David Hollinsworth

Decolonizing Indigenous disability in Australia

Cultural diversity and social inequality are often ignored or downplayed in disability services. Where they are recognized, racial and cultural differences are often essentialized, ignoring diversity within minority groups and intersectionality with other forms of oppression. This is often an issue for Indigenous Australians living with disability. This paper argues that understanding Indigenous disability in Australia requires a critical examination of the history of racism that has systematically disabled most Indigenous people across generations and continues to cause disproportionate rates of impairment. Approaches that focus on the cultural ‘otherness’ of Indigenous people and fail to address taken-for-granted normative ‘whiteness’ and institutional and discursive racism are unable to escape that history.

Unsettling Australian Settler Supremacy: Combating Resistance in University Aboriginal Studies.

Higher education courses designed to equip students to work effectively with Indigenous peoples by teaching about racism and inequality often encounter resistance to these concepts. In particular, students argue that individual and structural racisms, and their own white privilege, are ‘not their fault’. This article examines different forms of student resistance expressed within a number of Aboriginal Studies courses taught in a regional Australian university. This article reflects on data collected from various research initiatives with students, and personal teaching experiences over decades, and argues that although the notion of white supremacy can explicitly identify white privilege it also actively promotes even greater student resistance to learning. As such, this article argues for a consistent sequence of anti-racism approaches and suggests a number of key pedagogical strategies for anti-racism education.

Teaching Indigenous geography in a neo-colonial world

Abstract Australian universities are increasingly embedding Indigenous content and perspectives within curriculum to promote Indigenous cultural competency. We present teaching challenges in an Indigenous geography course designed to present an engaged, intercultural learning experience. We critically reflect on student evaluations, informal discussions and observations to complement scholarly debates. Course design and delivery was seen as stimulating and illuminating in terms of course content. While diversity of student cohorts, backgrounds and learning styles remain challenging, the romanticism of some students can override critical engagement with the geographical context of the course material and their positionality. There remains a tendency in both student constructions and the geographical literature to create an Indigenous/non-Indigenous binary that not only essentializes both, but can be culturally unsafe for Indigenous students. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students may share a sense of pessimism in confronting apparently unstoppable development and environmental destruction. We argue for scholarship around the fundamentally intercultural nature of coexistence to contextualize the spatial diversity of Indigenous lives in landscapes, currently obscured by dominant constructions of Indigeneity. Critical reflection on settler educators’ and learners’ positionalities with respect to neocolonial structures will help to transcend both essentialism and pessimism.

Academic ‘place-making’: fostering attachment, belonging and identity for Indigenous students in Australian universities

ABSTRACT Place is a concept used to explore how people ascribe meaning to their physical and social surrounds, and their emotional affects. Exploring the university as a place can highlight social relations affecting Australian Indigenous students’ sense of belonging and identity. We asked what university factors contribute to the development of a positive sense of place for these students. Findings are presented from two Australian universities, based on focus groups with Indigenous students, and interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous staff. Students prioritized relationships with academics as a key theme, stressing academic’s flexibility and understanding enabled their persistence at university. Students situationally manage self-identification, requiring academics to engage effectively with diverse students, but staff felt they required further professional development. We argue that academics can ‘make’ university places in their pedagogies and mentoring roles, but require universities to recognize this pedagogical caring as a legitimate and valued element of their work.

‘Cause we’re gonna lose big time’: Indigenous resource negotiations in settled Australia

ABSTRACT Recent work in Indigenous geographies theorizes that Indigenous peoples are differently placed in relation to the state, neoliberal development, and to other Indigenous peoples, rather than a simplistic Indigenous/non-Indigenous people and custodial/exploitative frame. Indigenous people’s claims to land in Australia are overlain by a reductionist, settler legal topography that confers land rights to some Aboriginal people, native title to others, and nothing to those whose connections to land have been ‘washed away in the tide of history’. This paper presents findings from interviews and focus groups with Aboriginal Australians in settled Australia, following negotiations over resource development. We argue that in the often-distant periphery where land rights and native title are compelling, the notion of intercultural space is exotic, marketed and celebrated. In contrast, in the clearly demarcated settler zones, intercultural spaces with significant Aboriginal populations are steadfastly inscribed as dispossessed spaces, ripe for development. Because of neoliberal state–corporate alliances and interests and the ease with which the development agenda is progressed in settled Australia, we argue that realization of where, how and why these geographies have come about is needed to achieve national intercultural space. Without this understanding, only a limited intercultural space will be achieved.