In our discussion of gifts, we recognize our inability to access the Indigenous and Black diasporic ancestral resonances that situate gifts as relational ways of knowing and being through materiality. We aim to recognize the traditional knowledges from which new materialist theorizing around gifts emerges; however, we do not wish to appropriate these approaches or ignore the rich history of "giftistemologies," or ways of knowing facilitated through gifting, that contribute to our Conference Creature praxis. While Jennifer Clary-Lemon (2019) discusses gifts in relation to the atrocities of settler colonialism to Indigenous bodyminds and lands, our project uses gifts to reconfigure the flows of agency within conference settings that mandate the hierarchical material and relational interactions that occur in these spaces. Conference Creatures isn't explicitly a citational project, but it, too, enables us to take up a project of "...looking both within and beyond the academy to highlight and build textual and material relationships with epistemic partners and forebearers" (Clary-Lemon, 2019). Apart from embracing a material relationality of gifts rooted in Indigenous epistemology, our project invites engagement with(in) and beyond our professional world(s).
Through our project, we blend Clary-Lemon's (2019) suggestion to "situate such terrible gifts as those that purposefully re-attune our attention to objects of study" with Gruwell's (2022) "craft agency" by using gifts to upset normative power differentials that created—and continue to enforce—"terrible gifts." As a gift, each Conference Creature implicitly makes visible (and tactile) inherited "terrible gifts" within academia such as patriarchy, white supremacy, and elitism. However, by drawing attention toward these power differentials, Conference Creatures simultaneously refuses these hierarchies by infusing a visual or tactile experience (in the form of each creature) into how we ask others to reimagine—and perhaps, recraft—our professional world(s). In other words, each creature evokes a terrible gift in tandem with a material reminder of one approach for upsetting the normative and unspoken lines between individuals at conferences.
To further explicate our multifaceted engagement with gifts, we might turn to Christine A. Nelson and Heather J. Schotton's (2022) "(Re)Considerations of Answerability," in which two Indigenous feminist teacher-scholar collaborators discussed the function of gifts in their own professional work. Mirroring Nelson and Schotton's ethical praxis of answerability, which informs how the pair crafts and researches together, Olivia and Hannah envision Conference Creatures as a material actor in collaborative professional praxis that builds relational answerability through the material gift. Like the authors above who have contemplated gifts through the lens of Robin Wall Kimmerer's (2013) work that put ecological sciences in concert with Indigenous knowledges, we, too, find Kimmerer's work helpful for understanding our project.
Drawing from Robin Wall Kimmerer's (2024) extended attention to gifts and reciprocity, Conference Creatures pursues a type of gift-giving that does not necessitate a one-to-one exchange of goods or services. Instead, the project enacts a material-discursive relational network of care within the field. In The Serviceberry, Kimmerer (2024) defined reciprocity and described how relationships are formed and maintained through these exchanges:
When I speak about reciprocity as a relationship, let me be clear. I don't mean a bilateral exchange in which an obligation is incurred, and can then be discharged with a reciprocal "payment." I mean keeping the gift in motion in a way that is open and diffuse, so that the gift does not accumulate and stagnate, but keeps moving, like the gift of berries through an ecosystem. (p. 17)
Kimmerer's understanding of reciprocity and gifts as in motion and expansive, when tied to her "covenant of reciprocity," defined as "...a pact of mutual responsibility to sustain those who sustain us" (p. 373), converges with Conference Creatures' commitment to disrupt neoliberal systems of commodification and hierarchy, refuse positivist attempts to measure reciprocity, and challenge traditional norms of the academy. Furthermore, our refusal to see creatures as a commodity, and our insistence on viewing creatures as a material reminder of the community gift that we might enact and embody, allows us to reimagine methods for establishing professional connections and attempt to counter a form of extraction that occurs in conference presentation settings. While our field actively creates formal and informal spaces to craft, collaborate, and make, Conference Creatures also understands these gatherings as full of potential opportunities to gift.
Academic conferences, workshops, lectures, institutes, seminars, and symposia are generative spaces, but they are also physically and mentally taxing. While expectations to present and engage in these situations are a reality of the profession, we view Conference Creatures as an intervention in the speaker-gives-to-audience norm. In prescriptive speaker-gives-to-audience situations, the scheduled presenter is expected to stand at the front of the room, supply curious minds with new knowledge, and provide additional knowledge in response to questions. While audience members may offer questions that move a speaker's work forward or applaud as a signal of contentment, these ephemeral relationalities do not have a material anchor to offset the knowledge extraction. When we distribute creatures to panel presenters, we resist the extractive nature of giving a presentation by transforming the exchange into a reciprocal act. In tandem with offering creatures as a gift to help sustain the individuals who—intellectually and emotionally—sustain us throughout the year, the connections and conversations these gifts invite encourage the expansion of the original gift through new connections and conversations.
