities scholarship, community engagement, and social and environmental activism. Through innovative, participatory environmental humanities research projects, her research applies multispecies and anticolonial methodologies to work toward social and environmental justice. Between 2015 and 2019 Kate held a Chancellor’s postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of New England. The project was a four-year collaboration with Anaiwan, Gumbaynggirr, Dunghutti and Gamilaroi people, developing and maintaining a community garden on a block of land that was once part of the East Armidale Aboriginal Reserve. This public environmental humanities research project was a prototype for environmental humanities research in action, where the research team, comprised of academics, community members, and nonhuman inhabitants of the community garden, collaborated to create new questions, to foster new modes of attentiveness and learning to be affected, and to develop alternative ecologies of responsibility and obligation at the interface of scholarship and activism. In 2017 Kate published her first monograph, focused on decolonising philosophy and writing through intimate, embodied, and situated encounters with the more-than-human world, titled Transdisciplinary Journeys in the Anthropocene: More-than-human Encounters in the Routledge Environmental Humanities series. Kate holds a PhD, which received the Vice Chancellors Commendation for Excellence in Research, from Macquarie University, and is co-editor of the Living Lexicon section of Environmental Humanities. Kate is currently completing work on a monograph documenting the community garden project, tentatively titled Gleaning the Soils of Silver City—Cultural Revival and Anticolonial Resistance in a Community Garden.

RCC Research Project: Gleaning the Soils of Silver City—Cultural Revival and Colonial Resistance in a Community Garden

Lunchtime Colloquium Video: Decolonizing Archives: Grounding Anticolonial History in a Community Garden

Selected Publications:

• with Anaiwan language revivalist Callum Clayton Dixon. “'Nyala gara-nda uyi-di-na urala-gu, gyuna-gu’ (We are Speaking our Path to Home, to Country): A Manifesto for Creature Languages’ Hacking the Anthropocene.” In Feminist, Queer, Anticolonial Propositions, edited by Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Astrida Neimanis, and Sigi Jottkandt. London: Open Humanities Press (forthcoming).

• “In the Shadow of a Willow Tree: A Community Garden Experiment in Decolonising, Multispecies Research.” Cultural Studies Review 24, no. 1 (2018): 74–101.

• Transdisciplinary Journeys in the Anthropocene: More than Human Encounters (as part of the Environmental Humanities series). Routledge: London, 2017.

• Everyday Futures: Australia in the Age of Humans. “Iwata.” 2017.

• “Becoming-With.” Environmental Humanities 5 (2014): 277–281.

• “An Ethics of Entanglement for the Anthropocene.” SCAN: Journal of Media, Arts, Culture 10, no. 1 (2014).