[Re]Imagining Indigenous Educational Design: A Conceptual Manifesto to Grow Disruptive Indigenous Digital Activists

Abstract

The ubiquity of digital technologies and the harvesting of individual data has modified global societies, reinforcing systems of oppression. While a contemporary phenomenon, the convergence of technology and human subjugation is historical, with links to the racialised reproduction of settler-colonialism. Australia, a settler-colonial state, has escalated the prioritisation of digital competitiveness with a recent policy directed at stimulating infrastructure and research-industry-government partnerships. Strategically, Indigenous communities remain constrained, where the ubiquity of technology and the escalation of digital competitiveness compounds the socio-economic impacts of continuing colonisation. Offline, Indigenous communities continue to face rigid political constraint that limits online access and denies opportunities for their people to live anchored to ancestral lands, seas, languages, and knowledge systems. Given the rapid advance of digital disruption, the inability to limit racialised socio-technical systems, or compete at parity in cyberspace, suppresses Indigenous digital activism, governance, and entrepreneurialism. This conceptual paper (part manifesto, part vision statement) offers initial thoughts intended to stimulate further research on twenty-first-century Indigenous educational design. Central to future design considerations is the search for pragmatic solutions capable of overcoming the racialised challenges limiting the collective development of digital activists essential for Indigenous nation-building. In [re]imagining an alternate digital educational agenda, Indigenous communities must collectively advance strategies that deliberately shift away from Australian schools toward local community digital learning hubs.