Indigenous Studies (Undergraduate Studies)
What can you study in Indigenous Studies?
Units in First Year
ABST 100 Introduction to Australian Indigenous Studies
In ABST 100 you get an overview of the essential elements of Australia’s Indigenous history and culture, particularly as they relate to the colonial context of the last 200 odd years and the contemporary issues which affect indigenous lives today. Beyond this, this subject gives students the chance to begin to think about the constructed nature of contemporary ‘Aboriginality’ in Australia as a product of the colonial and ongoing encounter with non-indigenous Australia.
Units in Second Year
ABST 200 Contested Issues in Indigenous Studies
All ABST units are fundamentally concerned with analyzing concrete examples of the thematic core of all our units: inter-action between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples and things. We begin the unit assuming that all students have some familiarity with concepts such as colonialism, post-colonialism, liberalism, neo-liberalism, nation-states and capitalism. We will be discussing these ideas in the first module of ABST 200, but in ways that are specific to Indigenous Studies.
Like ABST 100, ABST 200 is divided into three inter-connecting modules. Module 1 provides historical, political and sociological context for the issues that we raise in Modules 2 and 3. In Module 1 we consider concepts including culture, power and globalization, neo-liberalism, the nation-state and the impacts of the culture of capitalism.
In Module 2, we consider the ways in which the current global, national and some specific local environments have impacted on some particular groups of Indigenous peoples. We consider the concepts of ‘race’, ‘tradition’ and culture and how these have been related to ideas about colonialism historically and to post-colonialism over the last twenty-five to thirty years.
Finally, in Module 3 we conduct a comparative analysis of two groups of Indigenous peoples, how their identities and social worlds have been (re)constructed in recent times and how ‘we’ (the dominant society) think about them.
ABST 210 Exhibiting Indigenous Heritage: Comparative Studies of Indigenous Museum Exhibitions. .
We begin the unit assuming that all students have some familiarity with concepts such as colonialism, post-colonialism, liberalism, neo-liberalism, nation-states and capitalism. We will be discussing these ideas in the first module of ABST 210, but in ways that are specific to Indigenous Studies and to the interests of ABST 210.
Module 2 of ABST 210 interrogates the concepts of ‘heritage’ and ‘tradition’ in relation to Indigenous museum exhibitions and how these ideas have changed over time, are used and negotiated by Indigenous peoples in the present, and constrained by dominant definitions of the terms.
In Module 3 we conduct a comparative analysis of two museum exhibitions. Both these exhibitions are virtual exhibitions that we will visit on the world wide web.
Units in Third Year
ABST 300 Pathways for Indigenous Studies
In Module 1 of ABST 300 we will review the broad historical, political and legal discourses that have shaped relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia.
Module 2 of ABST 300 considers relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Fijians and the different meaning that the term ‘Indigenous’ connotes in the Fijian context compared with the Australian.
In Module 3 we consider the very different contexts, conditions and manifestations of ‘Indigeneity’ in the Fijian and Australian cases as examples of the diversity of Indigenous cultures globally. We will attempt to make some generalizations and investigate the issues which may constitute Indigenous Studies.
ABST 310 (re)Emergence of Indigenous Tradition: Comparative Studies in Nth America, New Zealand and Australia.
Following from ABST 210 which is concerned with representations of Indigenous traditions in museum contexts, ABST 310 is focused on conducting a comparative analysis of some representations of Indigenous traditions in different contexts in different places.
Module 1 of ABST 310 interrogates the concepts of ‘heritage’ and ‘tradition’ and how these ideas have changed over time, are used and negotiated by Indigenous peoples in the present, and are constrained by dominant definitions of the terms.
In Module 2 we compare some representations of tradition made by particular groups of Lumbee Indians in North Carolina, USA, and some groups of Maori in New Zealand.
Module 3 uses a specific example of the cultural (re)emergence of traditional cultural practices by a group of urban Aboriginal Australians, Darug Custodians and draws the material from Modules 1 and 2 together to make some generalizations about the effects of cultural (re)emergence in the 21 st century.