“InterGen” conversation on creating a children’s anti-racist book on migrant-indigenous solidarity in Australia

In this article, we converse about a program called InterGen, a series of artist-led interventions that critically reflect on modes of intergenerational knowledge making and sharing. Learning from the late bell hooks, we demonstrate how creative interventions can enact practices of freedom that disrupt institutional knowledge production by offering a multiplicity of sites for co-creating and co-thinking. We recreate a decolonial feminist conversation we held as part of the creative process of developing an anti-racist solidarity children’s book on migrant-Indigenous solidarity, a process that intentionally disrupted the western research process. We discuss a recent iteration as part of the InterGen program, delivered by Arts Gen at cohealth a community health organisation in Melbourne’s west. This project involved a collaboration between Folole and Tasnim, two Indigenous people who are settlers in Australia, who came together to weave an anti-racist narrative that unsettles multiculturalist children’s literature and that highlights a commonality of resistance cultures in white supremacist contexts. Our article offers insight into how engaged pedagogy practices might offer sites of learning that as hooks emphasises, could enrich spiritual nourishment and wellbeing.