Research

Research at The Australian Centre

The Centre, its Fellows and Affiliated Researchers are focused on scholarship that turns a critical lens to the settler colonial state and its institutions. Working always in engagement with Indigenous scholars and scholarship, and in service of Indigenous sovereignties, our research considers how Australia’s founding as a settler colony restricts our capacity to engage with the central challenges of our time. Our interdisciplinary work centres critical scholarship that is often marginalised in the disciplines. We aim to create an institutional home for the slow and careful approaches foundational to the often undervalued or invisible ethical work that is essential to any research in this field.

Critical public conversations

The Australian Centre's hugely popular Critical Public Conversations (CPC) series is the Centre's flagship public event offering.

The Critical Public Conversation (CPC) series aims to enrich the university's social, cultural, and intellectual life and beyond by facilitating conversations that explore the challenges at the heart of relations between Indigenous and settler peoples in a respectful and considerate manner. By making explicit the fraught foundations of this relationship and its centrality to the politics of this continent, the series develops capacity for scholarship that is more ethical and academically rigorous.

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Supporting emerging research

The Australian Centre seeks to catalyse, incubate, and support research in Indigenous-settler relations through two key programs.

Springer book series

The series Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World brings together scholars interested in examining contemporary Indigenous affairs through questions of relationality. This is a unique approach that represents a deliberate move away from both settler-colonial studies, which examines historical and present impacts of settler states upon Indigenous peoples, and from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, which is predominantly interested in how Indigenous peoples speak back to the settler state. Closely connected to, but with meaningful contrast to these approaches, the Indigenous-Settler Relations series focuses sharply upon questions about what informs, shapes and gives social, legal and political life to relations between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous peoples, both in Australia and globally.

Series Editors: Sarah Maddison, Sana Nakata, Julia Hurst

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Publications

View a selection of books, book chapters and journal articles published by academics associated with the Australian Centre.

Reading group

The Australian Centre runs a critical reading group each semester based on an academic text. Our monthly meetings bring together graduate researchers, early career researchers and senior academics across myriad disciplines to discuss the chosen text, generating new ideas and relationships. If you are interested in joining the Australian Centre reading group, please email us a few brief sentences about yourself and your research.

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Local Collaborations

View recordings of past events hosted in collaboration with our Australian-based partners, scholars, and networks.

International collaborations

View recordings of past events hosted in collaboration with international partners, scholars, and networks.