Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways that history curriculum has worked to legitimise dispossession through narratives that elide questions of Indigenous sovereignty, and which construct and consolidate white settler identity and possession.

The paper uses two case studies to compare history education documentation and materials at key moments where dominant narratives of settler legitimacy were challenged in public discourse: (1) the post-war humanitarian agenda of fostering “international understanding” and; (2) the release and educational recommendations of the 1997 Bringing them Home Report.

The paper shows that in two moments where narratives of settler legitimacy were challenged in public discourse, the legitimacy of settler possession was reiterated in history curricula in various ways.

This research suggests that the prevailing constructivist framework for history education has not sufficiently challenged criticisms of the representation of Aboriginal history and the history of settler-colonialism in the history syllabus.

The paper introduces two case studies of history curriculum and shows how, in different but resonant ways, curricular reforms worked to bolster the liberal credentials of the settler state.

The historian Patrick Wolfe reminds us that the settler colonial logic of eliminating native societies to gain unrestricted access to their territory is not a phenomenon confined to the distant past. As Wolfe (2006, p. 388) writes, “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” In the Gulf of Carpentaria region in Australia’s Northern Territory this settler colonial “logic of elimination” continues through mining projects that extract capital for transnational corporations while contaminating Indigenous land, overriding Indigenous law and custom and undermining Indigenous livelihoods. However, some Garawa, Gudanji, Marra, and Yanyuwa peoples are using creative ways to fight back, exhibiting “story paintings” to show how their people experience the destructive impacts of mining. We cannot know yet the full impact of this creative activism. But their body of work suggests it has the potential to challenge colonial institutions from below, inspiring growing networks of resistance and a collective meaning-making through storytelling that is led by Indigenous peoples on behalf of the living world.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the educational impulses and effects of Indigenous dialogue with the settler colonial state. Taking the Uluru Statement from the Heart, devised in May 2017 by a convention of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, as a starting point, and contrasting this with the 1967 Referendum campaign for constitutional reform, the paper explores the role of multiple forms and contexts of education during these processes of First Nations dialogue with the settler state.

This paper draws on historical accounts of the 1967 Referendum and the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart.

The paper demonstrates how education provided by the state has been used by First Nations peoples to challenge education systems and to dialogue with the settler state for Indigenous recognition and rights. It also illuminates the range of views on what education is and should be, therefore, contesting the neat and settled conceptions of education that can dominate policy discourse. Finally the historical cases show the deficiencies of settler state education through its failure to truthfully represent Australian history and its failure to acknowledge and confront the entirety of the consequences of settler colonial practices.

This paper seeks to bring issues of education, politics and justice together to illustrate how the settler state and its institutions – specifically here, education – are part of an ongoing project of negotiation, contestation and dialogue over questions of justice.

On June 21, 2021, a motion was introduced to the Australian Senate calling on the federal government to reject critical race theory (CRT) from the national curriculum, claiming that CRT is divisive and racist. This was allegedly sparked by revisions to the national school curriculum, which included a more accurate reflection of the historical record of First Nations peoples’ experiences of colonisation and the framing of British arrival onto the continent as an invasion. This paper aims to overview the omnipresence of Western thought systems in the academy and critiques how knowledge production as a disciplinary practice positions race as a “marginalised knowledge”.

This paper is conceptual and it theorises the morphology and functions of racism within the Australian education system specifically, and across the board. This theorisation offers an invaluable starting point in rethinking how we advocate for and preserve Blac/k scholarship in academia. It examines how the political economy of racism in education offers a transformative position from which scholars can contribute to potential systemic change that promotes racial literacy and racial dignity, and the conditions necessary to foster these changes.

The paper confirms what studies by Blac/k scholars already highlight: that racialised knowledges are marked – as an aesthetic addition or as disruptive – or unnecessary – and how these patterns of colonial desires are manifested in the classroom or in race discourse.

Specifically, the arguments made in this paper examine two undertheorised concepts, namely, “racial dignity” and “trauma porn” to foreground the reimagination of practices that inform racial literacy in education. This offers a helpful starting place to consider how this form of education facilitates ongoing settler colonialism in Australia. The authors then propose an anti-racist pedagogical practice in social work education entailing three core crucial and transformative elements: self- reflexivity, storytelling and collaboration with Blac/k people.

This chapter looks at how the concept of biopolitics can be used to understand the settler colonial legal orders. The focus is on the evolution of the definition of ‘Indian status’ in the Indian Act, which is the central piece of legislation in Canada’s Indian administration regime. Historically, the legal concept of Indian status was used as a way to constitute a population in relation to colonial sovereignty, and later was adapted as a mechanism to internally dividing the population through complex forms of legal domination. Scholars have turned to Michel Foucault’s studies of biopolitics and racism to understand how settler colonial sovereignty relates to a population on a territory. This chapter argues that Foucault’s analysis was radically historically embedded in a way that shapes its relevance to understanding settler colonialism. In Foucault’s original analysis, racism emerges as tool of the state in the relation between territory and sovereignty, which was characteristic in feudal Europe. In settler colonial legal orders such as Canada, however, sovereignty’s relation to the population is constituted in the absence of a prior connection to the land.