Ethical futures Australia: Identity, citizenry and belonging

Reframing the way we look at the world and ourselves.

There is a growing awareness that, for most of us, our influence to change the world happens in our closest quarters. It is in everyday interactions, in classrooms, among family or our local community that we have the power to foster belonging and acceptance.

To shape an ethical future, we need the ability to accept differences and to know and appreciate the diverse lived experiences of those around us.

In Australia, this means reckoning with our past. Our researchers, led by Indigenous academics, are looking at creative ways to tell Australian stories, to better understand the history of Australia’s Indigenous people and preserve and celebrate one of the world’s oldest and richest cultures.

We are looking at what it means to be Australian – and how our history and culturally diverse population fits within the global conversation of human rights, migration and identity.

This high impact work is tackling big challenges with big ideas.

Featured projects

Healing nations

Through collaborative research with Aboriginal communities, our research is investigating the impacts and future of land rights and land restitution on Aboriginal lives.

We are working with Yanyuwa claimants, the first group to lodge a land claim under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, and land rights professionals to uncover their future aspirations for Australia and build a better intercultural understanding of land rights, the effects of communities, and the future for Australian land and waters.

Researcher:

Professor Amanda Kearney

Youth activism as catalyst for intercultural and intergenerational change

This project is exploring young Indigenous and non-Indigenous people's environmental and anti-racism activism, considering the ways in which commitments to sustainable futures and equitable experiences translate across cultures and generations.

The project is led by a drive to better understand the extent to which agendas for change are shared despite cultural differences. The intended outcome is to direct intercultural and intergenerational health as configured through shared concerns and action.

A paper on this project has been published in the Religions Journal, special issue Interfaith, Intercultural, International and Amanda has just completed a book manuscript on the project’s overarching commitments, Keeping Company: An anthropology of being in relation (Routledge, London, 2021 publication).

Researcher:

Professor Amanda Kearney

Decolonising creative performances

Poetry and prose, images and light, movement and history are brought together in a powerful performance by the Unbound Collective. The Unbound Collective describe their performance as interrupting the scientific gaze and disturbing colonial authority.

They are bringing together years of research in a performance that moves through spaces that have historically seen Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians excluded and reduced to tell untold chapters of Australia’s true history.

Further information:

The Unbound Collective

Researchers:

Maternal futures: imagining motherhood in the Age of the Anthropocene

The project will explore how recent environmental/ existential/ emotional crises have shaped women’s decisions not to birth children and for those women who are raising children, their child-rearing practices. The core question guiding this research is: What are women’s imagined maternal futures?

Additional questions include

What is it about anthropogenic crises that triggers this thinking?
What are the primary emotional and ethical drivers of the decision?
How have (or are) these emotions drive (informing) practice?
How are these decisions made?
To what extent are such decisions ‘final’ and to what extent do they reflect an on-going reflexive engagement with the possibilities of the future?

Return of the Ngarrindjeri

Until the early 1900s, the remains of Australian Indigenous people were being collected, and sometimes stolen from burial sites, to be sent to museums and collections in the UK and around the world.

The Indigenous Repatriation Program, supported by Flinders researchers, has helped recover and return more than 1480 remains to their native lands and families. Researchers are focused not only on sourcing and negotiating these returns but forming culturally appropriate research methods and repatriation practices.

Researcher:

Dr Chris Wilson

Strengthening Australia's Domestic and Family Violence Workforce

This project aims to generate an evidence base on the nature of domestic and family violence (DFV) work and the implications for the DFV workforce across victim, perpetrator and Aboriginal specialist services. Using the innovative method of rapid ethnography, this project expects to provide a comparative understanding of DFV work and workforce practices and requirements. Expected outcomes include workforce development strategies that are responsive to the context and needs of DFV work. Given the high social, health and economic costs of DFV, investing in the DFV workforce has national benefits including improved services and better client and worker wellbeing.