I've been struggling with a few things lately and NAIDOC has highlighted some of them. It's reminded me of both the power of social networking to facilitate discussion and the problems that it inherits as a consequence of people posting incomplete 'hit and run' perspectives. I'll always be inspired by the work of Murri woman, Leesa Watego in exploring the liminal space of identity in online spaces and providing that to the broader community (particularly educators). But these last few weeks I've been reminded of the power of how and why we put our perspectives out there. And they were, for the most part in their demonstrations, a good reminder for us to support perspectives and not require agreement.
I loved that there was dissent about NAIDOC. Not because I have an issue with it, I quite like NAIDOC week, I like how it started, I like - for the most part - how it operates and I appreciate the power that it gives us as Aboriginal People of, as Dr Chelsea Bond, an Munanjahli and South Sea Islander Australian, described in her summary of NAIDOC 'enacting our own agency as sovereign people'. (Croakey, July 19, 2014 - follow the link)
Absolutely. But I loved that there was dissent, because it's unlikely that Chelsea, and others - including Stephen Hagan (a Kullilla man), in the First Nations Telegraph - would have articulated the complexity of their positions without some prodding from around the traps. In particular, they were responding to an article in The Guardian by Nakkia Lui, a Gamillaroi and Torres Strait Islander woman, who wrote Why this year's NAIDOC week will be my last.
I didn't mind the prod, and it wasn't the only one. It's been a year of this kind of agitation. So... while I didn't support her position, in fact I didn't support one individual's position on this, I'd like to think that - like many Aboriginal People - I'm a bit more complex than just blindly going along with these articles that are, after all, appropriately framed as op-eds. I like op-eds, because they do allow perspective, but frequently they become framed as truth. What I liked about the responses to this article is that they provided genuinely different perspectives and challenged some of these ideas, worried the space, and probably in some ways contributed to making NAIDOC better.
So, it was a few years ago that I got a properly fresh perspective on NAIDOC myself. Prompted by Celeste Liddle's Rantings of an Aboriginal Feminist blog providing a terrific single-person perspective on our struggle as Aboriginal women and men considering the implications of gender and feminism from an insider perspective. In one of her early entries she talked about Miss NAIDOC and it was through this work that I was first introduced to Celeste, an Arrernte woman. I found her perspective and ideas refreshing because she problematised aspects of it, but also clearly understood peoples intentions and the celebrations attached to it - it was a complex discussion that was not reductive or simplistically reactive. I was pleased that this year Celeste began a companion blog to the Rantings space: Ms NAIDOC - a blog where Aboriginal women are valorised for the things that Miss NAIDOC doesn't include. I don't hate Miss NAIDOC, nor do I feel represented by them. In fact I don't really feel represented by Ms NAIDOC either, but that's the point, right? We're a bunch of individuals who have different characteristics, different life experiences and we can all be celebrated and challenged to talk about ourselves and our lives.
I was going to finish this off by talking about how NAIDOC provided some solutions to the problems that I face in using social networking, but there is a political issue that is simply too difficult to write about here, in a blogspace that has been set up as really a one-way street. But just to say that the uproar about NAIDOC and how people promoted one or another of these articles as a reaction to Lui's article, were an example of how blunt an instrument that it can be. But the actual business in these op-eds, when they weren't positing that there is only one way to think about it, was terribly clever and really did open up a discussion of what NAIDOC can be. I wish that with all things we would give the same time to think around perspectives and not blindly following and promoting links, ideals and protests as truth.
*please note that I have used identity descriptors for people listed here according to their own biographical info. Please lemme know if you'd prefer something else.
Prof Sandy O'Sullivan (ARC Future Fellow)
Monday, July 21, 2014
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Apparently I'm doing another PhD.
So I've just begun a second PhD examining international First Peoples' connections and collaborations in research at higher education institutions.
Why Batchelor
There were a few reasons I selected Batchelor. I work at there, and I'm in the research division where I convene the Creative Arts section of our program, so it was a strong belief in what we're about. But it was also because at Batchelor we're thinking about our international research relationships a lot at the moment.
Research on a budget
Batchelor is lean and mean, but we are all about building our research. We're not like other institutions, we're pretty pared down. We can go to a conference IF we present a paper. Never without that. We can travel internationally to undertake our research if we bring in the research dollars to do just that. And so it's pretty simple, want to do research? Make it meaningful and bring in the support. As individual researchers we often subsidize our work and I'm okay with that. In fact last year I spent seven months overseas, and spent more than 30,000 of my own money on this work... cos sometimes when you're in a small place, that's what you have to do. But I also have a lot of flexibility because of the work I do, and there is also a lot of support.
We're small and strong
We only have a handful of people undertaking research full-time at the Institute, and we are hoping to grow what we do. We have amazing, committed research candidates as well. We also have a great deal of academic staff who make the time to contribute to research and these folks really need support... I'm hoping that this internationalisation project can assist in that.
Why internationalisation?
Well... I've been thinking about internationalisation a lot over the last five years and at the Institute we've been talking about it about that long too. I've had to travel internationally a fair bit with the ARC project that I've been working on. While it was necessary to travel for my museums research, but along the way I also came across remarkable people who made my research better - both First Peoples and non-Indigenous folks who work in museums or universities or small colleges or communities, in the arts and outside of all of these contexts. The international space matters to our researchers - being remote and small can have implications for how we engage with our bigger national partners: other unis and organisations etc. But beyond how we sit in the national space, it's a reminder that we're a part of an international conversation and that the conversation we have makes our research better. I imagine how limiting my research would be if I had never met Stephen Welsh at Manchester Museum, or Shannon Quist at the National Museum of the American Indian, or Pam Burnard at Cambridge University. These connections are meaningful and important and make the research better. The work I'm doing on the PhD will ponder how this can be tracked.
What's our research about at the Institute.
We focus on three core areas: language, education, and creative arts. These areas are all broadly imagined. Since we began to narrow our focus, we've been asked why it's narrowed... effectively we've made the decision that since we're small, we need to focus on areas that we've always done well in, and areas that are important to our community/ies.
What kind of research will we do internationally?
Well... we mostly do projects, we publish in international journals and write with our international partners. Sometimes we run workshops internationally, we do presentations on our work and our research. But this upping the ante in the international space is about a more strategic approach and partnerships. We aren't interested in 'international' cos it's elsewhere, we're interested because the people that we meet across other countries help us to contribute and work in ways that we wish to explore. We hope to create international projects that will have multiple partners... more on this soon. I'm currently preparing a report on this and should have at least the major (the approved) part of it available soon.
Why another PhD?
I want to learn more about higher education and what a mapping of practice might mean. I also hope the findings will be helpful for others. I think we talk a good game about lifelong learning, so I'm trying it on and seeing if I can have that same commitment again.
Why Batchelor
There were a few reasons I selected Batchelor. I work at there, and I'm in the research division where I convene the Creative Arts section of our program, so it was a strong belief in what we're about. But it was also because at Batchelor we're thinking about our international research relationships a lot at the moment.
Research on a budget
Batchelor is lean and mean, but we are all about building our research. We're not like other institutions, we're pretty pared down. We can go to a conference IF we present a paper. Never without that. We can travel internationally to undertake our research if we bring in the research dollars to do just that. And so it's pretty simple, want to do research? Make it meaningful and bring in the support. As individual researchers we often subsidize our work and I'm okay with that. In fact last year I spent seven months overseas, and spent more than 30,000 of my own money on this work... cos sometimes when you're in a small place, that's what you have to do. But I also have a lot of flexibility because of the work I do, and there is also a lot of support.
We're small and strong
We only have a handful of people undertaking research full-time at the Institute, and we are hoping to grow what we do. We have amazing, committed research candidates as well. We also have a great deal of academic staff who make the time to contribute to research and these folks really need support... I'm hoping that this internationalisation project can assist in that.
Why internationalisation?
Well... I've been thinking about internationalisation a lot over the last five years and at the Institute we've been talking about it about that long too. I've had to travel internationally a fair bit with the ARC project that I've been working on. While it was necessary to travel for my museums research, but along the way I also came across remarkable people who made my research better - both First Peoples and non-Indigenous folks who work in museums or universities or small colleges or communities, in the arts and outside of all of these contexts. The international space matters to our researchers - being remote and small can have implications for how we engage with our bigger national partners: other unis and organisations etc. But beyond how we sit in the national space, it's a reminder that we're a part of an international conversation and that the conversation we have makes our research better. I imagine how limiting my research would be if I had never met Stephen Welsh at Manchester Museum, or Shannon Quist at the National Museum of the American Indian, or Pam Burnard at Cambridge University. These connections are meaningful and important and make the research better. The work I'm doing on the PhD will ponder how this can be tracked.
What's our research about at the Institute.
We focus on three core areas: language, education, and creative arts. These areas are all broadly imagined. Since we began to narrow our focus, we've been asked why it's narrowed... effectively we've made the decision that since we're small, we need to focus on areas that we've always done well in, and areas that are important to our community/ies.
What kind of research will we do internationally?
Well... we mostly do projects, we publish in international journals and write with our international partners. Sometimes we run workshops internationally, we do presentations on our work and our research. But this upping the ante in the international space is about a more strategic approach and partnerships. We aren't interested in 'international' cos it's elsewhere, we're interested because the people that we meet across other countries help us to contribute and work in ways that we wish to explore. We hope to create international projects that will have multiple partners... more on this soon. I'm currently preparing a report on this and should have at least the major (the approved) part of it available soon.
Why another PhD?
I want to learn more about higher education and what a mapping of practice might mean. I also hope the findings will be helpful for others. I think we talk a good game about lifelong learning, so I'm trying it on and seeing if I can have that same commitment again.
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