Methodology is content: Indigenous Australian approaches to research through practice

An Indigenous Australian approach to research through practice is premised on building relationality. Indigenous Australian methodological approaches operate in their own right, and at the same time they accept existing binaries and ambiguities, as they are not linear in their worldview and epistemology. The methodological approaches to research are the content of the research and vice versa. These are inseparable in an Indigenous world-view. Motivation for this work: It can reconfigure the above. The methodological approach is through:Practice- Indigenist materialismEthics/pre-ethics and building relationality with peoples and communities

Greek as a marker of identity in Melbourne, Australia

Individual and group identity is often closely associated with language use. Language, in turn, often serves as a proxy for culture which provides the background against which language use occurs. For the Greek community in Melbourne, Australia, use of Greek is an important symbolic aspect of ethnic identification and personal and groupidentity. Even for those younger members of the community whose daily interactions occur primarily in English and who view themselves as first language speakers of English, Greek plays a specific role in expression of personal identity and cultural expression. The use of Greek provides a link to the culture of origin and serves as a symbolic marker of association with a specific group in the larger Australian context.For first generation Greek Australians, exposure to the language and culture came primarily from immigrant parents. However, many of these individuals also attended Greek school which served to reinforce their knowledge and ability to use the language. Their children, the second generation, often use Greek words routinely in specific contexts, such as when talking about food and religion or when referring to family members (grandmother, grandfather). While they often attend Greek school as well, there is evidence that overall ability to speak Greek fluently in the community is declining. Nonetheless, selective use of Greek terms remains an important identity marker. This paper will describe the use of Greek words and terms by English–speaking members of the Melbourne community and discuss its significance as a form of cultural identification and personal identity. The phenomenon of Greek school as a vehicle for language exposure will also be discussed. Data, based on in depth interviews with members of the Greek community, will be used to illustrate the contexts in which switches to Greek occur and elucidate the cognitive background of such usage.

Staircases, pyramids and poisons: the immunitary paradigm in the works of Noel Pearson and Peter Sutton

The recent focus on the category of culture provoked by Peter Sutton's The Politics of Suffering (2009) has revived questions of the meaning and utility of indigenous alterity in Australia. The end of the liberal consensus, contemporary with a declared end of ideology in Australian Indigenous† public policy, has been doubled in post-ethnic academic work harbouring a renewed suspicion of what Dombrowski (2010, 21: 129-140) has called indigeneity's distinctive sympathy. Within a cultural economy of commensurability, the fact that political claims are often contingent on the indigenous people themselves maintaining sufficient alterity to warrant the special treatment afforded them is taken by some as proof of voluntarism and bad faith. In order to gauge this immanent reorientation of indigeneity in Australia, this paper surveys the works of two prominent figures in policy debates-the anthropologist Peter Sutton and indigenous public intellectual Noel Pearson-who have both argued that remote Indigenous communities suffer from a cultural pathology. This paper presents a conceptual critique of their popular press works between 2000 and 2011. Within the context of post-ethnic government policy after self-determination and scholarship after identity, this paper contends that we are witnessing the (re)appearance of an equalitarian humanism which proposes, following Esposito [2008 (Orig. pub. 2004)], to immunize indigenous polities and the settler-colonial state against the historical frames and alterity of indigeneity.

At home/out of place: young people’s multicultural belongings

What does it mean to come of age in an era of anti-multiculturalism? How does such an environment shape the ways young people of diverse backgrounds come to feel “at home”-in the nation, in the city, in their neighbourhoods, and in their national identity? Discussing findings from a study of youth in the multicultural suburbs of five Australian cities, this chapter explores how the politics of belonging is lived through the spatial practices of everyday civic life for those who have grown up during the multiculturalism backlash of the 1990s and 2000s. It examines the contradictory picture that emerges of a new generation claiming a right to multicultural citizenship and forging productive diversity within the urban multiculture, and yet simultaneously positioned as “out of place” within civic life.

Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia occupies the mainland area east of India and south of China, as well as the archipelago between the mainland and Australia, west of the Pacific Ocean. The region is self-identified by its geographic proximity, although cultural commonalities across the region occur mostly at the level of consensus gentium rather than as an overarching mode of regional distinction. Its peoples derive from a broad East Asian racial grouping, dividing primarily along linguistic lines into four families of languages. These linguistic families thereafter quickly devolve into hundreds of ethnic groups, many of which have been bound together in postcolonial states that, to various degrees, comply or otherwise with precolonial polities. While some states have a strong sense of coherent national identity, others have had to consciously construct such an identity, with varying degrees of success and not a little resistance.

Indigenous representation and alternative schooling: prioritising an epistemology of relationality

This paper draws on a case study of a small alternative Indigenous school in Queensland, Australia. From the perspective of several of the school’s Indigenous Elders, the paper foregrounds the significance of group differentiation at the school on the basis of Indigenous representation. However, it also considers how such differentiation/representation can be problematic in perpetuating cultural reductionism. Beyond such reductionism, the paper examines the possibilities of the Indigenous epistemology of relationality. The school’s vision and governance around this epistemology – where community, kinship and family networks are at the centre of all relations – enabled both the articulation of a stable identity but also recognition of the complexity and diversity of Indigenous disadvantage. This paper argues that a prioritising of relationality within alternative Indigenous-led schooling contexts offers significant potential for addressing the complex educational needs of Indigenous students.