The Australian Centre, its Fellows and Affiliated Researchers are focused on scholarship that examines contemporary Indigenous affairs through questions of relationality. We resist uncritically (re)producing the idea that the unequal and unjust conditions of settler colonialism are inevitable, immutable and omnipotent, but neither do we ignore or depoliticise them. Through this work, we promote notions of settler responsibility to learn, engage, respond to and act on questions of ongoing colonial injustice on this continent.
The Centre’s activities are designed to enable Indigenous scholars, knowledge-holders, and non-Indigenous researchers to collaborate in the production of empirically rich, conceptually innovative, and ethically rigorous research.
Through high-quality research, comprehensive research training, specialised graduate education, and meaningful critical public discourse, our objective is to elevate the expertise and influence of the University of Melbourne researchers in this forward-looking national and international endeavour.
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.
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
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.
Local Collaborations
International collaborations
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Indigenous Women Futuring
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Recoding relationally: Indigenous new media and digital storytelling
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Root and Branch: Essays on Inheritance
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Reflections on Indigenous Politics and Settler Colonialism in Aotearoa
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Refusal, Resurgence, Renewal: Indigenous Independence in the 21st Century
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Visiting Fellows Seminar (Semester One)