Speculative design and heterogeneity in indigenous nation building

This paper presents a methodological exploration in postcolonial HCI. We share early insights of designing a digital platform for Indigenous nation building in Australia that speculate ways to catalyse, provoke and support necessary discussions of governance, plurality, cultural integrity and knowledge ownership. Rather than expecting consensus building or striving for problem-resolution, prototyping this digital platform has begun revealing tensions, complexities and possibilities that are significant to nation building. Manifesting and actively debating these became an epistemological pursuit for knowledge generation, but also a necessary ontological one in actively carving out 'agonistic' engagements that challenges hegemony and practice ploy-vocal future-making

Speculative indigeneities: the [k]new now

The starting point of this research study began with a broad and unwieldly question - what would Zimbabwe look like if colonisation didn’t happen? This question arose with regard to the launch of the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act (IEEA) in 2007 and is focused of on building an understanding of notions of indigeneity in Zimbabwe through an inquiry of indigenousness and indigenisation. The methodological approach is designed as an interdisciplinary and experimental research inquiry that processes these debates and proposes an expansion of the probabilities of notions of indigeneity within the range of existing socio-political, economic and historical analyses of indigenousness and indigenisation in Zimbabwe. This exploration begins with a broad historical, anthropological and etymological survey of the term 'indigenous’ that is interwoven with a contextual account of Zimbabwe and its socio-political lifespan. The primary site of investigation is the independence-day ceremony that took place at the National Sports Stadium in Harare, Zimbabwe on the 18th of April 2017. This focus is motivated by two distinctive elements at this event - a banner that declares 'ZIMBABWE WILL NEVER BE A COLONY AGAIN’ and a fragment from the president’s speech that asserts, 'we can now call ourselves full masters of our destiny’ (Mugabe 2017). This event stands as a crucial node for the debates and questions this research aims to pose regarding notions of indigenisation, indigenousness and registers of indigeneity. Political and socio-economic analyses of this annual ritual tower above the lacuna of analysis of its performance logics. This performance-specific inquiry aims to contribute new meanings and complexity around the event. The information generated from this reading is further processed through the mechanisms of speculative research as a way to think beyond the dilemmas and paradoxes that emerge from the historical, anthropological and performance analyses of this event. The penultimate chapter of this dissertation suggests a conceptual rehearsal of the findings generated through an expanded understanding of queer theory. The final articulation of 2 this research investigation extends the experimental approach, presenting a set of visual, aural and sculptural elements as the conclusion. The dissertation offers alternate readings of notions of homogeneity and singularity. It is also constituted as a way to understand the probability of building new knowledges through lateral and rhizomic processes as a journey that gathers and synthesizes from across a number of disciplines. The contention of this thesis, then, is to suggest an expansion of the notion of indigeneity towards the possibility of polygeneity, a notion that aims to align with the conceptual constructs of cosmopolitanism (Appiah 2006, Kleingeld and Brown 2014), which engage arguments for expanded understandings of contemporary identity formation. Embodied in this suggestion of polygeneity lies the potential to revive notions of dynamism and creativity that have been dormant since the onset of European colonisation in Zimbabwe. In the wake of the 'new dawn’ in Zimbabwe, in this moment of growing debates for alternatives, the thesis finds its impulse in the imperative for radical and creative shifts in consciousness to activate new ideas, new readings, and new knowledges

Arctic and Asian Indigeneities, Asian/North American Settler/Colonialism: Animating Intimacies and Counter-Intimacies in Avatar: The Last Airbender

By bracketing whiteness, Avatar: The Last Airbender reorients us to how global colonial modernity produces biopolitical difference as a technology of management to defamiliarize Asian and Indigenous relationalities. Approaching it as a site of alternative contact, I consider Lisa Lowe's intimacies of colonial comparative processes in apposition with insurgent counter-intimacies. This essay traces portrayals of Asian imperialism, colonialism, and Asian diasporic settler colonialism in tandem with comparative Indigeneities and decolonial solidarity. ATLA engages Asianness and Indigeneity together in a mode that is relational but not statically schematic, extending influential work by scholars thinking across Indigenous, Asian, and Asian diasporic studies

Introduction Curriculum Multiculturalism Boarding School

Almost all the Indonesian people realize that the people and nation of Indonesia has religious heterogeneity, social, cultural, political aspirations, and economic capabilities. In the world of education, heterogeneity is believed to have a strong influence on the ability of teachers to develop curricula, educational institutions the ability to provide a learning experience, and the ability of students to proceed in learning and processing information into something that can be translated as a result of learning. Heterogeneity was to be an independent variable that has a very significant contribution to the success of both the curriculum and the curriculum process as a result. Therefore, the heterogeneity should be taken into account and factors considered in determining the basis of philosophy, theory, vision, development documents, curriculum dissemination, and implementation of the curriculum. In general, multiculturalism has been taken as a foothold in developing curriculum and education in general education institutions, especially foreign educational institutions. Unfortunately, environmental awareness in the School and Boarding School about the importance of multicultural education curriculum is still there, even if there is still very limited. Therefore, the introduction of the curriculum with multicultural development approach in the School and Boarding School is considered important and significant, as an Indonesian Moslem man attempts to build a tolerant, open, ready to have different opinions and have the ability to live in the middle of the plurality of society. Keywords: Education, Curriculum, Multiculturalism, School, Boarding School

Leveraging Capacity: Technical Solutions to Hunger in the Era of Neoliberalism

Leveraging Capacity: Technical Solutions to Hunger in the Era of Neoliberalism takes the Global Seed Vault and the value of global crop diversity as a point of departure for raising questions about the influence of digital technology on the seed and about the solution to hunger known as global food security. Discussions about food security among food studies scholars highlight either the failures of global public health advocates to regulate the food and beverage industry or they view food security, like earlier campaigns against global hunger, as an instrument for U.S. foreign policy. On either side of this debate, the body is made to fit the conclusions of these scholars in terms of the impact of economic or state-based forces on our global food supply. But these debates are complicated by the recent turn to seed vaults promising crop diversity in perpetuity, where value for crop diversity is mobilized by political organizations and industry alike. Asking about the relationship of technology to the seed in this arrangement, I examine six discourses that have attended the turn to food security: nutrition, information, epigenetics, cybernetics, biotechnology, and biological diversity. In these discourses I chart instances where social problems begin to be defined as technical solutions in discourses on global hunger, discussions about scientific philanthropy, microbiology, and in discussions about biological diversity prospecting. While separately these discourses are inadequate to the task of understanding the turn to food security, when treated together however we can begin to see new articulations of relations of the body, the object, subjectivity, and institutionality as they are emerging in these discourses that should be considered a part of our contemporary neoliberal moment. Part of the reconfiguration of the body, I argue that we should view the turn to food security as a technical innovation and security for the body-as-data

Latinx Shakespeares

Latinx peoples and culture have permeated Shakespearean performance in the United States for over 75 years—a phenomenon that, until now, has been largely overlooked as Shakespeare studies has taken a global turn in recent years. Author Carla Della Gatta argues that theater-makers and historians must acknowledge this presence and influence in order to truly engage the complexity of American Shakespeares. Latinx Shakespeares investigates the history, dramaturgy, and language of the more than 140 Latinx-themed Shakespearean productions in the United States since the 1960s—the era of West Side Story. This first-ever book of Latinx representation in the most-performed playwright’s canon offers a new methodology for reading ethnic theater looks beyond the visual to prioritize aural signifiers such as music, accents, and the Spanish language. The book’s focus is on textual adaptations or performances in which Shakespearean plays, stories, or characters are made Latinx through stage techniques, aesthetics, processes for art-making (including casting), and modes of storytelling. The case studies range from performances at large repertory theaters to small community theaters and from established directors to emerging playwrights. To analyze these productions, the book draws on interviews with practitioners, script analysis, first-hand practitioner insight, and interdisciplinary theoretical lenses, largely by scholars of color. Latinx Shakespeares moves toward healing by reclaiming Shakespeare as a borrower, adapter, and creator of language whose oeuvre has too often been mobilized in the service of a culturally specific English-language whiteness that cannot extricate itself from its origins within the establishment of European/British colonialism/imperialism

Using Engaged Rhetorical Methods to Understand and Inform Collaborative Decision Making About Dams and Restoration in the Penobscot River Watershed

How do we understand what to do with rivers and dams? How might rhetoric, the ancient study of persuasion, inform and shape this understanding as it relates to river restoration practices? Ecological approaches to rhetoric provide ways for engaging in decision making about dams and river restoration. In this dissertation I present three projects that bring media discourse analysis, reciprocal case study, and cross-cultural digital rhetoric to sites of collaborative decision making about dams and rivers in the Penobscot River watershed (Maine, USA). In this place, the prominent Penobscot River Restoration reconfigured several hydroelectric dams to improve fish passage and hydropower generation. My collaborators and I explore what needs and opportunities remain for further action here and how community-engaged rhetorical ecology can advance decolonization and social-environmental justice. In the first project, we ask how news media about dams portray river restoration and how these portrayals matter for ongoing collaboration and decision making. We use a rhetorical approach within transdisciplinary media discourse analysis to explore 30 years of newspaper coverage of dam removal, with particular focus on news media about the Penobscot Restoration. Our results show that news media have widely framed the project as a success based on technical and social outcomes and that this framing limits what we can understand about the complexities of restoration and ongoing needs that remain on this river. In this way, media analysis can reveal opportunities for further collaborative engagement. In the second project, we build on the first to ask about other histories, futures, and stories that are left out of the dominant Penobscot Restoration success narrative. We advance an ethnographic case study approach where engaging across communities presents opportunities for changing how we do research. Doing research with community partners shifted our study from a retrospective focus to a focus on reciprocation--from looking back on past restoration activity to using research as a way of giving back to those who made the work possible. The results show how building relationships and opening up our research processes to this kind of reordering helps expand understandings of what we can work to restore. In the third project, we explore where reciprocation can lead when advancing research projects in response to our partners\u27 needs. We ask how digital approaches shape the opportunities for collaboratively composing alternative forms of media documentation for decolonization. In our analysis, we reflect on developing procedural digital ethics to support visual portrayals of Indigenous environmental science as a form of ongoing restoration practice. Our results show how this process relies on relationship building, cross-cultural dialogue, and flexible naming practices that reshape how we can collectively see our histories and work together toward socio-environmental justice

Exhibiting Difference at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History: Examining the Many Voices, One Nation Exhibition (permanent exhibition, launched 28 June 2017)

This thesis investigates the role of national history museums in mediating messages about national identity, social difference, belonging, and citizenship. Using the historical survey exhibit Many Voices, One Nation that opened in 2017 as a case study, it provides an investigation of the role of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the National Museum of American History more specifically, in shaping national narratives of belonging as they relate to the national past, present, and future envisaged by the exhibit. As a vehicle for examining these functions, the thesis follows the trajectory of the exhibit by exploring the exhibitional and narrative strategies employed in each of its sections, and considers these alongside the correlating chapters in the exhibit anthology, published by the Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press. As two distinct but connected registers of the exhibit, the physical display and the anthology provide the basis for a comparison of the methods employed in narrativizing the exhibit objects for different audiences. In analyzing the physical exhibit and anthology against the backdrop of the history of the modern museum in the United States, the thesis works within the fraught past of object collection and display, and considers the impact of movements for restorative museological justice on the work of the Smithsonian Institution. In doing so, the thesis considers how the Many Voices, One Nation exhibit contends with the violence of settler-colonialism, chattel slavery, and white supremacist immigration policies, in recounting the past, and how these accounts culminate in perceptions of national futurity that attempt to sever their relationship to these structures. The thesis conceptualizes museum temporalities as intimately connected to the speculative work of producing national narratives, and argues that the exhibitional space is a consequential site of intervention in the design and building of liberatory futures