Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration
Faculty of Arts
In light of the emerging COVID-19 situation and continuing policy statements from the State and Federal Government, the University is adopting a series of changes to reduce rates of infection in the community. The health and wellbeing of our community is of paramount importance. Therefore, all University events have been postponed or cancelled from midnight, Tuesday 17 March. Thank you for your understanding as we endeavour to keep our community members safe during this uncertain time. More information.
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The Closing The Gap Target To Reduce Numbers Of Indigenous Children In Care By 45% Within 10 Years Is Unrealistic And Likely To Fail
ISRC Collaborator Jacynta Krakouer “While the CTG target may be met through exiting Indigenous children from care ... what is the human cost of doing so? If we are not careful, permanent care & poor reunification efforts ... will result in assimilation.”
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Wednesday 12:00pm - 1:00pmWhat Does Success in Indigenous Higher Education Look Like?
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Closing the Gap misses the mark, the evidence, and our rights
ISRC Co-Director Dr Nikki Moodie on how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples 'have our own priorities, given to us by our ancestors and by Country, and it is progress towards those we need to measure'.
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Dr Nikki Moodie takes on co-director role
We are excited to announce that Dr Nikki Moodie will be joining Professor Sarah Maddison as co-Director of the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration.
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Wednesday 12:00pm - 1:00pmSavaging the Disciplines: reflections and futures for Indigenous higher education
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CPC Semester 2 program: What does success in Indigenous higher education look like?
Critical Public Conversations webinar series Semester 2, 2020. More information and registration.
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ISRC Reading Group - Winter and Semester 2
The ISRC will be continuing our book club over the winter break and in semester 2.
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The ignorance of our shared history is shocking.
Collaborator and Assistant Dean (Indigenous) at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education Dr Melitta Hogarth's take on recent events and a challenge to school systems and initial teacher education
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Teaching Indigenous culture and history in our schools
The days when school students were taught that Captain Cook "discovered" Australia may well be over, but are we providing students and their teachers with enough cultural knowledge to understand Australia's Indigenous past and future? We look at how the teaching of Indigenous histories and cultures has changed over time. Guests: Dr Melitta Hogarth, Assistant Dean (Indigenous) at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education Dr Louise Zarmati, Lecturer in Humanities and Social Sciences at the Faculty of Education, University of Tasmania
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Systemic racism in child protection must be addressed
Addressing systemic racism in child protection is an essential step in preventing black deaths in custody. Jacynta Krakouer for the National Indigenous Times.
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Black Lives Matter
On 5 June 2020, collaborator and proud queer, Gomeroi woman Dr Nikki Moodie said a few words for JOY 94.5 about the riots happening in the US and why they matter here in Australia.
- Professor Sarah Maddison
Sarah Maddison is Professor of Politics in the School of Social and Political Sciences, and co-Director of the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration. She is also Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Arts. Sarah is particularly interested in work that helps reconceptualise political relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian settler state, including critical examinations of a range of relevant public policies.
Sarah has published widely in international journals and is the author or editor of nine books including, most recently, The Colonial Fantasy: Why white Australia can’t solve black problems. Her other books in the field include The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation (2016), Conflict Transformation and Reconciliation (2015), Beyond White Guilt (2011), Unsettling the Settler State (2011), and Black Politics (2009). Sarah has led numerous research projects and was an Australian Research Council Future Fellow for 2011-14, undertaking a project that examined reconciliation in Australia, South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Guatemala.
- Dr Nikki Moodie
Dr Nikki Moodie is a Gomeroi woman, born in Gunnedah, NSW and raised in Toowoomba, Queensland. She is co-Director of the ISRC and a Senior Lecturer in Indigenous Studies and Sociology in the Faculty of Arts. Nikki has been widely recognised in the sociology of education, receiving the 2017 Betty Watts Indigenous Researcher Award from the Australian Association for Research in Education, and 2018 Best Paper in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education.
Nikki holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Political Science from the University of Queensland, and a PhD in Sociology from the Australian National University. After a few misplaced years in the public service, Nikki moved into research focusing on social network analysis and identity in Indigenous contexts. Nikki continues to teach in the areas of social policy and Indigenous studies, with her main research interests in Indigeneity and governance, focusing on social networks, public policy and data production. She has most recently received a four year ARC Discovery project with colleagues from the University of Melbourne and the University of Queensland, focused on Indigenous governance and state relations.
Professor Sarah Maddison and Associate Professor Sana Nakata
Founders of the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration
Photo: Phil Soliman, Telepathic Photo
- Associate Professor Jennifer Balint
Jennifer Balint is Associate Professor in Socio-Legal Studies and is currently Head of Discipline, Criminology. Her research expertise is in the area of state crime, genocide and access to justice, with a focus on the constitutive function of law in societies and transitional justice. Her monograph, Genocide, State Crime and the Law. In the Name of the State, is a legal and socio-political analysis of the capacity of law to address genocide and other forms of state crime, law’s relationship to reconciliation, and the role of law in the perpetration of these crimes. She co-established the Minutes of Evidence project, a collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, education experts, performance artists, community members, government and community organisations that aims to spark public conversations about structural justice and how understanding the relationship between the colonial past and the present can bring about just futures. For more information please see the Minutes of Evidence project website.
- Dr Ashley Barnwell
Dr Ashley Barnwell is Senior Research Fellow in Sociology in the School of Social and Political Sciences. Her work focuses on sociological aspects of emotion, memory, and narrative, and is anchored in the sociology of the family. In addition to more traditional qualitative approaches, she is interested in the role of life writing, literature, personal archives, and oral history in sociological research. Ashley is working on two current projects. The first is a study of how contemporary Australian novelists, such as Kate Grenville and Kim Scott, are using their own family histories to deal with social questions of intergenerational trauma and historical responsibility. This has been published as a book, Reckoning with the Past: Family Historiographies in Postcolonial Australian Literature (with Joe Cummins, Routledge 2019). Her other project, ‘Family Secrets, National Silences’, is a qualitative study of intergenerational family secrets in settler colonial Australia.
- Dr Lou Bennett
Yorta Yorta Dja Dja Wurrung, Dr Lou Bennett OAM is a former member of the internationally acclaimed music trio Tiddas. Bennett is a consummate performer, playing audiences worldwide, and a collaborator with the ISRC.
Bennett is a prolific songwriter/composer and during her ten years with Tiddas (1990-2000) penned some of the group’s signature songs. Bennett’s work stretches over a vast area within the Arts industry throughout the past thirty years including her various roles as Performer, Songwriter, Musical and Artistic Director, Composer, Actor, Soundscape and Music Designer and Educator. In 2006 Bennett was one of the co-founders of the Black Arm Band and contributing to all productions by the company. Bennett completed her PhD by project at RMIT Melbourne in October 2015. Bennett’s dissertation discusses the importance and relevance of Aboriginal language retrieval, reclamation and regeneration through the medium of the Arts to community health and wellbeing and explores the importance of Indigenous epistemology, methodology and pedagogy in artistic and academic contexts. Bennett uses her own languages of Yorta Yorta and Dja Dja Wurrung, extending to other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages that can be retrieved, reclaimed and regenerated through songs, stories and performances. Bennett received a McKenzie award in 2017 to research the obstacles and ethical issues related to retrieving and transmitting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages and continues to further her research program ‘Sovereign Language Rematriation Through Song Pedagogy’ after being awarded a Westpac Research Fellowship for 2020. Dr Bennett was inducted onto the Victorian Women’s Honour Roll for 2017 and accepted the award of member of the Order of Australia (OAM) in 2018
- Professor Karen Farquharson
Karen Farquharson is Professor of Sociology and Head of the School of Social and Political Sciences at The University of Melbourne. Her research explores the sociology of racism, migration, media and sport from a critical race theory perspective. Recent research projects include: Participation versus performance: Managing (dis)ability, gender and cultural diversity in junior sport, the AuSud Media Project, and the Koorie Energy Efficiency Project (KEEP) (5.4Mb pdf). Her most recent books are the co-edited collections Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging (2018) and Relating Worlds of Racism: Dehumanisation, Belonging, and the Normativity of European Whiteness (2018).
- Professor Kirsty Gover
Professor Kirsty Gover is Programme Director, Indigenous Peoples in International and Comparative Law. Her research addresses the law, policy, and political theory of Indigenous rights and law. She is interested in the transformative promise of Indigenous legal theory, and in its importance in settler-state political theory and international law. Professor Gover is the author of Tribal Constitutionalism: States, Tribes and the Governance of Membership (Oxford University Press, 2011) and is working on a book entitled When Tribalism Meets Liberalism: Political Theory and International Law (Oxford University Press), examining the ways in which Indigenous self-governance influences the development of international law. She is the law school’s Associate Dean (Indigenous Recognition) and Chair of the MLS Reconciliation and Recognition Committee.
- Associate Professor Chris Healy
Chris Healy teaches Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. He has worked at the University of Technology, Sydney, and held visiting fellowships at the Humanities Research Centre, ANU, the Centre for Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz and was a long-time External Academic Advisor in the Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His research work on social memory has considered relationships between Indigenous history and settler-colonialism in Australia, and some of the predicaments of postcolonial culture more generally. His first efforts in this field appeared in the UK-based journal, Oral History (1991) with latter essays in Postcolonial Studies (1999), Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture (2000), Body Trade: captivity, cannibalism and colonialism in the Pacific (2001), Culture in Australia: policies, publics and programs (2001), ACH: The Journal of the History of Culture in Australia (2007). That period of work culminated in his 2008 monograph, Forgetting Aborigines, UNSW Press.
- Dr Melitta Hogarth
Dr Hogarth is a Kamilaroi woman and Assistant Dean (Indigenous) at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. Melitta taught for almost 20 years in all three sectors of the Queensland education system specifically in Secondary education. Melitta’s interests are in education, equity and social justice. Melitta recently completed her PhD where she critically analysed Australian Indigenous education policy.
Melitta’s interests are in education, equity and social justice. Her PhD titled “Addressing the rights of Indigenous peoples in education: A critical analysis of Indigenous education policy” was awarded both the QUT and Faculty of Education Outstanding Thesis Awards and was awarded the Ray Debus Award for Doctoral Research in Education.
- Julia Hurst
Julia Hurst has a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Indigenous and Development Studies and a Masters of
Urban Planning. She has worked as a social and cultural planner and social researcher. Her interests lie in storytelling, social justice and the arts, and she has successfully merged these projects over the years on main stage and community theatre, arts and cultural projects in Melbourne, Geelong and Western Sydney. She was a member of the ARC Linkage Project (USyd and ANU) Deepening Histories of Place: Exploring Indigenous Landscapes of National and International Significance and during this project she directed and authored an enhanced e-book entitled At the Heart of it: Place stories across Darug and Gundungurra Lands: A downloadable history. She has recently completed her PhD: ‘Re-imagining identities: Aboriginal people on Darug and Gundungurra lands’ at ANU.
- Natalie Ironfield
Natalie (she/her) belongs to the Dharug nation and has been living on Wurundjeri land since 2013. Natalie is a Teaching Specialist in Politics and Criminology in the School of Social and Political Sciences. Additionally, Natalie works as an educator teaching into the Bachelor of Arts Extended at Trinity College. Natalie’s research focuses on the relationship between settler-colonialism and Indigenous hyper-incarceration and explores alternative responses to harm, which seek to move beyond the carceral state.
- Jacynta Krakouer
Jacynta Krakouer (BSc, MSW, MSP Melb) is a Noongar Aboriginal lecturer and researcher in the Department of Social Work at the University of Melbourne. Currently undertaking her PhD with the Department, Jacynta’s teaching and research expertise centres on child and family welfare, with a particular focus on Indigenous Australians. Her PhD explores Indigenous understandings of cultural connection for Indigenous Australian children in out of home care in Victoria.
- Dr Ligia (Licho) López López
Ligia (Licho) López López is a Queer Caribbean academic residing and learning as an uninvited guest in Narrm (Melbourne, Australia). She is a Lecturer at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. Her research, drawing from the histories of dispossession and Black and Brown rising, interrogates what the notion of diversity does in the social world (diverse from what?). Licho investigates Bla(c)k and Brown youth affect as curricular trans-formation. At the moment she is playing with global histories of marroonage as Black future making in the 21st century. Licho is the author of The Making of Indigeneity, Curriculum History and the Limits of Diversity (Routledge, 2018). Her work has appeared in Race Ethnicity and Education, The British Journal of Sociology of Education, Discourse, and Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, among others. She is currently working on two books under contract with Routledge entitled Taking place: Indigenous perspectives on future(s) and learning(s) (with Gioconda Coello), and Migrating Americas: Interrogating the relations between migration and education in the South (with Ivón Cepeda and Maria Emilia Tijoux). Licho’s work strives to challenge the colonial frontiers of exploration in order to create educational futures that grow antibrown and antiblack racism free social worlds.
- Associate Professor Sana Nakata
Sana Nakata is Associate Professor (Indigenous), Senior Lecturer in Political Science and founder of the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration. Trained as a lawyer and political theorist, her research is centred upon developing an approach for thinking politically about childhood in ways that improve the capacity of adult decision-makers to act in their interests.
Sana’s current project looks at representations of children in Australian political controversies, with particular focus upon Indigenous Australian children and child asylum seekers. She is the author of Childhood Citizenship, Governance and Policy (2015), and along with director Sarah Maddison, edits the Springer book series: Indigenous Settler Relations in Australia and the World.
- Dr Sophie Rudolph
Dr Rudolph is a non-Indigenous Australian, with a long-standing interest in exploring issues of social justice, diversity and equity in education and, in particular, the impact that colonial history has on present day inequalities in Australia. These interests frame Sophie’s teaching and research practices. Her research includes sociological and historical examinations of education and investigates issues of curriculum, pedagogy and politics in education, policy and practice. Her work is informed by critical and post-structuralist theories and aims to offer opportunities for working towards social change.
- Professor Zoë Laidlaw
Zoë Laidlaw joined the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne in September 2018 as a professorial fellow, having previously worked at Royal Holloway University of London (2005-2018) and the University of Sheffield (2001-2005). Her research concerns Britain’s empire and colonies in the early and mid-nineteenth century, with a particular focus on imperial networks, humanitarianism, governance, colonial knowledge, settler societies, human rights, Indigenous protection and Indigenous dispossession. She has worked on the colonial histories of Australia, British North America, South Africa, New Zealand, India and the Caribbean. Zoë is also interested in the connections between colonial histories and present-day attempts at conciliation between colonising and colonised populations.
- Professor Adrian Little
Adrian Little is Pro Vice Chancellor (International) and Professor of Political Theory at the University of Melbourne. He has published six monographs including, most recently, Enduring Conflict: Challenging the Signature of Peace and Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2014) as well as many journal articles and book chapters. In 2013, along with Mark McMillan, Paul Muldoon, Juliet Rogers, Erik Doxtader and Andrew Schaap, he received an ARC Discovery Grant for the project ‘Resistance, Recognition and Reconciliation in South Africa and Northern Ireland - Lessons for Australia’. Adrian is currently Pro Vice Chancellor International at the university and has responsibility for developing the international component of the university’s Reconciliation Action Plan.
- Associate Professor Juliet Rogers
Juliet Rogers is an Associate Professor in Criminology in the School of Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She specialises in the study of trauma, specifically its psychological, legal and political manifestations and effects. From 2012-16 she was an Australian Research Council DECRA fellow examining the ‘Quality of Remorse’ after periods of political and military conflict in Australia, Northern Ireland and South Africa. Prior to her academic career she was a youth worker, manager and trauma therapist. She holds an ongoing Visiting Fellowship at the University of Bologna, TRaMe center for the study of trauma. She published widely in the field of law, trauma and conflict. In 2013 she published Law’s Cut on the Body of Human Rights: Female Circumcision, Torture and Sacred Flesh and is finalising a monograph on The Quality of Remorse.
- Lilly Brown
Lilly Brown is an interdisciplinary educator and researcher and a PhD candidate and lecturer at the University of Melbourne. With a background in critical Indigenous studies, education and youth sociology, her work seeks to attend to the narratives and power relations that shape social structures. She draws on creative representation in her research and education practice to respond to her work with young people, community organisations and Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal people across Australia.
Lilly’s research and teaching focuses on 1. the possibilities education presents as both a site of positive transformation and social reproduction; 2. the ongoing colonial state violence resisted by First Peoples; and, 3. the way anti-Indigenous racism, as foundational to Australian nationhood, continues to function. Lilly’s academic practice is informed by her relationships and work with different communities in Victoria and across Australia, including with Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal young people, their families, communities and schools. Lilly belongs to the Gumbaynggirr people of the mid-north coast of NSW, and has lived on the land of the Kulin Nations in Melbourne since 2011.
- Anya Thomas
Anya Thomas is Phd candidate in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Melbourne. She has an MA and Human Security and Peacebuilding from Royal Roads University in Victoria, Canada and has worked in treaty negotiations, conflict sensitivity and intergovernmental relations in Canada, Nepal, Cambodia and Australia. Her research interests include Indigenous diplomacy, cooperative governance and self-determination. Anya is a recipient of the University of Melbourne Human Rights Scholarship and commenced her Phd in March 2019.
- Janelle Young
Janelle Young is a Doctoral student with the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration. Janelle is from Canada, where she spent the past six years working on a variety of community-based research initiatives related to Indigenous health and wellbeing. She holds masters degrees in Social Work and Anthropology. Her masters thesis explored the politics of reconciliation in Mi’kmaw territory in Nova Scotia, Canada. She currently works in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander child and family safety wellbeing policy.
Grant type
ARC Discovery
Researchers
- Professor Sarah Maddison (University of Melbourne)
- Tom Clark (Victoria University)
- Ravi de Costa (York University, Canada)
Description
Many consider the formal reconciliation process in Australia to have been a failure, yet the need for a more effective engagement between Indigenous and other Australians remains pressing. This project examines the Australian experience of reconciliation, asking how the process of reconciliation in Australia can connect to the attitudes of non-Indigenous people in ways that may prompt their engagement with Indigenous needs and aspirations.
This project has undertaken original focus group research to explore non-Indigenous engagement with reconciliation in Australia. It considers ways to transform the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in light of debates about constitutional recognition and renewed called for treaties with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Researchers
Descriptions
Travelling Television
Currently in development, Chris Healy’s ‘Travelling Television’ argues that certain kinds of television re-fashioned relations to place and occupation for non-Indigenous Australians in the second half of the twentieth century.
Australian Indigenous Filmmaking: Returning to Country
This is an ongoing research project being carried out by Chris Healy, Therese Davis and Romaine Morton. The work will take the form of a website that goes live in November 2018 and a collaboratively authored book for the University of Edinburgh Press ‘World Cinema’ series that will appear in 2019.
Researchers
Description
This project examines the Cashless Debit Card trial in the East Kimberley, Western Australia. The Card targets First Nations people disproportionately where 82% in the East Kimberley trial are First Nations. Like other income management programs, the Card aims to restrict cash and purchases to curb alcohol consumption, illegal drug use and gambling. The current study reviews the Cashless Debit Card in the context of current policies managing Indigenous consumption.
The project also examines aspects of the trial in the East Kimberley including its implementation, lack of community engagement, community resistance and effects on money management. Findings thus far indicate a chaotic trial period, as well as a deeply flawed logic, disconnected from the relational poverty experienced by people receiving state benefits. Further, the research team reveal that by targeting First Nations subjectivities with behavioural conditions, state benefits reveal themselves as a contemporary technology of settler colonisation and assimilation.
Researchers
Description
Adrian Little’s work looks to gain a deeper understanding of the Prime Minister’s rejection of the Uluru Statement and Referendum Council Report. In particular, Little focuses on the role played by the proposal for an Indigenous voice to parliament in this rejection. Little contends that the Uluru Statement rightfully demanded a three-pronged approach, and that all three are necessary for progress on Indigenous-settler relations. The truth and treaty elements of the proposed Makarrata commission are argued to be just as controversial as the proposal for voice. Little explores truth in a comparative light as a way of clarifying the choices Australia will face in how to institutionalise truth processes. This ranges from the South African attempt to build an institution which saw truth as central to reconciliation, through to Northern Ireland where the pursuit of truth remains deeply controversial twenty years after it was decided that the issues were too raw to form part of the Good Friday Agreement. He has recently published articles on this topic in Political Theory (2020) and the Review of Politics (2018).
Researchers
- Julia Hurst
Description
This research explores fundamental questions of Australian Aboriginal identity in 21st century Australia. Julia Hurst argues that cultural and political debate about the value of urban Aboriginal identities often serves to disempower Aboriginal voices. Hurst’s research will test location bound historical assumptions of Aboriginal belonging along with what are often considered the fixed historical processes of Aboriginal identity making across time. Following the question: ‘What is your Indigenous heritage, when your heritage is defined by convincing other people?’ Hurst will analyse narratives of urban Aboriginal identity in key locations around Australia, including Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. The differences between these locations will help to shape a multi-site, interdisciplinary analysis of new urban Aboriginal identities under varying cultural, economic and historical conditions.
Researchers
Description
It has long been assumed that when people know better, people will do better. The current state of affairs for Indigenous peoples around the world suggests that this is not the case. Research has shown that even when individuals know more about the history and social contexts of Indigenous peoples, their views upon Indigenous peoples’ rights and political status may not necessarily shift. Cultural Awareness and Competency has become a key institutional process for educating individual employees of their responsibilities toward Indigenous peoples in their professional settings. This research project will explore the paradigm of cultural awareness in education, employment training and policy-making and analyse the ways in which it informs and shapes Indigenous-Settler relations at work and beyond.
Researchers
- Associate Professor Sana Nakata
- Dr Daniel Bray (La Trobe University)
Description
Children have figured strongly in Australian political controversies. In twenty-first century Australia, some of the most controversial political debates have centred on the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, and child asylum seekers at Australia’s borders. The project undertakes an extensive analysis of representative claims made about both groups of children to demonstrate the ways in which political debates are transformed by the appearance of children. By examining representative claims about children and the impact of these claims on political decisions, this project engages with emerging literature on the relationship between democratic theories of representation and the conduct of ‘real politics’ to develop a political account of childhood and explore its implications for policy-making.
Researchers
Description
David Nolan is currently leading a research project that explores the changing ecology of Indigenous news production and representation, following the emergence of a burgeoning sector of Indigenous digital media initiatives. These initiatives have taken advantage of the affordances to digital platforms to develop new outlets for Indigenous self-expression, representation and exchange, and have gained an increasing level of prominence in mainstream media, both through specific tactical interventions and longer term partnerships with mainstream news organisations. In collaboration with Indigenous journalist Jack Latimore, this research is exploring the degree to which new digital tools, including an app developed by Latimore for the Centre for Advancing Journalism, have the potential to facilitate effective strategies for improving the range and quality of Indigenous news representation in Australia’s wider news ecology.
Researchers
Description
This project aims to investigate the inherited family secrets, stories, and memories that inform Australians’ understandings of colonial history. The histories told in schools and museums shape national identity and impact Indigenous-settler relations. But little is known about the histories told or concealed within families, and how they drive people’s political views and promote or stymie national truth-telling. This research intends to benefit individuals and communities working toward national reckoning via creating knowledge about how viewpoints are created, fixed, and altered over time. It also aims to show how educators can use family histories to teach people about intergenerational inequalities, cultural traumas, and hidden diversities.
Researcher
Description
Zoë Laidlaw is a Chief Investigator on ARC Discovery Project DP180100537 Inquiring into Empire: remaking the British world after 1815 (2018-2022). Inquiring into Empire examines the pivotal role of commissions of inquiry in reforming law throughout the British Empire from 1815-1840. Using traditional methods and digital tools, the project investigates the design, instantiation and impact of inquiry on colonial law, the imperial constitution and the mechanisms of imperial governance across the empire. Its outcomes include enhancement of our understanding of law reform, the historical functions of commissions of inquiry, and the legacy of British imperial rule throughout the world. Chief investigators are Lisa Ford (UNSW); Kirsten McKenzie (Sydney); David Roberts (UNE); Zoë Laidlaw (Melbourne); and Stephen Doherty (UNSW). Partner Investigators are Alan Lester (Sussex); Paul Halliday (Virginia); and Philip Stern (Duke).
Zoë Laidlaw is also Principal Investigator for three UK AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Training Grants in collaboration with Dr Gaye Sculthorpe, Curator of Oceania, The British Museum. These grants have funded three PhD studentships exploring the little-known and under-utilised Australian collections of The British Museum and other UK-based collections of Indigenous Australian objects and images. ‘The Royal Navy and Colonial Collecting, 1820-1870’ (2014-17) was completed by Daniel Simpson (Royal Holloway University of London); ‘Picturing the Antipodes: race, image and empire in 19th-century Britain’ (2016-2020) is being completed by Mary McMahon (RHUL); and Nicola Froggatt (RHUL) is working on ‘British Ethnographic Collecting in Western Australia’ (2017-2021).
Neil Howard The British Museum CC BY-NC 2.0
The Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration (ISRC) is continually looking to develop new relationships and build on its knowledge base through partnership, contract and other research.
In the collaboration there is a multidisciplinary team of leading researchers that are dedicated to exploring issues relating to Indigenous Settler Relations.
The collaboration is open to both short-term and long-term partnerships, and are adaptable to a wide variety research needs. If you believe the ISRC would be a suitable fit for your initiative, research project or partnership then we encourage you to email the collaboration with your enquiry along with relevant contact details.
A summary of the publications produced by collaborators can be seen on the Publications web page.
Graduate Researchers
The collaboration would love to hear from current or prospective graduate research students undertaking study related to the emerging field of Indigenous-settler relations. Get in touch via our Contact web page. The ISRC can assist with:
- Identifying potential supervisors
- Support with application processes
- Engaged research support for existing PhD and Masters by Research students
- Networking opportunities with collaborators
We encourage students at all levels to subscribe to our mailing list to hear of other opportunities to get involved with the collaboration.
Reading Group
The ISRC runs a reading group each semester. Our semi-regular 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 ISRC reading group, email a few brief sentences about yourself and your research to I-SRC@unimelb.edu.au.
- Semester 1, 2020* – Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations: Interdisciplinary perspectives, eds. Sarah Maddison and Sana Nakata
- Semester 2, 2019 – Indigenous and Decolonising Studies in Education: Mapping the long view, eds. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang
- Semester 1 2019 – As We Have Always Done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
*Please note: this semester the reading group will be conducted via Zoom and not face-to-face.
2020
Barnwell, Ashley. Critical Affect: The Politics of Method. Edinburgh University Press, 2020
Critical Affect explores the emotional complexity of critique and maps out its enduring value for the turn to affect and ontology. Through a series of vivid close readings, Ashley Barnwell shows how suspicion and methods of decoding remain vital to both civic and academic spaces, where concerns about precarity, transparency, and security are commonplace and the question of how we verify the truth is one of the most polarising of our age.
The book addresses the important yet overlooked implications for critical methods in influential work on affect, non-representational, and actor-network theories and situates current debates within enduring ethical discussions about how to represent lived experience.
Relations: Interdisciplinary
perspectives
Maddison, S. and Nakata, S. (eds.). Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations: Interdisciplinary perspectives. Springer, 2020.
The first of the Springer series Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World, this book examines contemporary Indigenous affairs through questions of relationality, via a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives. Relationality functions as a key analytical framework with which to explore the what, who, when, where, and why of Indigenous-settler relations; who steps into these relations and how; what are the different temporal and historical moments in which these relations take place and to what effect; where do these relations exist around the world and what are the variations they take on in different places; and why are these relations important for the examination of social and political life in the 21st century?
Its unique approach represents a deliberate move away from both settler-colonial studies, which examines historical and present impacts of settler states on Indigenous peoples, and from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, which predominantly focuses on how Indigenous peoples speak back to the settler state. It explores the issues that inform, shape, and give social, legal, and political life to relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, both in Australia and globally.
2019
Why white Australia can't
solve black problems
Maddison, S. The Colonial Fantasy: Why white Australia can't solve black problems. Allen & Unwin, 2019.
Australia is wreaking devastation on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Whatever the policy, government has done little to improve the quality of life of Indigenous people. In far too many instances, interaction with governments has only made Indigenous lives worse. Despite this, many Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders and commentators still believe that working with the state is the only viable option. The result is constant churn and reinvention in Indigenous affairs, as politicians battle over the 'right' approach to solving Indigenous problems.
The Colonial Fantasy considers why Australia persists in the face of such obvious failure. It argues that white Australia can't solve black problems because white Australia is the problem, and calls for a radical restructuring of the relationship between black and white Australia.
Family Historiographies in
Postcolonial Australian Literature
Barnwell, Ashley and Cummins, Joseph. Reckoning with the Past: Family Historiographies in Postcolonial Australian Literature. Routledge, 2019
This is the first book to examine how Australian fiction writers draw on family histories to reckon with the nation's colonial past. Located at the intersection of literature, history, and sociology, it explores the relationships between family storytelling, memory, and postcolonial identity. With attention to the political potential of family histories, Reckoning with the Past argues that authors' often autobiographical works enable us to uncover, confront, and revise national mythologies. An important contribution to the emerging global conversation about multidirectional memory and the need to attend to the effects of colonisation, this book will appeal to an interdisciplinary field of scholarly readers.
Douglas, Kate and Barnwell, Ashley (eds.,). Research Methodologies for Auto/Biography Studies. Routledge, 2019
This collection of short essays provides a rigorous, rich, collaborative space in which scholars and practitioners debate the value of different methodological approaches to the study of life narratives and explore a diverse range of interdisciplinary methods. Auto/biography studies has been one of the most vibrant sub-disciplines to emerge in the humanities and social sciences in the past decade, providing significant links between disciplines including literary studies, languages, linguistics, digital humanities, medical humanities, creative writing, history, gender studies, education, sociology, and anthropology.
Rudolph, Sophie Unsettling the Gap: Race, politics and Indigenous education. Peter Lang, 2019.
Unsettling the Gap: Race, Politics and Indigenous Education examines pressing issues of inequality in education. The notion of gap – and the need to close it – is used widely in public and policy debates to name the nature and scope of disadvantage. In the competitive world of education, gaps have become associated with students who are seen to be “falling behind,” “failing” or “dropping out.” A global deficit discourse is, therefore, mobilised and normalised. But this discourse has a history and is deeply political. Unsettling the Gap examines this history and how it is politically activated through an analysis of the “Australian Closing the Gap in Indigenous Disadvantage” policy. In this policy discourse the notion of gap serves as a complex and multiple signifier, attached to individuals, communities and to national history.
In unravelling these diverse modalities of gap, the text illuminates the types of ruling binaries that tend to direct dynamics of power and knowledge in a settler colonial context. This reveals not only the features of the crisis of "Indigenous educational disadvantage" that the policy seeks to address, but the undercurrents of a different type of crisis, namely the authority of the settler colonial state. By unsettling the normalised functions of gap discourse the book urges critical reflections on the problem of settler colonial authority and how it constrains the possibilities of Indigenous educational justice.
2018
López López, Ligia (Licho) The Making of Indigeneity, Curriculum History, and the limits of Diversity Routledge, 2018
Conceptually rich and grounded in cutting-edge research, this book addresses the often-overlooked roles and implications of diversity and indigeneity in curriculum. Taking a multidisciplinary approach to the development of teacher education in Guatemala, López provides a historical and transnational understanding of how "indigenous" has been negotiated as a subject/object of scientific inquiry in education. Moving beyond the generally accepted "common sense" markers of diversity such as race, gender, and ethnicity, López focuses on the often-ignored histories behind the development of these markers, and the crucial implications these histories have in education – in Guatemala and beyond – today.
Morrissey, Philip and Healy, Chris (eds.,). Reading the Country: 30 Years On. UTS ePress, 2018
Steeped in story-telling and endlessly curious, Reading the Country: An Introduction to Nomadology (1984) was the product of Paddy Roe, Stephen Muecke and Krim Benterrak experimenting with what it might be like to think together about country. Their book has since become one of the great twentieth-century works of intercultural dialogue.
Reading the Country: 30 Years On is a celebration of that book - examining not only its place and time of creation but also its movement across social, philosophical and political surfaces, seeping into the way we look and learn and teach about how people are, or could be, part of country.
Nolan, D., Farquharson, K. and Marjoribanks, T. (eds.,) Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging. Anthem Press, 2018
Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging explores mediated debates about belonging in contemporary Australia by combining research that proposes conceptual and historical frameworks for understanding the concept in the Australian context. A range of themes and case studies make the book a significant conceptual resource as well as a much-needed update on work in this area. Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging also provides an intervention that engages with key contemporary issues, questions and problems around the politics of belonging that are relevant not only to academic debate, but also to contemporary policy development and media and popular discussion.
2017
and Assimilation Policy
Ellinghaus, K. Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and Assimilation Policy. University of Nebraska Press, 2017
Blood Will Tell reveals the underlying centrality of "blood" that shaped official ideas about who was eligible to be defined as Indian by the General Allotment Act in the United States. Katherine Ellinghaus traces the idea of blood quantum and how the concept came to dominate Native identity and national status between 1887 and 1934 and how related exclusionary policies functioned to dispossess Native people of their land. The U.S. government’s unspoken assumption at the time was that Natives of mixed descent were undeserving of tribal status and benefits, notwithstanding that Native Americans of mixed descent played crucial roles in the national implementation of allotment policy.
The role of blood quantum is integral to understanding how Native Americans came to be one of the most disadvantaged groups in the United States, and it remains a significant part of present-day debates about Indian identity and tribal membership. Blood Will Tell is an important and timely contribution to current political and scholarly debates.
neoliberalism and power
Klein, E. Developing Minds: Psychology, neoliberalism and power. Routledge, 2017
Development policy makers and practitioners are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their ability to target 'development' interventions and the psychological domain is now a specific frontier of their interventional focus. This landmark study considers the problematic relationship between development and psychology, tracing the deployment of psychological knowledge in the production/reproduction of power relations within the context of neoliberal development policy and intervention. It examines knowledge production and implementation by actors of development policy such as the World Bank and the neo-colonial state - and ends by examining the proposition of a critical psychology for more emancipatory forms of development.
The role of psychology in development studies remains a relatively unexplored area, with limited scholarship available. This important book aims to fill that gap by using critical psychology perspectives to explore the focus of the psychological domain of agency in development interventions. It will be essential reading for students, researchers, and policy makers from fields including critical psychology, social psychology, development studies and anthropology.
Inequality Re-examined
Klein, E. Reading Amartya Sen’s Inequality Re-examined. Routledge, 2017
Amartya Sen's Inequality Re-examined is a seminal text setting out a theory to evaluate social arrangements and inequality. By asking the question, 'equality of what'?, Sen shows that (in)equality should be assessed as human freedom; for people to have the ability to pursue and achieve goals they value or have reason to value.
The text lays out the fundamental ideas to Amartya Sen's Capability Approach. This approach is celebrated in diverse academic disciplines because of its specific contribution towards the improvement to debates on inequality beyond economic deprivation and utility measures. Furthermore, the arguments put forward by Sen in Inequality Re-examined has had many practical applications throughout policy circles including the Human Development Index, the Multi-Dimensional Poverty Measure, the compilation of lists of capabilities and drawing further attention to human agency and democracy. Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998 for his contribution to welfare economics; the core arguments of this work is found in this book.
Mitigation on Indigenous
and Forest Communities
Tehan, M., Godden, L., Young, M., and Gover, K. The Impact of Climate Change Mitigation on Indigenous and Forest Communities: International, National and Local Law Perspectives on REDD+. Cambridge University Press, 2017
The international legal framework for valuing the carbon stored in forests, known as 'Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation' (REDD+), will have a major impact on indigenous peoples and forest communities. The REDD+ regime contains many assumptions about the identity, tenure and rights of indigenous and local communities who inhabit, use or claim rights to forested lands. The authors bring together expert analysis of public international law, climate change treaties, property law, human rights and indigenous customary land tenure to provide a systemic account of the laws governing forest carbon sequestration and their interaction. Their work covers recent developments in climate change law, including the Agreement from the Conference of the Parties in Paris that came into force in 2016. The Impact of Climate Change Mitigation on Indigenous and Forest Communities is a rich and much-needed new contribution to contemporary understanding of this topic.
2016
Colonial Reconciliation:
Non-Indigenous People and
the Responsibility to Engage
Maddison, S., Clark, T., and de Costa, R. (eds.,). The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation: Non-Indigenous People and the Responsibility to Engage. Springer, 2016
This book investigates whether and how reconciliation in Australia and other settler colonial societies might connect to the attitudes of non-Indigenous people in ways that promote a deeper engagement with Indigenous needs and aspirations. It explores concepts and practices of reconciliation, considering the structural and attitudinal limits to such efforts in settler colonial countries. Bringing together contributions by the world's leading experts on settler colonialism and the politics of reconciliation, it complements current research approaches to the problems of responsibility and engagement between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples.
2015
Maddison, S. Conflict transformation and reconciliation: Multi-level challenges in deeply divided societies. Routledge, 2015
and reconciliation: Multi-leve
challenges in deeply
divided societies
This book examines approaches to reconciliation and peacebuilding in settler colonial, post-conflict, and divided societies. In contrast to current literature, this book provides a broader assessment of reconciliation and conflict transformation by applying a distinctive 'multi-level' approach. The analysis provides a unique intervention in the field, one that significantly complicates received notions of reconciliation and transitional justice, and considers conflict transformation across the constitutional, institutional, and relational levels of society.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork in South Africa, Northern Ireland, Australia, and Guatemala, the work presents an interdisciplinary study of the complex political challenges facing societies attempting to transition either from violence and authoritarianism to peace and democracy, or from colonialism to post-colonialism. Informed by theories of agonistic democracy, the book conceives of reconciliation as a process that is deeply political, and that prioritises the capacity to retain and develop democratic political contest in societies that have, in other ways, been able to resolve their conflicts.
Governance and Policy: the
politics of becoming adult
Nakata, S. Childhood Citizenship, Governance and Policy: the politics of becoming adult. Routledge, 2015
Debates about children's rights not only concern those things that children have a right to have and to do but also our broader social and political community, and the moral and political status of the child within it.
This book examines children's rights and citizenship in the USA, UK and Australia and analyses the policy, law and sociology that govern the transition from childhood to adulthood. By examining existing debates on childhood citizenship, the author pursues the claim that childhood is the most heavily governed period of a liberal individual's life, and argues that childhood is an intensely monitored period that involves a 'politics of becoming adult'. Drawing upon case studies from the USA, the UK and Australia, this concept is used to critically analyse debates and policy concerning children's citizenship, criminality, and sexuality. In doing so, the book seeks to uncover what informs and limits how we think about, talk about, and govern children's rights in liberal societies.
Laidlaw, Z. and Lester, A. (eds.,). Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series, 2015.
The new world created through Anglophone emigration in the 19th century has been much studied. But there have been few accounts of what this meant for the Indigenous populations. This book shows that Indigenous communities tenaciously held land in the midst of dispossession, whilst becoming interconnected through their struggles to do so.
Indigenous-Settler
Relations:
Interdisciplinary perspectives
Maddison, S. and Nakata, S. (eds.). Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations: Interdisciplinary perspectives. Springer, 2019.
The first of the Springer series Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World, this book examines contemporary Indigenous affairs through questions of relationality, via a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives. Relationality functions as a key analytical framework with which to explore the what, who, when, where, and why of Indigenous-settler relations; who steps into these relations and how; what are the different temporal and historical moments in which these relations take place and to what effect; where do these relations exist around the world and what are the variations they take on in different places; and why are these relations important for the examination of social and political life in the 21st century?
Its unique approach represents a deliberate move away from both settler-colonial studies, which examines historical and present impacts of settler states on Indigenous peoples, and from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, which predominantly focuses on how Indigenous peoples speak back to the settler state. It explores the issues that inform, shape, and give social, legal, and political life to relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, both in Australia and globally.
Contact
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