The impetus to decolonise high schools and universities has been gaining momentum in Southern locations such as South Africa and Australia. In this article, we use a polyvocal approach, juxtaposing different creative and scholarly voices, to argue that poetry offers a range of generative possibilities for the decolonisation of high school and university curricula. Australian First Nations’ poetry has been at the forefront of the Indigenous political protest movement for land rights, recognition, justice and Treaty since the British settlement/invasion. Poetry has provided Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples with a powerful vehicle for speaking back to colonial power. In this article, a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers argue that poetry can be a powerful vehicle for Indigenous voices and Knowledges. We suggest that poetry can create spaces for deep listening (dadirri), and that listening with the heart can promote truth-telling and build connections between First Nations and white settler communities.  These decolonising efforts underpin the “Wandiny (gathering together)—Listen with the Heart: Uniting Nations through Poetry” research that we discuss in this article. We model our call-and-response methodology by including the poetry of our co-author and Aboriginal Elder of the Kungarakan people in the Northern Territory, Aunty Sue Stanton, with poetic responses by some of her co-authors.

No abstract

Global doctoral education has been particularly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, which have drawn attention to the vast inequities faced by black, cultural minority and Indigenous peoples. These developments have focused urgent attention on the need to de-homogenise Australian doctoral education. Australian universities have been very slow to create recognition and accreditation programs for First Nations and transcultural (migrant, refugee and international candidates) knowledge systems, histories, geographies, languages and cultural practices in doctoral education. A significant body of research investigates Australian universities’ education of Indigenous and transcultural doctoral candidates. However, few scholars have sought to trace the links between individual personal doctoral candidate life histories and large-scale Australian government policy trends. This paper draws upon the Indigenous knowledge global decolonization praxis framework and de Sousa Santos’ theories about cognitive justice and epistemologies of the South to fill this gap. Future aspects of this project will involve conducting an international policy analysis, life histories and time mapping to implement key Indigenous knowledge approaches in Australian doctoral education. This paper will critically explore the application of three core First Nations knowledge approaches – the agency of Country, the power of Story and intergenerational, iterative and intercultural knowledges – to Australian doctoral education.

No abstract

While there is a great deal of support for the integration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) into higher education, there is still a significant amount of work to be done to move beyond tokenism. Intensive dialogue and robust conceptual outlooks are required. In this paper, this international team of South African and Australian scholars engage in a transcultural and transdisciplinary dialogue in order to chart how discourses and debates about IKS are understood in the different historical and cultural contexts of South Africa and Australia. They combine the theoretical approaches of de Sousa Santos (2014; 2018a and b) about epistemic justice with the theories of Odora Hoppers (2021), Visvanathan (2009), and First Nations Australian scholars Williams, Bunda, Claxton, and McKinnon (2018) about an Indigenous knowledges global decolonisation praxis framework. This dialogue is deliberately jarring and polyvocal because of our desire to go beyond tokenism. The South African team have chosen to apply Bacchi’s (2009) approach of problem formulation and policy as change proposal to discourses about IKS in South African policy documents. The Australian First Nations team have demonstrated how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge systems work through the power of stories. Purposely adopting a polyvocal, multimodal approach, the Australian section includes ethnographic policy analysis and narratives that illustrate how IKS might operate in higher education.