International Day for Elimination of Racial Discrimination

The 21st of March is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

This date was chosen as it is the anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa. Ban Ki-Moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations states:

Each year we mark this Day on the anniversary of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre. We can never forget the 69 unarmed and peaceful demonstrators who were killed by South African police as they protested the country’s unjust apartheid laws. Apartheid has long since been dismantled and there have been other important advances in the struggle against racism. These include treaties and declarations, the development of an international framework to combat racism, and national protection systems by numerous States. Despite much progress, racism remains a pervasive menace to individuals and ethnic and religious groups worldwide. It is a threat to stability and a grave violation of human rights. We must join forces to end racism, and sport can help reach this goal. On this International Day, let us recommit to ending racial discrimination and realizing our vision of justice, equality and freedom from fear for all.

It is my personal experience that Australian's do not have a sophisticated understanding nor an ability to identify, talk about and/or critically reflect on their own racism - individual, institutional and systemic. "I'm not racist" is frequently heard in the media as a defence. I would argue that probably all of us are racist to some degree or another. It doesn't make it okay of course. But it does mean that when you attempt to defend yourself with "I'm not racist", you look, sound and probably are being absurd, and un-productive. It takes a long time to grapple with one's own racism - to be able to self-identify it, to challenge it. It's an ongoing journey of reflection and personal challenge.

Here are some links that may assist you on your journey to better understanding racism -

• All Together Now - is a not-for-profit foundation set up to directly challenge and combat racism in Australia
• It Stops With me - campaign to challenge racism from the Human Rights Commission
• Racism: No Way - education campaign to challenge racism from NSW Government, Department of Education and Training

It's good to also share individual experiences of racism, so I've "mined" the Deadly Bloggers list for some personal reflections on racism -

• "Nigger" does not belong in the school yard from Not Quite Cooked
• I wonder what Johnny's mum was up to today from Not Quite Cooked
• White Privilege is Totes a thing from Sarah's World of Procrastination
• Response to racism in Rugby League from Dr Chris Sarra
• Am I White enough for you? from Clouds on a distant horizon
• The Racism post: I'm calling you all out from Black thoughts live here

I'll end with this poem by the very very deadly Murri poet Steven Oliver....

In Australia, other commemorations are also held on the 21st of March. These include Harmony Day and Closing The Gap.

If you know of any other deadly posts on racism, let me know so I can add update the list above ...

Cheers, Leesa

Trevor Nickolls - Dreamtime to Machinetime

Image of From Dreamtime 2 Machinetime (1979) by Trevor Nickolls at 

QAG|GOMA in Brisbane, 2013

This week Aboriginal artist Trevor Nickolls passed away. Most Australians are not aware of this work of Mr Nickolls, and the way he paved a path of possibility for those artists whose work we value and respect so much today.

Take some time out of your week to learn more about his work. Here are some links -

• A tribute by Aboriginal Artist Vernon Ah Kee
• Media Release about his passing
• Australian Screen, Dreamtime, Machinetime (1987)
• A tribute essay by Adrian Newstead
• Article by Gabriella Coslovich about the Other Side of Art exhibition in The Age 

You can also use Google images to see more of his work.

Trevor Nickolls said of his 1979 work:

My life revolves around painting and drawing. I incorporate Aboriginal and Western techniques and symbolism to make contemporary art that relates to both cultures today. My paintings are to share with everyone. I look to bridge the gap between Western art and Aboriginal art. My work is a balancing act, like walking a tightrope between my dreams and my life when I'm awake - from Dreamtime to Machinetime.

Source of quote: Interpretive Panels at QAG|GOMA 14 June 2013.

Top ten Indigenous resources for business studies

There has been a lot of emphasis over the last decade on the creation of vocational and educational opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and rightly so. Emphasis on inspiring and increasing access to career opportunities definitely plays a part in redressing inequity. Programmes to date have tended to focus on increasimg Indigenous students participation in apprenticeships & trades, ín sport, in education, health, the arts and law.

One area that is not discussed at great length as an option for Indigenous students is business and commerce. This may be as as a result of few visible Indigenous role models in the business arena. Lucky for young people today however, there are quite a few business role models out there.

Here are our top ten (so far) -

1) Aboriginal Business Magazine is published by Willmett Group in Brisbane. Coming out each month, it is a very reasonably price, well designed publication featuring a range of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in business.

2) Indigenous Business Council of Australia (IBCA) is a national body seeking to represent the interests of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities in business.

3) Mandurah Hunter Indigenous Chamber was the first Australian Indigenous chamber of commerce. It supports Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander business people in the Hunter region.

5) South East Queensland Indigenous Chamber of Commerce was established five years ago to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander business people in South East Queensland.

6) Victorian Indigenous Business Directory by the Koori Business Network is a directory of over 100 businesses and organisations in Victoria.

7) Yulkuum Jerrang, Victorian Indigenous Economic Development Conference is a major annual conference held in Melbourne each year for the past three years. Speakers and participants from all around Australia attend.

8) Kinaway Victorian Aboriginal Chamber of Commerce is an active chamber of commerce based in Victoria.

9) Aboriginal Enterprises in Mining, Exploration and Energy Ltd (AEMEE) is a not-for-profit organisations created to support Indigenous businesses in mining and allied industries.

10) Inguides is an independent classifieds and directory created by Cairns based media company Blackvine Media for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander businesses, organisations and events.

I look forward to writing a second top ten list of business resources and organisations over the next month.

Leesa Watego

Some Aboriginal People Are More Aboriginal Than Others

Last September (2011) I attended the annual Oodgeroo Noonuccal public lecture at QUT by scholar Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Her lecture was titled Race Matters: Representations of Aboriginality in the Media. In it she explored the racialised history of private media in Australia, particularly it's coverage of Aboriginal Peoples and 'issues'. It was a very timely lecture given the judgement of the Pat Eatcock v Andrew Bolt case due at the time.

Last night fellow edu-tweet Luke Pearson sent out the a link to a shortened version of that paper given at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney (October) for the panel session: Some Aboriginal People Are More Aboriginal Than Others. The description for this session:

White Australia has always had a view on what makes a 'real' Aboriginal person. Andrew Bolt is the merely the latest in a long line of commentators who have put forward their views about 'black' and 'white' Aboriginals. Spread across a continent after 200 years of colonisation, Aboriginal people are diverse in a way that is at odds with media stereotypes of 'traditional' Aboriginal people living in troubled remote communities. At a crucial time for recognition and reconciliation, does 'white' or 'black' matter? Who speaks for Aboriginal people and defines who they are? 

Also on the panel was Associate Professor Bronwyn Fredericks who powerfully explored the politics of naming and identity.

When watching the lectures, take time to consider your (Indigenous or non-Indigenous) understanding of identity within Australia. Consider the ways in which you and those around you use language to define others according to criteria you decide. What is the impact of that on other people and the way they're represented?

Image below from someone on Twitter late 2011 during the post-Bolt flurry. You need to watch the video to understand the relevance of the slide below.

Leesa Watego

Seeing the invisible frames

Today's lecture I'm delivering at QUT for EDB007 pre-service teachers is about being able to identify the 'invisible frames' that we live within. Like my lecture for Indigenous Art Protocols & Practices, the lecture will explore what we know and how we know it.

I'm inspired by the recent election to focus this year's lecture on democracy and how teachers can incorporate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives into their studies of democracy, civics and society and politics and the political system.

As a result I've developed the first of my Deadly Ways presentations that I will present in the second half of the lecture. These are a bit of a rip-off of Tom Barrett's 'Interesting Ways' presentations that are a fantastic resource for teachers all over the world. Of course I'm using 'deadly' ways. I've been thinking about creating a series for a few months now so thanks for Jean Phillips (EDB007 Convenor) for giving me the opportunity (and deadline) to get it done).

You can get a copy of the lecture notes for today's session, as well as a copy of the first of our Deadly Ways presentations.

** Please note: I use Google Docs for my presentations. You should be able to access it without a Google Account. But I highly recommend a Google account  (its free!) and Google Products (including Google Documents, Reader, Blogger, Picase and a whole suite of other products) for develop, collaborating and sharing.

Learning from Yellow Rage

In two of three of my 1213QCA Indigenous Art, Protocols and Practices lecture last week I showed this video, and I wanted to provide all the students with an opportunity to engage with this powerful and confronting (and very effective) work again.

Warning: Course Language



bell hooks in her essay Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance argues

The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of do-ing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture. Cultural taboos around sexuality and desire are transgressed and made explicit as the media bombards folks with a message of difference no longer based on the white suprema-cist assumption that "blondes have more fun." The "real fun" is to be had bybringing to the surface all those "nasty" unconscious fantasies and longings about contact with the Other embedded in the secret (not so secret) deep structure of white supremacy. 

In the video, Yellow Rage seek to challenge stereotypes and assumptions of "Asian" and "Asian-ness". To interrogate mainstream positions and assumptions the artists explore:

• mainstream assumptions (and entitlements) about language
• appropriation of Asian imagery ("fake Asian tattoo)
• assumptions about the cultural and sexual behaviour of Asian women
• the power of the knower to know about the Other, including the impact of on-going colonisation by the West
  
• the centring of the mainstream

 Some questions for discussion:

• What are the key themes the artists are exploring?
• What do you think of the way that they express their point? Does "confronting" work? How does it make you feel?

Research: Seeing, Knowing & Doing

Last week I explored the idea of research for students in 1213QCA Indigenous Art, Protocols and Practices at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. In the context of the student's work, I focused on the idea of research as not being about the stereotypical idea of research (thinking here - lab coats, clip boards, pen in pockets etc), but about how we, each of us, engaged in:

• seeing
• knowing 
• doing

Seeing: we explored how each of us "see" the world depending on our we see reality. The way we see reality is often programmed by our upbringing, and our culture. This video helps to illustrate this simple point:




Obviously "seeing" is much more complicated than in the video above, but it gives a bit of a starting point. In relation to looking at the visual arts, Vincent Lanier, an arts educator identified 9 filters through which we "see" art:


1) What other people say bout art and the particular work2) The setting of the art work
3) How we have learned to see
4) How muchw e know about the elements and principles of design
5) What we know about the particular symbols that are used
6) What the art work reminds us of
7) How much we know about the history of the work
8) How we judge the work
9) What relationship the work has to our life.

Knowing:When we explore the idea of knowing in relation to research, I asked the students to answer two questions:

1) What do you know about Aboriginal art? (just list them)
2) What are the sources of that knowledge (how do you know what you know, where did you get that information from).

Looking at knowledge and knowledge production, we identified that the majority of our knowledge about Aboriginal Art (for most of the students), was knowledge that was written down and passed on by non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people - teachers, curators, arts writers, art academics etc. This leads us to explore power - and the power of knowledge production.

Doing:
When we explore doing, we explore our role within the research process. I really love to think about critical theory as an approach to exploring this. I find it really empowering. What Critical theory does is:

• Challenges accepted norms and truths
• Challenges privilege and power
• Is explicitly about liberation & democratisation
• Acknowledges that there are no absolutes/truths

Has exploring seeing, knowing & doing helped to unpack the process of research? Can you think of additional filter's to the nine identified by Lanier?

How my able-ism stuffed me up: A reflection on my practice

For years now, when I lecture, I rarely stand still. I wander up and down the corridors of the lecture theatre. Sometimes I get students up to interact, I ask them questions. I have been known even to move them around physically to illustrate a point. I don’t use paper notes. I’ll have a few PowerPoint slides that prompt the thread of my session. I have a big voice and I don’t use a mic because everyone can hear me. Or so I thought. 

My "performance" was rudely interrupted on Wednesday when a minute into my lecture two students told me that they couldn’t hear me. They were hearing impaired. Completely thrown, I ended up having to stand behind the lectern, something I almost never ever do. The position of the lectern in the Central Theatre at South Bank campus of Griffith Uni, is in the corner of the theatre, and IN THE DARK!!! As it turned out, my brain froze, and if how I felt about my deliver is anything to go by, for the students surely the lecture was sub-standard.

So what happened? 

I realised afterward that it was my own able-ist assumptions that stuffed me up. Roving mics are available in that lecture theatre, but it never occurred to me to get one because this “problem” had never presented itself before. Actually, writing this, it occurs to me that it probably has, and I was just too self-absorbed and inside my own head to see it.

I’ve always been committed to providing lecture notes and follow-up on the web for my students. I’m aware that economic access issues can prevent students from getting campus. Family commitments can impact student’s study opportunities - a sick child at home can mean that you miss the lecture where “they talk about the assignment”. In the past I’ve tried to provide additional support to international students whose lack of prior knowledge and understanding of the Australian context alienates their learning opportunities. I’ve encouraged them to relate the Indigenous issues work we do in the course to their own country. I’ve provided additional learning opportunities to student’s whose cultural capital meant that their ability to engage with the academy is hindered. And it’s funny, sad and pathetic (on my part), that in a lecture about re-thinking how we see the world and challenging assumptions, I was unable to do that for student’s whose physical needs impacted on their access.

What a wake up call! Thanks to the students who stopped me on Wednesday. It peeved me at the time. And I was cranky that I’d got thrown. But you have now allowed me to see what I didn’t see before. I've never used the term ableism before, though I've heard it used by others. My personal interests have always been in issues of race and culture and occasionally gender and sexuality. But the lesson i've learned this week is that privelige and needs transcend categories. My promise is that  I’ll do everything I can to ensure that I work with the needs of ALL my students.

Note: I've created a new category here on The Critical Classroom called Curating Your Thinking. This idea came to me in a lecture this week. For me, its about not letting other discourses determine how I will think about something. Or, probably more importantly, its about having an awareness of how prevailing discourses are influential and are present when we think. Still playing with this idea.