Tess Lea

This Is Not a Pipe: The Treacheries of Indigenous Housing

This essay describes the surreality of Aboriginal housing in Australia, where images reroute remedial concern from the literal conditions toward a pathologization of the indigenous householder. Using governmental data against governmental interpretation, the essay shows how a pragmatic issue of substandard original construction, undersupervised repairs, poor to nonexistent maintenance, and rapid shifts in policy attention is hidden to reinsert householders as the main culprits of substandard living conditions in many Aboriginal communities. A dirty literalism that sees the surreal in the everyday is required to unpack the means and the methods through which such maneuvers are made.

When looking for anarchy, look to the state: Fantasies of regulation in forcing disorder within the Australian Indigenous estate:

This article questions the foundational binary ‘anarchy–bureaucracy’ and the multiple articulations at play in the state’s refraction of anarchic qualities onto Indigenous Australians. Launching from the Northern Territory Emergency Response of June 2007, in which the Australian government assumed direct control of 73 Aboriginal communities in the north of Australia, it asks why bureaucracy is considered the antonym of anarchy and not its synonym. In mobilizing accounts of anarchic Aboriginal depravity to authorize an ongoing bureau-professional presence in Indigenous worlds, links to other matters of interest, such as the state’s dependence on mining revenues, let alone any account of the affective dimension of policy life, were removed from view. Reconsideration of the anarchy–state binary offers a lens to explore the emotional compulsions that are suppressed in the work of upholding the myth of a rational state and how this suppression further authorizes ongoing (anarchic) interventions into Indigenous worlds.

Coaching (and) Commitment: Linking Ongoing Professional Development, Quality Teaching and Student Outcomes.

This research conducted in primary schools in Northern Australia evaluated the effectiveness of the web‐based program ABRACADABRA (ABRA) as a tool to complement early childhood literacy instruction in an Australian and Indigenous context. A further component of this research was to monitor implementation fidelity. The ABRA training was built around professional development best practices to address the challenges of providing ongoing training in remote areas. Teachers attended a one‐day workshop that trained them in the use of ABRA, and continued learning was reinforced by pairing teachers with a literacy coach. Data were gathered through an implementation fidelity measure, researcher field notes, focus groups, teacher logbooks, and the Early Language and Literacy Classroom Observation tool. This paper outlines challenges and successes that the researcher/coaches experienced while supporting teachers.

Problematising school space for Indigenous education: teachers’ and parents’ perspectives

This interpretive study explores the relationship between spatial qualities and school-parent engagement in three primary schools which serve low income periurban Indigenous families in north Australia. Drawing from interviews with educators and parents, school-based observations and community fieldwork conducted over the course of two years in two different towns, we found that educators are very concerned that schools, as western institutions, present cultural and physical barriers to effective engagement; but that this view is not shared by Indigenous parents. Rather than seeing this as a simple issue of cultural difference, our analysis seeks to unravel the curious way in which the otherness of school space is acknowledged in educator discourse. Only some place features of school are suggested as a barrier by educators while other aspects – such as the clear identification of insiders and outsiders through school routines and locales – remain unremarked. We conclude by suggesting that schools are inherently exclusionary, a foundational fact which both parents and educators accept and respond to, in ways which both explain the push for engagement within education policy and its irrelevance as a concern for parents.

Joining the dots: The links between education and health and implications for indigenous children.

This paper provides a general overview of the literature investigating the nexus between education and health; discussing the relationship between these domains at individual, family and community levels. We then briefly examine the programme and research implications of such a framework for interventions aimed at improving education and health, with specific reference to young Indigenous Australians. We find that while education and health are inextricably linked, throughout the life course and at different levels of influence, there is less empirical work exploring this relationship in an Indigenous context. Given the gravity of literacy and numeracy failure rates in school‐based education and its potential impact on Indigenous health, we assert an urgent case for rigorous research into interventions that address the barriers to effectiveness in implementing quality educational experiences and opportunities for Indigenous children.

Being Moved (On): The biopolitics of Walking in Australia's Frontier Towns

It is in the contemporary period of Indigenous cultural recognition that the biopolitical system of policing Aboriginal walkers in Australias frontier towns has become so normalized that it takes place without public notice, using universally accepted mechanisms for shedding metropolitan areas of the unsightly and unwanted. Ironically, the hypermarginalized hunter-gatherer population can be identified by their perambulation — they walk — a form of urban nomadism that is both desired and reviled. Aboriginal pedestrians who are temporarily not in motion are forced to keep moving but are not expelled altogether, for their presence is essential to the regions wider economic interests. Since Aboriginal pedestrians are “moved on” when entrepreneurial imperatives cannot be met, and since moving is also a means of remaining invisible in the most heavily policed commercial zones, walking is thus overdetermined, a coproduced effect of racial excision and resistance in the ambivalent political economies of the Australian liberal-settler frontier.

Anthropology and STS: Generative interfaces, multiple locations

In this multi-authored essay, nine anthropologists working in different parts of the world take part in a conversation about the interfaces between anthropology and STS (science and technology studies). Through this conversation, multiple interfaces emerge that are heterogeneously composed according to the languages, places, and arguments from where they emerge. The authors explore these multiple interfaces as sites where encounters are also sites of difference—where complex groupings, practices, topics, and analytical grammars overlap, and also exceed each other, composing irregular links in a conversation that produces connections without producing closure.

Examining the Impact of ABRACADABRA on Early Literacy in Northern Australia: An Implementation Fidelity Analysis

ABSTRACT To address students’ poor literacy outcomes, an intervention using a computer-based literacy tool, ABRACADABRA, was implemented in 6 Northern Australia primary schools. A pretest, posttest parallel group, single blind multisite randomized controlled trial was conducted with 308 students between the ages of 4 and 8 years old (M age = 5.8 years, SD = 0.8 years). Findings suggested that computer-based instruction under controlled conditions can improve student literacy, especially for Indigenous students at risk of reading difficulties. The authors examine the fidelity with which the computer-based literacy tool was implemented and the impact of implementation fidelity measures on student outcomes. Student exposure to and use of the literacy tool, and quality of instruction and lesson delivery, were analyzed for their influence on students’ literacy outcomes. Implementation fidelity measures accounted for between 1.8% and 15% of the variance of intervention students’ scores.

Improving the state of health hardware in Australian Indigenous housing: building more houses is not the only answer.

Background This article outlines a program of applied research and development known as Housing for Health that, over the period 1999–2012, targeted health-related improvements in housing for Indigenous householders in communities across regional and remote Australia. In essence, the program focuses on measuring the functionality of key appliances and structures (we term this “health hardware”) against clear criteria and ensuring identified faults are fixed. Methods Detailed survey and assessment of all aspects of housing was undertaken, particularly focusing on the function of health hardware. All results were entered into a database and analyzed. Results The results demonstrate extremely poor initial performance of the health hardware. A key finding is that attention to maintenance of existing houses can be a cost-effective means of improving health outcomes and also suggests the need to superintend the health-conferring qualities of new infrastructure. We briefly outline the early foundations of the Housing for Health program, major findings from data gathered before and after improvements to household amenities, and our efforts to translate these findings into broader policy. Conclusions These data demonstrate that simply injecting funds into housing construction is not sufficient for gaining maximum health benefit.

Challenges of conducting systematic research in Australia's Northern Territory

This paper explores the challenges of conducting systematic research, using our experiences of conducting a study to evaluate the effectiveness of ABRACADABRA, an online tool for early childhood literacy instruction as the contextual framework. By discussing how the research team resolved such perennial issues as high teacher turnover, low or erratic Indigenous student attendance, difficulties with collecting reliable data on student outcomes, and the time and funding required to travel long distances, we show how rigorous research might still be conducted, to counter the usual proffering of such challenges as reasons why experimental research should not be attempted. Without minimizing the dimension of the logistical and funding challenges facing the conducting of experimental research in regional and remote settings, we end with an appeal that such work be prioritized, lest already disadvantaged education settings suffer further neglect in terms of national research priorities.