TY - JOUR
AU - Verhoeven,, Deb
AB - In 2018 at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), two Australian scholars met for the first time. Despite having peers and friends in common and occasionally spotting each other on social media platforms, they had never met in real life. Within two years both would take up posts at different universities, but the crossing-over at UTS forged an enduring collaborative working relationship. Sandra arrived at UTS in its Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, confident she would be part of a whole-of-university Indigenous reform agenda. Indeed, an agenda was being promulgated across the Australian higher education sector to increase all levels of Indigenous participation in undergraduate enrollment, graduate research completions, academic and non-academic employment, research outcomes, and engagement and impact. This initiative was taken up by different Australian universities with varying levels of commitment, capacity, and cash. Sandra's confidence was well-placed. UTS was indeed a leader in Indigenous higher education with senior Indigenous appointments, culturally sensitive provisions for Indigenous students including plans for purpose-built accommodation. Deb had arrived at UTS in a dynamic new role as Associate Dean of Engagement and Innovation in the Faculty of Arts and Social Science (FASS), with a vision for establishing the conditions for the possibility of connection across the towering, concrete silos of the university sector. Key to her undertaking were the crossings between humanities, arts, and social sciences (HASS) and science, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM), between academic and non-academic staff, as well as early career and senior scholars. Another significant task was to bolster the links between the public and the academy, built on the belief that academics have particular responsibility to “make connections” (professionally, ideationally, socially) beyond their own individual experiences and standpoints. Our own crossing of paths at UTS was also an opportunity to consider the revision of a much more profound social and intellectual rift in the Australian university sector. Our approach to the breach between Western approaches to academic knowledge systems and Indigenous ontologies is a productive opening which we briefly consider in this article. Part of the process of our collaboration has been to reflect on the frameworks and principles we have respectively developed as feminist Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics and to reconsider their meaning for our future work together. These revised values specifically seek to make research that is agentic, sovereign, and underpinned by Indigenous approaches to relationality. Our values (and perhaps more importantly our mutual reflection on them) animate our respective quest for change and inclusivity and explicitly refuse the twin powers of patriarchy and whiteness. Provocations and possibilities Through relationality, we are trying to understand what reimagining connection, community and co-existence in academic contexts might be—as opposed to the valorization of object-ives and object-ivity that can be found in many academic disciplines. This is challenging for the university sector in so many ways, especially in Australia, when so much assessment of academic performance is built around the assumption that the values defining success are easily recast as numbers and other forms of statistical data. Rather than understand how we work as academics in terms of productivity work-flows, we want to bring to the surface the work-arounds and the working-withs—drawing on all the estuaries, eddies, cross-currents, and billabongs of creation, resistance, and revision. As Shawn Wilson succinctly puts it, “Rather than viewing ourselves as being in relationship with other people or things, we are the relationships that we hold and are part of” (2008, p. 80). For Wilson, a revised non-hierarchical approach to academic cultures would be based around the creation of shared spaces of connection that are designed to bridge or reduce the distance between people and the relationships they share. For example, if hypothetically no one is actively excluded from a space, a field of study, domains of inquiry, research groups, professional associations, communities or societies, then the capacity to co-exist with diverse others, rather than stand objectively distant from them, would become a highly valued competency. The capacity to co-exist could be seen as fundamental to the challenge issued by Paula Gardner in her presidential address to “reconceive of our differences not as roadblocks, but as opportunities for enrichment” (2018, p. 3). Kombumerri/Aboriginal and political philosopher Mary Graham (2008, n.p.) puts it another way, asking, “how do we live together without killing each other?” We can take “each other” to include humans, country which includes lands and waters, and all related sentient beings (Phillips and Ravenscroft 2016; Bawaka Country et al. 2015). In “Working with and learning from country,” the cultural geographers' discussion of methodology is “underpinned by a relational ethics of care” (2015, p. 2) and is collectively authored by three non-Indigenous researchers and four Yolngu/Aboriginal knowledge-holders, and the Country of the Yolngu people is also given authorial status. Publishing with Country as co-author acknowledges that the natural world is inherently a part of all activity that takes place on it and that without Country there is (and we are) nothing. The authoring collective goes on to propose that “practising relational research requires researchers to open themselves up to the reality of their connections with the world, and consider what it means to live as part of the world, rather than distinct from it” (2015, p. 2). Graham (2008, n.p.) similarly takes this approach when she asserts that all new or confirmed knowing must center “place before inquiry.” Graham's “place” (2008, n.p.) is not just the ideological “place” of feminist standpoint theory, but also “place” in, on, and with sentient Country. Graham's philosophy of “place” (2008, n.p.) challenges the Western episteme that seeks to generate reproducible knowledge based on technique irrespective of location and subjectivities. The other first principle Graham articulates is the logic that “all perspectives are valid and reasonable” (2008, n.p.) not towards a ceaseless relativism, but as “an instrument to suspend or soften judgement, prudence or discernment” (2008, n.p.). For Graham, this kind of management of ego is central to relational ontology and to non-hierarchical ways of knowing, being, and doing, and is a central dimension of practice based on Aboriginal ontology. Applying Graham's (unpublished, p. 2) “management of ego” to academic research practices, we can imagine a different form of deliberation that involves “something like a combination of caring stewardship, referee-like supervision, watchful guardianship and prompts towards attentive, measured persuasion.” Pursuing inquiry and scholarship from a position of self-understanding that we are already and always ontologically relational fundamentally disrupts normative research design. If “knowledge, theories and ideas are only knots in the strands of relationality that are not physically visible but are nonetheless real” (Wilson, 2008, p. 87), then the insights gleaned by ordained observers who are given expert status by elite reward systems, and which are reinforced by privileged bibliographies and preferred methodologies, can never be holistic in its conclusions. Instead, we would like to see academic research processes that explicitly negotiate the entanglements between researchers and those who lives are already invested in the phenomena proposed for interrogation. In the kind of relationally informed research we are advocating, proximity to one's subject (a sense of your capacity for relating) is not a negative. Our approach refuses the belief that if you share a standpoint (acknowledge “relationality”) with your research subject you are somehow “too close” to the topic to be “objective.” It is a way of acknowledging Wilson's (2008) provocation that all researchers have a relationship to their subjects even if this remains unexplained or “physically invisible.” It is also a way of honoring relational agency in the research process and opening our research through co-creation to insights that have the potential to create meaningful impact. It is an opening-up of possibilities rather than a foreclosing of them. The opening-up is such that research design itself is problematized. How does one create linear timelines and frames of certainty if what is yet to be known has to start from what is not yet known? Genuine negotiated entanglement helps reveal the efficacy of research design, in contrast to current models of research that impose a system that has acquired value because it has been repetitively tested for its reproducibility and that therefore leads to orthodoxy and a host of unsettled a priori assumptions. Conclusion So, what does this mean for us? For Deb, a white, queer, feminist “stirrer,” collaborating with Sandra emboldened me to reflect deeply on my institutional role as an Associate Dean of Engagement and Innovation and on my work as a media studies researcher in order to fully appreciate that standpoints, however entangled at the level of personal definition, are never just a matter of what is done to us, but are equally about what we do to others; to recognize that acts of refusal (this is not related to that) always point to the way the relational is embodied within us (rather than naming an unseen line stretching between people or things); and to grasp that academic work of different kinds must, as a matter of urgency, find ways to multiply our variously shared worlds (in a sense, to create new communities of co-existence). Equally for Sandra—who is also in this generative entanglement—an Indigenous academic whose home within the academy is never comfortable, it means an imperative to find peers who are not just similarly interested in disrupting orthodoxy and normative practices, but those who start from a place already at odds to the settled order. For me this means finding new ways of working and a vocabulary to express insight so that others may appraise, critique, or seek to adopt or adapt, while avoiding instituting a new settled order. Being in a state of relation can mean accepting multiple perspectives which can destabilize initial certainty but also allows for the potentiality of negotiated and richer new knowledges. This dialogue brings space with which to explore new ways to be in relation with research, colleagues, subjects, and students in academia. We are exploring, gently and persistently, a “thinking together” as David Bohm (1996, p. 7) coined it in his theory of dialogue. An attempt at “speaking nearby” (Trinh, 1982). A kind of “becoming individual within the group” as Graham (2008, n.p.) put it—for one does not surrender one's own subjectivity or positionality, one allows it to be influenced, re-shaped, made more relevant to the matter at hand; more informed. This becomes a dialectic that shifts inquiry and scholarship beyond a mimicry of the old ways applied to ever-new fascination—and that gives us some hope that the academy can bring a sense of home to inquiring minds and deeply committed engagement. References Bawaka Country , Wright , S., Suchet Pearson , S., Lloyd , K., Burarrwanga , L., Ganambar Stubbs , M., Ganambar , B., & Maymuru , D. ( 2015 ). Cultural Geographies , 22 ( 2 ), 269 – 289 . doi: 10.1177/1474474014539248 . Crossref Search ADS Crossref Bohm , D. ( 1996 ). On dialogue . New York : Routledge . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Gardner , P. M. ( 2018 ). Diversifying ICA: Identity, difference, and the politics of transformation . Journal of Communication , 68 ( 5 ), 831 – 841 . doi: 10.1093/joc/jqy050 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Crossref Graham , M. ( 2008 ). Some thoughts about the philosophical underpinnings of Aboriginal worldviews . Australian Humanities Review Online Classic Essay, 45 . Retrieved from australianhumanitiesreview.org. OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Graham , M. (unpublished). “The beginning of relationality.” Phillips , S. , & Ravenscroft , A. ( 2016 ). From the earth out: Word, image, sound, object, body, country . Special Issue: Indigenous Writing Westerly Magazine , 61 ( 1 ), 105 – 117 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Trinh , T. M. (Director). ( 1982 ). Reassemblage [Film]. Women Make Movies, Inc. Wilson , S. ( 2008 ). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods . Halifax, Canada : Fernwood Publishing . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of International Communication Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - “How Do We Live Together Without Killing Each Other?” Indigenous and Feminist Perspectives on Relationality
JF - Communication, Culture & Critique
DO - 10.1093/ccc/tcaa007
DA - 2003-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/how-do-we-live-together-without-killing-each-other-indigenous-and-vS70XEGjpG
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -