Walking contemporary Indigenous songlines as public pedagogies of country

The singing and dancing of Darug peoples once echoed throughout the Hawkesbury Nepean riverlands in ceremony. A long and challenging walk through bushland along the Nepean River, from Emu Green to Yarramundi on the Hawkesbury River, invites the walker to meditate on the presences and absences of these river places. Yarramundi is an important site for Darug people today, as it holds the history and cultural memories of singing the rivers in song and ceremony. Walking contemporary Indigenous songlines asks how we can come to know the river through walking the contemporary songlines of Darug songwriters and artists that sing the country of the riverlands today, and what is produced when this is enacted as public pedagogy. The paper explores a process of walking the Nepean River Trail, from my home at Emu Green to the Shaws Creek and Yellomundee Aboriginal cultural trails. The walk is reproduced as public pedagogy with collaborators Leanne and Jacinta Tobin, who have deep family connections to Yarramundi: connections that were temporarily lost through their early lives, and recreated through art, language and music practices in contemporary creations of ancestral songlines and connections. The public pedagogy performance was enacted at the Circular Quay International Passenger Terminal in a presentation of three songs, 73 artworks, and a short explanatory talk to an audience of 700 members of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects. This paper asks: What does this public pedagogy produce? What does it mean to enact it at this historic site of colonial invasion and contemporary arrival of both temporary and permanent immigrants to this landscape

Developing relational understandings of water through collaboration with indigenous knowledges

Scholars around the world are increasingly taking up the imperative of the Anthropocene to develop new epistemologies beyond the nature culture binary in order to address escalating planetary problems. Water is one of the most urgent and extreme cases of global resource depletion and the failure of development to recognize the significance of indigenous water knowledges is cited as fundamental to this dire situation. In Australia, a thirteen year drought that threatened the survival of the Murray–Darling system was believed to be related to changing climatic conditions in the global south and intimately connected to the increasing impact of human species on planetary systems. Natural resource managers in Australia have a history of failing to incorporate Aboriginal knowledges into decisions about the management of water. This article explores how a collaborative study of water with five Indigenous artists in Australia’s Murray–Darling basin can contribute to the development of new epistemologies of water. It identifies the possibilities of thinking through Australian Aboriginal concepts of Country for a contemporary methodology of water based on traditional epistemologies in which human and ecological systems are conceptualised as one. The methodology of thinking through Country was developed in multimodal forms including paintings, translations from Aboriginal languages, and oral explanations assembled in digital format. This methodology allowed shared contemporary understandings to emerge in the space between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal knowledge of water. Examples of art forms and stories reveal intimate local ecological knowledge of water embedded in contemporary cultural forms and languages

Schools as sites of advanced capitalism : reading radical inequality radically

This chapter was precipitated by an existential crisis at confronting the situation of children in one of the poorest areas in western Sydney, Australia. Concerned about the question of how research can possibly make a difference to these children’s lives, it seeks new methodologies and epistemological positions from which to read the radical inequalities that characterise the workings of advanced capitalism in our schools today. Braidotti (2014) offers a Deleuzian analysis of advanced capitalism as a process ontology that codes and recodes the rules that construct our socio-economic relations. She argues that we cannot use the existing language of universities based in logic and a linear sequence of cause and effect because advanced capitalism does not work like that. Advanced capitalism contradicts itself, changes the rules with perfect ease and panache, and does not care for anything other than immediate profit. In advanced capitalism, subjectivities are produced in which difference is capitalised upon and highly valued in terms of creating new markets but these differences are subsumed into a market economy, disconnected from the emancipatory potential of making a difference in the world

'Working' culture : exploring notions of workplace culture and learning at work

This article is based on research into the practical problem of masculinity and learning and practising safety in the mining industry. The research began with a post-structural analysis of gendered subjectivity in miners' yarns but argues that a concept of ‘culture’ is needed to elucidate a middle-level relationship between individual workers and the organisation. Concepts of ‘culture’, however, are problematic in this context because they have been used uncritically in organisational literature. The author explores the enactment of a concept of ‘culture’ through an ethnographic study of mine workers. It was found that workplace cultures are characterised by violence and aggression, risk taking, and competitiveness, which impact on learning and practising safety. In emergent understandings of culture in this study the author suggests that ‘culture’ can be reconceptualised in order to involve workers in their own cultural analysis and to articulate the relationship between the complex, collective, and contested nature of contemporary workplaces and the learning that takes place there. Such a cultural analysis enables the possibility of identifying sites of change and ‘culture’ as a concept that can be mobilised as a technology for workers to intervene in their own workplace practices

Water in a Dry Land

Water in a Dry Land, a selection of works from a 3 year project by artists from the Riverine Language groups in the Murray-Darling Basin; Daphne Wallace, U’Alayi and Gamaroi country in the northern drylands, Badger Bates, Paakantji country on the Darling, and Treahna Hamm, Yorta Yorta country on the Murray River. Exhibition curated by Professor Margaret Somerville

Deep mapping connections to country

Maps both represent and shape the places of our world. The practice of deep mapping involves Indigenous and non Indigenous people working together to create processes by which to re-imagine relationships to place. This practice began during long term partnership research with Aboriginal communities in settled Australia in which together we sought ways to represent contemporary Aboriginal place knowledges that challenge how relationships to land, or the environment, are generally understood and enacted. The maps represent both past relationships and contemporary stories about how places have come to be as they are. They reinscribe stories of deep time, a time when the earth and all its creatures were made, but a time that exists in the present as well as the geological past. Each time a story is told or represented through deep mapping the deep time stories of creation are re-enacted. Deep mapping becomes a way that one's responsibilities to care for country continue into the present and can be shared by all who inhabit that place. These maps guide us towards an ethical future of living in the Anthropocene

Bubbles on the surface : a methodology of water

This paper is about a methodology for researching place that evolved in an ARC project Bubbles on the Surface: a place pedagogy of the Narran Lake. The methodology was collaboratively designed by U'Alayi researcher Chrissiejoy Marshall and Monash researcher Author. It was developed from conversations linking Marshall's methodology of 'thinking through country' (Marshall, 2004) and Author's 'postmodern emergence' (Author, 2007; 2008). The project developed a life of its own when other Indigenous artist/researchers were employed to work on the research. The artist/researchers have generated artworks and stories about water in their different locations in the MurrayDarling Basin which have been expressed in a series of iterative exhibitions of artworks and text. In this paper I will examine the evolving methodologies and the resulting artworks and stories to explore how the methodology has been enacted and developed throughout this project

(Becoming-with) water as data

I begin with water. What if l considered water as data and human subjects as only coming into being in relation to water? How does water produce the human and what does a reading of data as water produce? In considering the possibilities of water as data, I become aware that my research activities have generated a large body of work oriented towards water as onto-epistemological force. Adapting the method of anarchiving, I extract moments of water becoming data from four previ­ous research project publications which moving between contemporary Australian Aboriginal and Western new materialist frameworks. The segments extracted from these books form the archive. The anarchive, or new creation, is produced with the addition of a complementary piece of water data from recent writing, resulting in a conversation between Then and Now. The chapter is structured in the form of these four anarchives, each with brief analytical notes. It concludes with a con­sideration of the ontological, epistemological and methodological implications of becoming-with water as data

Posthuman theory and practice in early years learning

This childhood/nature chapter was provoked by curiosity about the rise of posthuman theorizing in early years learning research and practice. Set in the context of the Anthropocene as the age of human entanglement in the fate of the planet, it takes the view that the primary task of this time is to develop new understandings of the human and new concepts of thought (Colebrook, Extinction: framing the end of the species. Open Humanities Press, 2010). Early childhood has led the field of education in the development and application of posthuman theorizing in response to this imperative, prompting the explorations of the chapter. A review of the literature in this field resulted in the identification of three distinct areas of posthuman theoretical activity: new materialism, child-animal relations, and Indigenous-nonindigenous intersections. The third category Indigenous-nonindigenous intersections which draws primarily on Indigenous theorizing was so divergent from the others, and so complex, as to be considered outside the scope of this chapter. In gathering the various papers together to make sense of the literature in each of new materialism and child-animal relations, different modes of analysis were called for. New materialism in early childhood education and practice is considered using a genealogical generational analysis following the work of Van der Tuin (Generational feminism: new materialist introduction to a generative approach. Lexington Books, London, 2014), while child-animal relations prompted an analytical approach involving Haraway’s bag lady method following Taylor, Blaise, and Giugni (Discourse Stud Cult Polit Educ 34(1):48–62, 2013). A particularly interesting and curious finding was that “life” emerged as a major theme from new materialism and “death” from child-animal relations in keeping with the paradoxical nature of the Anthropocene

Textual genres and the question of representation

For over thirty years qualitative research has proliferated and flourished. During the past ten years there have been a number of attempts to characterize and defend the nature of the field and the various paradigms within it (for example, Atkinson and Delamont, 2006; St Pierre and Roulston, 2006; Cairns, 2010). In this chapter I take the approach that the strength of the field of qualitative research is that it is based on 'difference'. A proliferation of methods of data collection and analysis has generated ongoing and rigorous debate. The debates concern the relationship between the subjects of our investigations- the people, including ourselves, whose lives we investigate - and the ways that we undertake the investigations. This includes an essential relationship to the means through which we represent the knowledge produced through our research in public and scholarly dissemination