Graduate Research Program Symposium 2021 (online)

Research Symposium 2021: The Endurance of Indigenous Sovereignty and the Violence of Settler Institutions

Registration website

About this event

The Symposium keynotes and theme this year are focused on the political functions of violence and its operation through diverse settler institutions. Violent colonial institutions are not only carceral, but also bureaucratic, academic, health-focused, cultural and social.

This Symposium draws on critical Indigenous and settler colonial scholarship that explores the political function of systemic violence in societies which rely on fundamentally exclusionary foundations. How can we ethically research and account for violence as Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, from our locations and within our relationships? What does it mean to attempt transformative scholarship within academic structures that have long legitimised and continue to reproduce colonial violence? How does violence towards Indigenous people and other racialized people, as seen most brutally in recent deaths in custody and theorized by Indigenous activists and families of those killed, enact particular kinds of colonial ordering? How is state violence in our colonial context is fundamentally political, and what are the implications of this for understanding Indigenous experiences of and responses to this violence? Critically, this symposium involves exploring Indigenous resistance and refusal in their relation to political violence and colonising projects. It also considers how carceral violence is connected to other, less widely acknowledged forms of violence within colonial institutions, including bureaucratic structures of policy and academic structures of knowledge. This Symposium centres Indigenous sovereignty, scholarship and visions for futures beyond settler violence.

Please get in contact with the ISRC if you would like to attend in person as we have limited tickets available: [email protected]

DRAFT SCHEDULE

Thursday 9 December

9:30 - 9:45am Welcome to Country Wurundjeri Elder

9:45 - 10am Symposium opening Professor Sarah Maddison

10am - 10:50am Keynote : Dr Crystal McKinnon - Enduring Indigeneity and Solidarity in Response to Australia’s Carceral Colonialism

10:50 - 11:20am Morning tea

11:20am - 1pm Panel 1

11:20 - 11:40am Pip Henderson - Indigenous strength and resistance challenges the status quo of schooling and education that maintains colonial violence in so-called Australia

11:40 - 12pm Michelle O’Toole - Learning from non-Māori engagement with te reo Māori: how do settler participations with an Indigenous language reinscribe colonisation and index social change?

12 - 12:20pm Amy Thomas - ‘We wanted to be boss’: self-determination and settler colonial governance in Aboriginal multilingual schools

12:20pm - 12:40pm Discussant: Associate Professor Lorenzo Veracini

12:40 - 1pm Questions from floor

1 - 2pm Lunch

2pm - 2:50pm Keynote: Dr Kim Alley - Incarceration, State Violence and Settler Colonialism in Australia and Palestine

2:50 - 3:20pm Afternoon tea3:20 – 5pm Panel 2

3:20 - 3:40pm Katy McKeown - Am pròiseact dàimh (The Affinity Project) 3:40 - 4pm Priyanka Shivadas - Performing Indigeneity 4 - 4:20pm Catherine Ryan - What’s my work address? Phenomenology and reflective settler-colonial research on Aboriginal Land

4:20 - 4:40pm Discussant: Dr Crystal McKinnon

4:40 - 5pm Questions from floor

5pm CLOSE

Friday 10 December

10am - 10:50am Keynote: Associate Professor Lorenzo Veracini- Enduring Indigenous Sovereignties against the ‘World Turned Inside Out’

10:50 - 11:20am Morning tea

11:20am - 1pm Panel 3

11:20 - 11:40am Catherine Gay - Imperial Materialities: Kulin girls’ textual and material culture in nineteenth-century Victoria

11:40 - 12pm Zac Roberts - Through the camera lens: Visualising 20th Century Aboriginal-Jewish relations in the Australian Outback

12 - 12:20pm Stefanie Oliver - ‘Drawing parallels’: Critically examining colonial neglect in past tuberculosis and leprosy epidemics in Indigenous Australia, whilst living through the COVID-19 pandemic. What happens now matters for future generations

12:20 - 12:40pm Discussant: Dr Julia Hurst

12:40 - 1pm Questions from floor

1 - 2pm Lunch

2 - 3:40pm Panel 4

2 - 2:20pm Tasnim Mahmoud Sammak - Beyond reciprocity: Articulating Black-Palestinian solidarity on Blackfella country

2:20 - 2:40pm Shelly McGrath - ‘Change Everything’: Dismantling settler-colonialism through place-based abolition strategies

2:40 - 3pm Vanessa Whittington - Inalienable Indigenous sovereignties and ‘caring as Country’- Epistemic trespass or discursive mainstreaming?

3 - 3:20pm Discussant: Dr Kim Alley

3:20 - 3:40pm Questions from floor

3:40 - 4pm Closing Reflections Professor Sarah Maddison and Dr Julia Hurst