Michelle Evans

Containing, contesting, creating spaces: leadership and cultural identity work among Australian Indigenous arts leaders

Drawing on the experiences of 29 Australian Indigenous artists and arts leaders, this article explores the way these individuals provide leadership by expressing and resisting cultural identities of Aboriginality. Scholars have shown how a key activity in leadership is ‘identity work’, or negotiating a sustainable leadership identity, yet much of the scholarship to date neglects context and cultural dimensions of identity work in leadership. Our research draws on the extensive theorising on social identity, but we take a critical perspective, arguing that public discourses of Aboriginality mean that leadership identities in Indigenous communities have a complex, sometimes contested status. We begin the article showing the way in which Aboriginality as an identity is constructed in the public domain. We then explore three categories of identity practice enacted by our sample of arts leaders: contesting essentialisation, containing trauma and creating belonging. The discussion argues that these practices of interrogating and re-shaping stereotypic cultural identities often constitute acts of leadership. We contribute to scholarship by providing new insights on identity work; and to practice, highlighting the potential significance of leadership identity work to the self-determination and flourishing of Aboriginal peoples.

Ethical Considerations When Using Visual Methods in Digital Storytelling with Aboriginal Young People in Southeast Australia

This chapter discusses a digital storytelling project involving young Aboriginal people from southeast Australia who used the creative capacities of digital technologies to explore subjective experiences of identity. We discuss three key ethical considerations that supported and emerged from working with young Aboriginal people. Decolonization, the participation gap and situated learning were critical factors that were important in developing an ethical framework for engagement in research with Aboriginal young people. The approach sought to address the challenges that Aboriginal youth continue to experience, including marginalization from mainstream society, negative stereotyping and lingering misperceptions of real Aboriginal identities in contemporary urban Australia. The visual content arising from the workshops supported Aboriginal young people to reposition their contemporary visual self-representations as diverse and authentic.

Navigating the territories of Indigenous leadership: Exploring the experiences and practices of Australian Indigenous arts leaders

This article explores the leadership of Australian Indigenous artists and arts leaders. We advance the idea of ‘territories’ to convey the overlapping contexts in which Indigenous artistic leaders work, and through this framework seek to highlight the embodied ways individuals enact leadership across country and community. Thematic, narrative and discursive analysis of 29 in-depth interviews with diverse Indigenous artists identify four territories and multiple practices of leadership in which our participants engage. The four territories are: authorisation in a bi-cultural world (cultural authorisation and self-authorising); identity and belonging (both fearless and connected); artistic practice (innovative and custodian of cultural values); and history, colonisation and trauma (expressing and containing trauma, empowering and generating hope). The article builds on emerging research on Indigenous leadership to argue that the experiences of Indigenous artists and a framework designed to reflect their embodied and spatially anchored practices, has broader applicability – revealing new insights about leadership.

From the Studio to the Bush: Aboriginal Young People, Mobile Story-Making and Cultural Connections

Between 2014 and 2016, a group of Southeast Australian Aboriginal young people from Korin Gamadji Institute (KGI) participated in three digital storytelling workshops, learning to use a range of digital technologies to assist in creative explorations of their culture and identities. The initial workshops were conducted at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), where professional digital storytelling facilitators supported young participants in constructing their stories in a studio environment. Locating the final workshop at Camp Jungai, a place of cultural significance for Aboriginal Victorians, inspired participants’ creative use of mobile devices for story production. This chapter reveals one approach for providing Aboriginal youth with the capacity to control their explorations of culture through mobile story-making, and the significance of a community-based setting.