Creative Spaces

‘When you talk about a lack of “insert minority” into “insert any industry”, what you’re also saying is that you’re not willing to support the people who are actually there.’

Aminatou Sow is a writer and cultural commentator. She co-hosts with Ann Friedman the hit podcast Call Your Girlfriend, which tackles the intricacies of feminism, pop culture and politics. Together she and Friedman coined the term ‘Shine Theory’, a practice of mutual investment committed to collaborating with rather than competing against other people –especially other women. She is a member of the Sundance Institute Director's Advisory Group and previously led Social Impact Marketing at Google. Sow is also the founder of Tech LadyMafia, a group that increases opportunities for women in tech. She was named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 in Tech.

Karen Pickering is a feminist writer and organiser. Her previous work includes running the events Cherchez La Femme and Girls On Film Festival, writing the books About Bloody Time and Doing It, and her next book on motherhood shock and the resulting trauma will be published by Pantera Press. She is a single mother and lives with her son on Wurundjeri Country, where it's other mothers who make it all possible.

Eloise Grills is a writer and visual artist living on Dja Dja Wurrung land. Her collection of illustrated nonfiction, big beautiful female theory, was shortlisted for the 2023 Stella Prize and the Indie Book Award for Illustrated Nonfiction.

Dr Denise Chapman is a counternarrative storyteller, spoken word poet, and critical autoethnographer who lectures in children’s literature, early literacy, and inclusive children’s media at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Dr Chapman has served as a literacy specialist focused on critical media literacy in Australia, Fiji, and the United States. Denise uses oral stories, children’s literature, poetry, and digital images as counternarrative windows for social disruption and liberation. She is currently exploring preservice teachers experiences with diverse transmedia stories for children, and how teachers consider the impacts of diverse stories on children’s imagined possibilities. Collecting and analysing children’s literature, poetry, and short films centring the Global African experience serve as a favourite pastime for Denise.

Her most recent publication entitled 'The Crooked Room: Intersectional tap dancing, Academic Performing, and Negotiating Black, woman, Immigrant' is a critical poetic autoethnography that shares her wayfinding experience as an African American woman academic working in a White-privileged Australian university, trying to survive systems of oppression unacknowledged by those within the university space.

In an upcoming edited book by Dr Jeff Share entitled Ecowriting in Every Classroom, Denise discusses the freedoms and conscious-raising connections that stories lend to those experiencing oppression, as stories can help us fly.