Michael J. Christie

Transdisciplinary Research and Aboriginal Knowledge

Indigenous academic researchers are involved in Indigenist, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, all of which present problems and opportunities for Indigenous knowledge traditions. Transdisciplinary research is different from interdisciplinary research because it moves beyond the disciplinarity of the university and takes into account knowledge practices which the university will never fully understand. Indigenous knowledge traditions resist definition from a Western academic perspective - there are Indigenous knowledge practices which will never engage with the academy, just as there are some branches of the academy which will never acknowledge Indigenous knowledge practices. In this paper I present the story of my own non-Indigenous perspective on Indigenous research and what happens to it in a university. I am not concerned here with the knowledge production work Aboriginal people do in their own ways and contexts for their own purposes, but rather turn my attention to some of the issues which emerge when transdisciplinary research practice involves Australian Indigenous communities.

Designing digital knowledge management tools with Aboriginal Australians

Abstract The paper describes an approach to digital design grounded in processes of Indigenous collective memory making. We claim the research should be understood as performative knowledge making, and accounting it should also be performative. Accordingly we present four texts generated in the course of our research as an exhibit. They attest design processes for a file management system TAMI. We briefly theorise our approach as exemplifying Suchman’s ‘located accountability’.

Aboriginal knowledge traditions in digital environments

According to Manovich (2001), the database and the narrative are natural enemies, each competing for the same territory of human culture. Aboriginal knowledge traditions depend upon narrative through storytelling and other shared performances. The database objectifies and commodifies distillations of such performances and absorbs them into data structures according to a priori assumptions of metadata; that is the data which describes the data to aid a search. In a conventional library for example, the metadata which helps you find a book may be title, author or topic. It is misleading and dangerous to say that these databases contain knowledge, because we lose sight of the embedded, situated, collaborative and performative nature of knowledge. For the assemblages of digital artefacts we find in an archive or database to be useful in the intergenerational transmission of living knowledge traditions, we need to rethink knowledge as performance and data as artefacts of prior knowledge production episodes. Through the metaphors of environment and journey we can explore ways to refigure the archive as a digital environment available as a resource to support the work of active, creative and collaborative knowledge production.

Digital lives in postcolonial Aboriginal Australia

In this article, the authors relate brief stories of episodes spanning a period of 10 years when they worked with Australian Aboriginal groups and individuals as they incorporated digital technologies into their cultural practices. Their story telling is leavened with a dissonant working imaginary designed to interrupt both itself and the stories. As their stories of their digital lives proceed, however, the carefully contrived, resourceful dissonance unexpectedly recedes as the new and surprising digital lives that form part of their collectives evade the grasp of their interrupting tool.

Yolngu Life in the Northern Territory of Australia: The Significance of Community and Social Capital

The notion of social capital has had wide currency in mainstream social policy debate in recent years, with commonly used definitions emphasising three factors: norms, networks and trust. Yolngu Aboriginal people have their own perspectives on norms, networks and trust relationships. This article uses concepts from Yolngu philosophy to explore these perspectives in three contexts: at the former mission settlements, at homeland centres, and among “long-grassers” in Darwin. The persistence of the components of social capital at different levels in particular contexts shotild be seen by government policy makers as an opportunity to engage in a social development dialogue with Yolngu, aimed at identifying the specific contexts in which Yolngu social capital can be maximised.

BOUNDARIES AND ACCOUNTABILITIES IN COMPUTER-ASSISTED ETHNOBOTANY

Designing software alongside ethnobotanists and Indigenous owners and practitioners of traditional knowledge, brings to light a range of issues which expose some of the assumptions underlying both Western ethnobotany and software design. In collaborating over the development of software to facilitate the use of digital objects in knowledge work, issues of knowledge politics, accountability, ontologies, and epistemologies arise. This paper discusses the ways these issues, in a particular context, led to the development of a flexible, ontologically flat, epistemologically open, ethnobotanical software design.

Aboriginal contributions to the evaluation of housing (and to postcolonial theory)

Housing Reference Groups (HRGs) began to be established in remote Northern Territory (NT) Aboriginal communities in 2009 when the Northern Territory Government compulsorily acquired remote Aboriginal housing and closed down 75 Aboriginal Housing associations. In this highly contested context, we were invited to undertake an evaluation of the HRGs. Through both open discussion and semi-structured interviews, we learnt from the Aboriginal people we worked with to see a much wider, more structural understanding of housing and its governance. This in turn led us to reflect upon Aboriginal contributions to the theory and practice of evaluation, and their various relations to received theories such as social justice, pragmatist philosophy and ethics, and Frierian conscientization. This collaborative ground-up evaluation process contributed to our own ongoing practices of evaluation, and possibly to some slight but reverberating changes in government policy and practice.

Digital Futures for Bilingual Books

In dozens of Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, thousands of books in Indigenous Australian languages were produced for use in classrooms, with illustrations by local artists, usually published on site and with a small local distribution. The production of these resources involved a blending of Indigenous knowledges with Western technologies bringing previously oral-only stories into a written mode, enabling a different means of transmission and a different degree of permanence, as well as a radical redefinition of text and representation. The digitisation of this body of literature in the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages extends these shifts even further, creating new audiences, contexts and opportunities for the transmission of Indigenous knowledges contained in these books. This chapter addresses some of the implications of the changes associated with the shift from oral to paper to digital modes.

Developing Local Curriculum Materials—Learning Metaphors, Insightful Collaborations, Community Involvement

When bilingual education began in remote schools of the Northern Territory only the most basic printing technologies were available. By the time bilingual education was revoked as a government policy thirty years later, schools were well and truly in the digital age. The remarkable evolution of the materialities of teaching and learning was underpinned by an equally remarkable transition of pedagogical theories: from those underpinned by colonialism and the enlightenment, to those reflecting and supporting distinctive local Aboriginal epistemologies and knowledge practices. This paper deals with the complex interactions between the theories and technologies of NT bilingual education, from the early 1970s until the present. In doing so, he discusses the following key topics: literacy materials inherited from the mission era and the development of new materials and literacy pedagogies; the move to language experience and child-centred approaches; Aboriginalisation and the role of the classroom teacher; the assertion of ancestral connections—songs, histories, and designs—in education, and the development of both-ways curriculum; and finally, the appropriations of digital media.

Final Comments: Objects of Governance as Simultaneously Governed and Governing

In 2013 a perplexity we had been experiencing for some time around the apparently unstoppable proliferation of contexts in which “the public problem” of Indigenous governance emerged came to a head. As members of an informal consultancy team established within the Contemporary Indigenous Knowledge and Governance Group in the policy research institute where, near the ends of our careers, we find ourselves based, we were asked by a group of concerned government officers – both Federal and Territory, to intervene in ‘governance training’ in five Aboriginal communities. Top-down delivery of Government funded training services on a fly-in-fly-out basis has become a huge industry in Aboriginal Australia, yet a bad smell of failure persistently hangs around these programs. The amount of funding we were offered for our work was significant, but still the size of a ‘rounding error’ in government budgets for governance and leadership training in Australian Aboriginal communities. And like much useful research funding, it was offered to us at short notice, at the end of a financial year. Our very different research-informed approach to services delivery was seen as an alternative to what was not working, and we were approached by people in government with whom we had established relations of confidence and trust. Contracts were duly signed and we found ourselves deeply involved with a group of younger scholars in delivering the ‘Indigenous Governance Development and Leadership Project’ (IGDLP). This in part is the origins of our writers ‘workshop on objects of governance, and this volume.