‘Universities are not the safe places we would like to think they are, but they are getting safer’: Indigenous women academics in higher education

This paper outlines some of the experiences of Indigenous women academics in higher education. The author offers these experiences, not to position Indigenous women academics as victims, but to expose the problematic nature of racism, systemic marginalisation, white race privilege and radicalised subjectivity played out within Australian higher education institutions. By utilising the experiences and examples she seeks to bring the theoretical into the everyday world of being Indigenous within academe. In analysing these examples, the author reveals the relationships between oppression, white race privilege, institutional privilege and the epistemology that maintains them. She argues that, in moving from a position of being silent to speaking about what she has witnessed and experienced, she is able to move from the position of object to subject and gain a form of liberated voice (hooks 1989: 9) for herself and other Indigenous women. She seeks to challenge the practices within universities that continue to subjugate Indigenous women academics.

Indigenous research and broader issues in the Academy

The Rudd Labour Government rode to power in Australia on the education promise of 'an education revolution'. The term 'education revolution' carries all the obligatory marketing metaphors that an aspirant government might want recognised by the general public on the eve government came to power however in revolutionary terms it fades into insignificance in comparison to the real revolution in Australian education. This revolution simply put is to elevate Indigenous Knowledge Systems, in Australian Universities. In the forty three years since the nation setting Referendum of 1967 a generation has made a beach head on the educational landscape. Now a further generation who having made it into the field of higher degrees yearn for the ways and means to authentically marshal Indigenous knowledge? The Institute of Koorie Education at Deakin has for over twenty years not only witnessed the transition but is also a leader in the field. With the appointment of two Chairs of Indigenous Knowledge Systems to build on to its already established research profile the Institute moved towards what is the 'real revolution' in education – the elevation of Indigenous Knowledge as a legitimate knowledge system. This paper lays out the Institute of Koorie Education‘s Research Plan and the basis of an argument put to the academy that will be the driver for this pursuit.

Using the semantic grid to build bridges between museums and indigenous communities

In this paper we describe a Semantic Grid application designed to enable museums and indigenous communities in distributed locations, to collaboratively discuss, describe and annotate digital objects and documents in museums that originally belonged to or are of cultural or historical significance to indigenous groups. By extending and refining an existing application, Vannotea, we enable users on access grid nodes to collaboratively attach descriptive, rights and tribal care metadata and annotations to digital images, video or 3D representations. The aim is to deploy the software within museums to enable the traditional owners to describe and contextualize museum content in their own words and from their own perspectives. This sharing and exchange of knowledge will hopefully revitalize cultures eroded through colonization and globalization and repair and strengthen relationships between museums and indigenous communities.

Governmentality and the reflection of legal educators : assessment practices as a case study

This paper presents a conceptual framework, informed by Foucault’s work on governmentality, which allows for new kinds of reflection on the practice of legal education. Put simply, this framework suggests that legal education can be understood as a form of government that relies on a specific rationalisation and programming of the activities of legal educators, students, and administrators, and is implemented by harnessing specific techniques and bodies of ‘know-how’. Applying this framework to assessment at three Australian law schools, this paper highlights how assessment practices are rationalised, programmed, and implemented, and points out how this government shapes students’ legal personae. In particular, this analysis focuses on the governmental effects of pedagogical discourses that are dominant within the design and scholarship of legal education. It demonstrates that the development of pedagogically-sound regimes of assessment has contributed to a reformulation of the terrain of government, by providing the conditions under which forms of legal personae may be more effectively shaped, and extending the power relations that achieve this. This analysis provides legal educators with an original way of reflecting on the power effects of teaching the law, and new opportunities for thinking about what is possible in legal education.

From Jindabyne to 'Jindabyne' : immigrant and indigenous specters

This paper reads Ray Lawrence's film Jindabyne (2006) in order to consider how "Australian" connotes as "immigrant" or "Indigenous" in contemporary Australia. Although the film is an adaptation of an American short story, it exploits an existing grammar of place in Australian cultural production in order to interrogate this very culture. If questions of race, gender, and class have haunted post-settlement Australia, Lawrence's film simultaneously stages these spectres and gestures towards the necessary failure of any attempt to exorcise them in a place where indigeneity is invisible. Thus, the location of Jindabyne, the town drowned in the name of progress, offers an exemplary visual metaphor for the failed project of identity formation in a place where forgetting is a survival tool.

Governing depression in law students and the shaping of legal personae

Since a recent Australian study found that university law students experience higher rates of depression than medical students and legal professionals (Kelk et al. 2009), the mental health of law students has increasingly become a target of government. To date, however, there has been no attempt to analyse these practices as an activity of government in advanced liberal societies. This paper addresses this imbalance by providing an initial analytics of the government of depression in law schools. It demonstrates how students are responsibilised to manage the risks and uncertainties of legal education by constructing resilient forms of personal and professional personae. It highlights that, in order to avoid depression, students are encouraged to shape not just their minds and bodies according to psychological and biomedical discourses, but are also to govern their ethical dispositions and become virtuous persons. This paper also argues that these forms of government are tied to advanced liberal forms of rule, as they position the law student as the locus of responsibility for depression, imply that depression is caused by an individual failing, and entrench students within responsibilising and entrepreneurial forms of subjectivity.

Discrimination or Differential Involvement? A Review of the Research Exploring the Impact of Indigenous Status on Sentencing

Existing court data suggest that adult Indigenous offenders are more likely than non-Indigenous defendants to be sentenced to prison but once imprisoned generally receive shorter terms. Using findings from international and Australian multivariate statistical analyses, this paper reviews the three key hypotheses advanced as plausible explanations for these differences: 1) differential involvement, 2) negative discrimination, 3) positive discrimination. Overall, prior research shows strong support for the differential involvement thesis, some support for positive discrimination and little foundation for negative discrimination in the sentencing of Indigenous defendants. Where discrimination is found, we argue that this may be explained by the lack of a more complete set of control variables in researchers’ multivariate models.

Legal responses to climate change

The challenges of climate change pose problems requiring new and innovative legal responses by legal practitioners, government officials and corporate officers. This book addresses a broad range of topic areas where climate change has impact and systematically analyses the key legal responses to climate change, both at the international level and within Australia at federal, State and local levels. In particular, it critically examines: •the rights, duties and market mechanisms established under the international climate change regime •the effect of climate change policies on the implementation of environmental and planning laws •new regimes for the implementation of renewable energy and energy efficiency initiatives •legal frameworks for the implementation of biological and geological sequestration projects (including forest projects and carbon rights); and •legal principles for the design of an effective carbon trading scheme for Australia It also considers the role of the common law including: •the likely response of the law of torts to emerging forms of climate change harm; and •potential liabilities for professionals who must take climate change into account in their decision-making and advice

The Australian response to climate change : business as usual or legal innovation?

Through international agreement to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol the global community has acknowledged that climate change is a global problem and sought to achieve reductions in global emissions, within a sufficient timeframe, to avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. The sheer magnitude of emissions reductions required within such an urgent timeframe presents a challenge to conventional regulatory approaches both internationally and within Australia. The phenomenon of climate change is temporally and geographically challenging and it is scientifically complex and uncertain. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the current Australian legal response to climate change and to examine the legal measures which have been proposed to promote carbon trading, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and carbon sequestration initiatives across Australia. As this paper illustrates, the current Australian approach is clearly ineffective and the law as it stands overwhelmingly inadequate to address Australia’s emissions and meet the enormity of the challenges posed by climate change. Consequently, the government should look towards a more effective legal framework to achieve rapid and urgent transformations in the selection of energy sources, energy use and sequestration initiatives across the Australian community.

Life on the edge : housing experiences in three remote Australian indigenous settlements

This analysis of housing experiences and aspirations in three remote Indigenous settlements in Australia (Mimili, Maningrida and Palm Island) reveals extreme liveability problems directly related to the scale and form of housing provision. Based upon field visits to each of the settlements and extensive interviews with residents and local housing and community officers, the paper analyses two aspects of living in such housing conditions at two spatial scales, the layout of the settlement and the design of individual houses. The failings at both scales are shown to be the fault of a dysfunctional housing system that is only recently been addressed.

Culture-fair assessment : challenging Indigenous students through effortful mathematics teaching

This paper reports on a mathematics education research project centred on teachers’ pedagogical practices and capacity to assess Indigenous Australian students in a culture-fair manner. The project has been funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage program and is being conducted in seven Catholic and Independent primary schools in north Queensland. Our Industry Partners are Catholic Education and the Association of Independent Schools, Queensland. The study aims to provide greater understanding about how to build more equitable assessment practices to address the issue of underperforming Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) students in regional and remote Australia. The goal is to identify ways forward by attending to culture-fair assessment practice. The research is exploring the attitudes, beliefs and responses of Indigenous students to assessment in the context of mathematics learning with particular focus on teacher knowledge in these educational settings in relation to the design of assessment tasks that are authentic and engaging for these students in an accountability context. This approach highlights how teachers need to distinguish the ‘funds of knowledge’ (González, Moll, Floyd Tenery, Rivera, Rendón, Gonzales & Amanti, 2008) that Indigenous students draw on and how teachers need to be culturally responsive in their pedagogy to open up curriculum and assessment practice to allow for different ways of knowing and being

Differences in Treatment and Management of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Patients Presenting with Chest Pain: Results of the Heart Protection Partnership (HPP) Study

BACKGROUND: Indigenous patients with acute coronary syndromes represent a high-risk group. There are however few contemporary datasets addressing differences in the presentation and management of Indigenous and non-Indigenous patients with chest pain. METHODS: The Heart Protection Project, is a multicentre retrospective audit of consecutive medical records from patients presenting with chest pain. Patients were identified as Indigenous or non-Indigenous, and time to presentation and cardiac investigations as well as rates of cardiac investigations and procedures were compared between the two groups. RESULTS: Of the 2380 patients included, 199 (8.4%) identified as Indigenous, and 2174 (91.6%) as non-Indigenous. Indigenous patients were younger, had higher rates hyperlipidaemia, diabetes, smoking, known coronary artery disease and a lower rate of prior PCI; and were significantly less likely to have private health insurance, be admitted to an interventional facility or to have a cardiologist as primary physician. Following adjustment for difference in baseline characteristics, Indigenous patients had comparable rates of cardiac investigations and delay times to presentation and investigations. CONCLUSIONS: Although the Indigenous population was identified as a high-risk group, in this analysis of selected Australian hospitals there were no significant differences in treatment or management of Indigenous patients in comparison to non-Indigenous.

Psychometric validation of the growth and empowerment measure (GEM) applied with Indigenous Australians

Objective: Empowerment is a complex process of psychological, social, organizational and structural change. It allows individuals and groups to achieve positive growth and effectively address the social and psychological impacts of historical oppression, marginalization and disadvantage. The Growth and Empowerment Measure (GEM) was developed to measure change in dimensions of empowerment as defi ned and described by Aboriginal Australians who participated in the Family Well Being programme.---------- Method: The GEM has two components: a 14-item Emotional Empowerment Scale (EES14) and 12 Scenarios (12S). It is accompanied by the Kessler 6 Psychological Distress Scale (K6), supplemented by two questions assessing frequency of happy and angry feelings. For validation, the measure was applied with 184 Indigenous Australian participants involved in personal and/or organizational social health activities.---------- Results: Psychometric analyses of the new instruments support their validity and reliability and indicate two-component structures for both the EES (Self-capacity; Inner peace) and the 12S (Healing and enabling growth, Connection and purpose). Strong correlations were observed across the scales and subscales. Participants who scored higher on the newly developed scales showed lower distress on the K6, particularly when the two additional questions were included. However, exploratory factor analyses demonstrated that GEM subscales are separable from the Kessler distress measure.---------- Conclusion: The GEM shows promise in enabling measurement and enhancing understanding of both process and outcome of psychological and social empowerment within an Australian Indigenous context.

Cyberbullying in social networking sites and blogs : legal issues for young people and schools

This article examines the social networking phenomenon that has been so readily embraced by school-age adolescents, in the context of its potential to contribute further to the mechanisms for and incidence of cyberbullying amongst school students. Cyberbullying in these online for a, as a misuse of technology to harass, intimidate, tease, threaten, abuse or otherwise terrorise peers, teachers and/or the school in general, is discussed from both the psychological perspective and in terms of its legal ramifications (both criminal and civil) in Australia. Some recommendations for proactive and preventative measures, education and policy adoptions are provided, together with general advice to parents, schools and adolescents on awareness of the risks involved and how young people might better protect themselves in light of that knowledge.