Knowledge Practices 1 (CWRI10002)

This subject offers an introduction to the physical and conceptual structures and functions of the university, and how various scholars have strategically engaged with/in these. It will draw on Australian and trans-national Indigenous theorists and theories and non-Indigenous scholars who engage with key concepts relating to the politics of knowledge production, and will guide students to analyse the historical and axiological contexts out of which these theories and concepts arise including the emergence of the modern university. Students will be supported to develop and articulate a critical reading praxis through an engagement with academic practices and theoretical positions including the politics of citation, Indigenous and Indigenous women’s standpoint theory, Indigenous queer and feminist theories and decolonising methodologies. In doing so students will complicate limiting and limited notions of Indigenous methodologies, by considering the role of non- Indigenous theorists and academics in doing ‘Indigenous work’. Throughout the semester students will evaluate the utility of these theories in making meaning of their own practice as students, and in doing so cultivate tools and strategies to engage successfully at the interface of Indigenous knowledge practices and Western knowledge systems.