Wild adventures in thought and deed: in conversation with Kathleen Quinlivan

Professor Kathleen Quinlivan died in 2020; she was based at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. A conversation between Kathleen and Mary Lou Rasmussen, conducted in 2020, makes up the bulk of this afterword; Kathleen and Mary Lou were longtime friends and collaborators. This conversation resonates with Kathleen's intellectual vitality and underscores a wild ethos that drove Kathleen's passion for social and political change. Kathleen was an important figure in the development of sexuality education in Australia and New Zealand. Over several decades she undertook research on topics that expanded the field and made interventions that advocated not for safety or assimilation, but for pleasure, wildness and the potentiality of failure. In this conversation Kathleen talks about her early life and experiences, within and outside education, and reflects on how these informed her theoretical commitments and her willingness to take risks, to fail, and to persist in cultivating '"a non-stupid" optimism'; a term she borrowed from the U.S. playwright Tony Kushner.