Our courses

This course provides students with the opportunity to critically engage with Indigenous Australian peoples, their art, film, literature and music making. By examining iconic works of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander cultural production students will have the opportunity to explore Indigenous histories and develop critical understandings of Indigenous lives and the artistic expressions within them.

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This course provides students with contemporary understandings of Indigenous Australian experiences and systems of family and kinship. Students will learn about the wide variety of kinship systems which were/are used in Indigenous communities prior to and after colonisation. They will gain a practical understanding of how to map and construct genealogies, and a firm grounding in the ways that family and kin relationships link people to each other, their country and to the Dreaming.

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This course explores the interdisciplinary works of Indigenous Global South theorists and how these theories relate to Indigenous Southern theory in Australia. The main aim is to give students the opportunity to engage with the works of Global Indigenous perspectives in philosophy, social science, cultural studies and history and their relationship with Indigenous Australian interdisciplinary perspectives. The Indigenous/Southern perspectives will be the focus of the course, as conceptualised in coloniality/decolonial and Southern Theory. The course will first discuss postcolonial theory, coloniality/decolonial theory and southern theory drawing from the main works of Gayatri Spivak, Raewyn Connell, Martin Nakata, Walter Mignolo, Anibal Quijano and others. Then the course will show how philosophy, social sciences, cultural studies and history looks like from a decolonial and southern perspective. The course content will draw examples from the Indigenous/Southern perspectives of the Americas (Canada, Latin America and the United States), New Zealand and the Pacific region, South Asia/Indian Subcontinent and the African nations. Lastly the course will help students examine and critically reflect on how different Global Indigenous/Southern perspectives are evaluated in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australian perspectives in philosophy, cultural studies, social sciences and history. In the end the student should be able to produce an informed position on International Indigenous perspectives and its use in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander academic arena.

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This course is designed to enable students to undertake supervised independent research in an area of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Studies. The course should interest anyone who may work professionally with Indigenous people in Australia or overseas. It is thus suitable for students in areas of Arts, Humanities and Social and Behavioural Sciences such as anthropology, archaeology, art history, criminology, cultural heritage, education, English and media studies, history, journalism and communication, museum studies, music, and sociology, but also includes students in fields as diverse as architecture, biological or earth sciences, business or tourism, civil, environmental or mining engineering, environmental/natural resource management, geography, law, medical and health sciences, and planning, Students should expect to gain a deeper knowledge of their topic and to acquire research skills in independent study and thinking.

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Survey of major themes in Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Studies from Aboriginal & Torres Strait  Islander perspectives.

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Emerging Critical Indigenous Methodologies presents the opportunity for students to critically engage with and develop a deep understanding of Indigenous methodological trends. Through this engagement students will be presented with the opportunity to apply new methodological and ethical knowledges to research with national and international ethical implication.

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Through lectures and tutorials presented by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous women, both students and lecturers explore historical and contemporary issues identified as relevant by Aboriginal women. A major theme running through this course is to compare, contrast and critically analyse mainstream representations of Aboriginal women with the words and knowledges of Aboriginal women themselves.

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The course explores a wide range of topics, from the unique geography of Torres Strait to the influences of post-colonial history, the intricate relationship of people to the sea, and the social organisation and social structure of Torres Strait Islander society and culture, past and present. Interwoven throughout out the course are themes of colonisation, identity and cultural perspectives.

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander approaches to knowledge in a tradition context; interaction between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Western modes of inquiry; emergence of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scholarship.

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Critical examination of conceptual and practical issues arising in research on and with Indigenous people with a focus on the Australian context.

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