‘I don’t think you’re going to have any aborigines in your world’: Minecrafting terra nullius

Abstract

The myth that justified the takeover of a continent lives on both in classrooms and popular media. Drawing from classroom observations in an urban primary school in Australia, this paper enters the technology in education conversation, more specifically through the use of videogames for learning. Based on classroom exchanges between teachers and students, we interrogate how the school’s use of Minecraft, a best-selling commercial videogame, continues to reproduce myths of settler colonialism in the 21st century. Specifically, the curriculum mobilizes structures inherent to both Minecraft and modern Australia’s treatment of its Indigenous populations. That is, both classroom and videogame interactions reproduced the myth of terra nullius: the doctrine that determined land, prior to colonization, was empty and unowned, and therefore available for settlement by the colonizer. We conclude that within videogames and classrooms students’ voices manage to inquire into and interrogate the curriculum, resisting reproduction of erasive coloniality in school.status: publishe