Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations by Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations. Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2020)

Author:Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations. Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2020)
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811392054
Publisher: Springer Singapore

Although such an approach can thus be distinguished from public sphere theory, it might nevertheless be positioned as but another imported epistemological framework derived from a European theoretical tradition. There may be, however, some potential for exploring how far the relations between ANT and Indigenous epistemologies might be productively brought together (albeit not simply ‘reconciled’). Indeed, without gainsaying their very different cultural and epistemological bases, Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee scholar Vanessa Watts (2013) has highlighted some affinities between ANT and Indigenous approaches, underlining that ANT is built upon the premise of interconnecting, referential chains of humans and non-humans, and how these connections recognise mutual exchange/effect (2013, p. 28). The emphasis placed on the agency of non-human things, particularly land and water, in Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies stands in stark contrast to the normative abstraction characteristic of humanist approaches to representation (Waller, 2016). Indigenous modes of conceptualising reality are often literally ‘grounded’, such that theories and understandings are intimately bound to, and not distinct from, sacred connections between place, non-human and human (see also Marika, 2008; Marika, Yunupingu, Marika-Mununggirtj, & Muller, 2009; Rose, 2007; Watts, 2013, p. 22; Waller, 2017). The metaphysical dimension of Indigenous epistemologies based on relationships to land poses a deep challenge to the principles and premises of Western research methodologies rooted in secular post-enlightenment epistemologies. Rose (2007) uses the term ‘recursive epistemologies’ to discuss the dynamic nature of Indigenous ethical and epistemological processes, in which the world is inhabited by both human and non-human forms of sentience ‘and events continually enter into, become entangled with, and then re-enter the universe they describe’. She explains recursive epistemology as a ‘situated connectivity’ that fosters ‘porous proximities’ to work productively with difference, change, and exchange. This occurs when both knower and known are mutually embedded in an encounter and knowledge is exchanged and changes both parties (Rose, 2007, pp. 91–92).

Another aspect that might allow an ANT-based analytical approach to afford potential connections to Indigenous research approaches derives from its reflexive acknowledgement that analyses of socio-technical networks can facilitate, and may already constitute, interventions to ‘reengineer’ them. Gaining an understanding of the socio-technical relations that have been constitutive of what we define as the Indigenous ‘news network’ [a term we draw from Domingo, Masip, and Costera Meijer (2015)], and how it is changing, requires consideration of how it has been (and remains) structured by colonial relations of power that are embodied by and enacted through institutional structures and practices. Universities do not stand apart from this network, but as sites where media education, training and research are conducted, form an essential part of its complex. Here, an agenda for a more encompassing analysis of the relations through which news networks are formed can be productively extended by drawing upon decolonising approaches to knowledge production. Decolonising methodologies involve acknowledging the ways in which research has historically served to naturalise or justify colonial oppression (Smith, 1999) and can (inadvertently) contribute to ongoing dispossession (Foley, 1999; Moreton-Robinson, 2011). Researchers are therefore required to critically reflect

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