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.

Duplicity of meaning

This article considers the ‘duplicitous’ functions of the word ‘wild’ in the arguments over the Queensland’s Wild Rivers Act 2005. Certain traditional owners, environmentalist and state groups have deployed the term pragmatically, simultaneously endorsing its usage (through repetition) and disavowing its colonial associations (through explanation) against protestations by Indigenous and non-Indigenous stakeholders. In a sense, this ambivalent ‘duplicity’ is entirely consistent with relations between the settler-colonial nation state and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander polities – relations aptly characterised by Povinelli as shaped by ‘the cunning of recognition’ – which stratify relations between groups through the endorsing of ‘tradition’. Thus ‘the Indigenous’ can be posited both as one political minority amidst a multicultural polity and as a pre-modern and endemic precursor of the settler-colonial nation, constitutively conservationist ‘first Australians’. Arguably, in the legislation’s ‘recognition’ of the ‘wild’ past, Indigenous peoples – who were known in nineteenth century Queensland as ‘wild blacks’ or ‘myalls’ (meaning those who resisted leaving their lands – and ‘could be shot with impunity’) are recouped as the nation’s first caretakers of ‘pristine’ waterways. However, this article regards the current use of this ambivalent word as also potentially authorising those recognised through this mythic form, providing a limited and uncertain opportunity for traditional owners to ground a form of sovereign right in lands and waterways. Against totalising settler-colonial critiques of hegemony, this article argues that the Wild Rivers legislation does not forget indigeneity, but rather relies on indigeneity. While much research concerning ‘natural’ ideologies such as ‘the noble savage’ has worked to show that faith in a belated era of historical fullness or presence can serve to evacuate the present of material details, it may also be that the ‘wild’ can also offer Indigenous peoples a valuable political authority to, in the words of Courtney Jung, ‘contest the exclusions through which it has been constituted’.

The politics of disagreement in critical education policy studies: a response to Morsy, Gulson and Clarke

This paper engages with Morsy, Gulson and Clarke's response to the recent special issue of Discourse (Vol. 34, No. 2) that examined evolutions of markets and equity in education. We welcome Morsy, Gulson and Clarke's supplementation of the special issue with the genealogical analysis they provide of private school funding in Australia and the attention they draw to elisions of race, ethnicity, Indigeneity and whiteness in contemporary framings of equity in policy and research. We also clarify and expand on some of the aims and arguments that framed the special issue. However, we feel that any response adequate to the ‘event’ that Morsy, Gulson and Clarke hope to stage – that is, a ‘debate redux’ and politics of dissensus in education as an antidote to depoliticisation – must extend beyond the rehearsal of pre-existing positions; it cannot stop at endorsing or critiquing the points raised in their paper, or reiterating the rationales and arguments of the special issue. We therefore respond by gesturing towards possibilities for ‘disagreement’, in the sense that Jacques Ranciere gives this term, about the political vocation of critical policy sociologists, and the modes of doing and being that can be seen as ‘critical’ and ‘political’ in academic education research. We do not disagree with Morsy, Gulson and Clarke in the usual sense; for that reason, we engage seriously with their call for a politics of dissensus in education.

Poetry and prose as pedagogical tools for addressing difficult knowledges: translocational positionality and issues of collective political agency

In this paper the focus is on the possibilities that poetry and prose offer as pedagogical tools that can both accommodate and address difficult and painful knowledges. The paper presents and analyses poems and prose written by students at a non-traditional secondary school for disadvantaged girls (many of whom identify as Indigenous Australian). Through stories of grief and pain, but also hope and possibility, the poetry/prose book signifies a sense of collective political agency against oppressive relations towards the girls creating new moulds of existence. Contra to dominant approaches to recognising and valuing Indigeneity in schools, these writings represent Indigenous culture as a complex, dynamic and contingent social practice. While it is contended that a valuing of marginalised cultures is an important aspect of cultural recognition, the paper argues that a broader and more critical focus is required in beginning to address Indigenous oppressions.

Schooling for self-determination through a justice politics of Indigenous representation

This paper presents data from a study of secondary school for girls, the majority of whom identify as Indigenous Australian. ‘Gamarada’ High School is located in a suburban area of Queensland (Australia) and was established to provide quality education for disadvantaged girls. The paper draws on student and teacher interview data from a broader study that was concerned with examining how the school addressed the economic, cultural and political dimensions of Indigenous girls’ disadvantage. The focus here is on issues of political justice in relation to Indigenous representation and, more specifically, how such representation at the school supports the key Indigenous equity priority of self-determination. Feminist post-colonial theories are drawn on to argue the importance of educators engaging with a politics of representation that initiates theory from the social location of Indigenous experience, reflects an anti-racist/anti-colonial agenda and recognises and values the central role relationality plays in Indigenous lives.

Beyond culturalism: addressing issues of Indigenous disadvantage through schooling

This paper draws from a study that explored issues of student equity, marginality and diversity in two secondary schools in regional Queensland (Australia). The paper foregrounds interview data gathered from administration, teaching and ancillary staff at one of the schools, ‘Crimson’ High School. The school has a high Indigenous student population and is well recognised within the broader community as catering well to this population. With reference to the school’s concerns about Indigenous disadvantage and the various approaches undertaken to address this disadvantage, the paper articulates the significance of educators being critically aware of how they construct race and use it as an organising principle in their work. This awareness is central to moving beyond the culturalism and racial incommensurability that tend to predominate within Indigenous education—where cultural reductionism homogenises indigeneity within and against a dominant White norm. With reference to a specific approach at the school designed predominantly for Indigenous male students—to foster inter-cultural awareness and respect through sport—we highlight ways in which notions of culturalism and racial incommensurability might be disrupted.

‘It’s almost like a White school now’: racialised complexities, Indigenous representation and school leadership

Drawing on a broader study that focused on examining principal leadership for equity and diversity, this paper presents the leadership experiences of ‘Jane’, a White, middle-class principal of a rural Indigenous school. The paper highlights how Jane's leadership is inextricably shaped by her assumptions about race and the political dynamics and historical specificities of her school community. A central focus is on Jane's tendency to deploy culturally reductionist understandings of Indigeneity that position it as incompatible or incommensurable with White culture/western schooling. The paper argues the central imperative of a leadership that rejects these understandings and engages in a critical situational analysis of Indigenous politics, relations and experience. Such an analysis is presented as imperative to supporting representative justice in that it moves beyond merely according a voice to Indigenous people to a focus on better understanding, problematising and remedying the racial relations that contribute to Indigenous oppression.

Indigenous girls, social justice, and schooling : addressing issues of disadvantage

Indigenous women and girls in Australia remain highly disadvantaged economically, culturally, and politically. The ways in which schools can better address this disadvantage are the focus of this chapter. The chapter builds on existing research in the area of Indigenous schooling and social justice to add important theoretical and practical insight into supporting Indigenous girls – an equity group whose marginalization (while highly salient) tends to be lost amid broader concerns about Indigeneity. With reference to “Emma’s” story as exemplifying some of the key constraints to the educational attainment of Indigenous girls , the chapter explores how schools might begin to remedy this disadvantage through their engagement with a politics of (1) economic redistribution, (2) cultural recognition, and (3) political representation.

Los migrantes de la laguna: un estudio etnográfico sobre la construcción y configuración de los flujos migratorios de la comunidad Kichwa en Sesquilé

Esta tesis de grado se intereza por observar y análizar las red migratoria de los Kichwas de Sesquilé, especificamente en los procesos que permitieron la construcción y consolidación de las redes migratorias, las cuales se encienden o se apagan, a partir de las configuraciones políticas, religiosas, culturales y económicas que la comunidad ha experimentado.