Judgements on Justice: young people and Aboriginal reconciliation

Aberdeen, Lucinda; Matthews, Julie

doi:10.1080/1361332990020203

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 10 publications

(9 reference statements)

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“…However, prevailing biased narratives, as well as direct experience, clearly influence young people. For instance, a study of Australian primary students’ understandings of the possibilities for inter-group reconciliation with aboriginal people found that, “Racialisation was the prism through which students understood and experienced others’ and their own social and political position” (Aberdeen and Mariko Matthews, 1999: 215). Although the children expressed abstract beliefs in tolerance, equality, and justice, these beliefs coexisted with inaccurate, ethnocentric ideas.…”

Section: Young People’s Understandings Of Social Conflict and The Potmentioning

confidence: 99%

Voices of Canadian and Mexican youth surrounded by violence: Learning experiences for peace-building citizenship

Bickmore

Awad

Radjenovic

2017

Research in Comparative and International Education

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How do young people living in high-violence contexts express a sense of democratic agency and hope, and/or frustration and hopelessness, for handling various kinds of social and political conflict problems? The management of conflict is a core challenge and purpose of democracy, severely impeded by the isolation and distrust caused by violence. Publicly-funded schools can be (but often are not) part of the solution to such challenges (Bickmore, 2014; Davies, 2011). This paper is drawn from a larger ongoing project probing the (mis)fit between young people's lived citizenship and conflict experiences, and their school-based opportunities to develop democratic peace building capacities, in non-affluent local contexts surrounded by violence, in international comparative perspective. We report on focus group conversations with several small groups of students, ages 10-15, in 2 Canadian and 4 Mexican schools in marginalized urban areas. Diverse participating young people tended to have a stronger sense of agency and hope in relation to some kinds of conflicts (such as environmental pollution) compared to others (such as unemployment and insecure work or drug-gang violence). In general, they did not feel that their lived citizenship knowledge was much valued or built upon in school. Citizenship, peacebuilding, and the role of formal education in contributing to each are contested, malleable ideas shaped by cultural, political, economic and social factors. Formal education is a project of nationstates, thus citizenship and peace-related education in publicly-funded schools often emphasizes nationalist loyalty and compliance to dominant norms, perhaps especially in countries affected by armed conflict (Bush & Saltarelli, 2000; Quaynor, 2012). Paradoxically, education is also associated with the development of democratic agency. Democratic processes are conflict management processes-deliberative dialogue and collective decisionmaking in the face of difference, disagreement and ideological struggle. To flourish, democracy requires an adequate level of social peace, just as building and sustaining just peace requires democracy. Democratic processes and roles (including legislative, judicial and communitarian-dialogic) are designed to prevent or redress violence by equitably handling social-political conflicts. Although they are inextricably connected, conflict analysis distinguishes violence (harmful actions and effects) from the conflicts that underlie them (the disagreements, competing needs, and factors provoking or encouraging those actions), in order to focus on solvable problems more than symptoms. Beyond the presence or absence of direct violence, social conflicts have two crucial dimensions: social-structural concerns revolving around tangible interests (competing desires and needs, such as access to natural resources or economic opportunities), and psycho-cultural concerns embedded in beliefs, narratives, and interpretive elements of relationships such as (dis)trust or bias (Ross, 1993, 2010). Another dimension sha...

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Section: Young People’s Understandings Of Social Conflict and The Potmentioning

confidence: 99%

Voices of Canadian and Mexican youth surrounded by violence: Learning experiences for peace-building citizenship

Bickmore

Awad

Radjenovic

2017

Research in Comparative and International Education

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“…It aimed to address Indigenous disadvantage through community education and the provision of advice to government and other agencies (Aberdeen & Matthews, 1999, Hollinsworth, 1998. The main role of reconciliation was, To bring about through education, a greater level of awareness of Aboriginal History, cultures, dispossession, continuing disadvantage and the need to redress disadvantage.…”

Section: Contemporary Novelists Such Alexander Mccall Smith and His Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Museum, memorial and mall: postcolonialism, pedagogies, racism and reconciliation

Crowley

Matthews

2006

Pedagogy, Culture & Society

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Through museum and shopping mall and the possibilities, subtleties, banalities and disparities of reconciliation in South Africa and Australia, this paper immerses itself in the question of pedagogies and in particular the pedagogies of reconciliation, public spaces and postcolonialism. In both Australia and South Africa postcolonialism as theory and pedagogy is ambiguously positioned especially in relation to issues of reconciliation which in turn is arguably also ambiguously located. Reconciliation is or has variously been state sanctioned policy, project and agenda which, in part, is a process and practice of recognising and addressing histories of racism and its effects. Projects in both nations have included public, educational and schooling spheres and range, for instance, from the building of large scale museums to self-initiated school and community projects. All of these involve ways of knowing and knowledge of the colonial past and a postcolonial present. Not insignificantly, they all involve the ways in which race, racism and postcolonialism are understood and represented. Central to this, we will contend, is a necessity to bring into question the discursive practices of both racism and antiracism particularly as they influence and shape new emerging modalities of anti-racism within postcolonial contexts and practices. We will argue that an ability to analyse and deconstruct everyday spaces such as shopping malls is as integral to pedagogy as is a class excursion to a museum such as the Hector Pieterson or the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. Still further, we will argue that postcolonial pedagogy is itself an artefact of fraught histories deeply informed by colonial origins, local specificities and contemporary strategies of remembrance.

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Reconnecting: Women and reconciliation in Australia

Matthews

Aberdeen

2008

Women's Studies International Forum

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Judgements on Justice: young people and Aboriginal reconciliation

Cited by 3 publications

References 10 publications

Voices of Canadian and Mexican youth surrounded by violence: Learning experiences for peace-building citizenship

Voices of Canadian and Mexican youth surrounded by violence: Learning experiences for peace-building citizenship

Museum, memorial and mall: postcolonialism, pedagogies, racism and reconciliation

Reconnecting: Women and reconciliation in Australia

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