Constructing
Engagement:
geographical
education for justice within and beyond tertiary classrooms
presented as the INLT/Journal of
Geography in Higher Education Lecture, University of Plymouth, January 2001
Department of Human
Geography, Macquarie University, NSW, 2109, AUSTRALIA
ABSTRACT:
This paper reflects on
experience as an educator, education bureaucrat, researcher and indigenous
rights activist to frame significant challenges facing geographical education
in the contemporary university and beyond. It argues that the process of
constructing engagements between 'students' in diverse settings within and
beyond the confines of the tertiary classroom and addressing the intellectual
and practical consequences of 'deep colonising' of even quite progressive
university programs are critically important. Drawing on the work of Freire,
Levinas, Rose and Derrida among others, the paper explores prospects for
decolonising the geographical imagination that academic geography fosters.
KEYWORDS:
indigenous rights, social
justice, geographical imagination, decolonisation, borderlands, polyphony,
border pedagogy, other
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful my colleagues and students
at Macquarie University, my colleagues in many research projects around indigenous
Australia over recent years, and my family and friends for their support. I
would particularly like to acknowledge the support of the Australian Awards for
Higher Education, the Journal of Geography in Higher Education, the INLT
and IBG/RGS. I am grateful to Sally Northover and Natalie Smith for permission
to use their copyright work in this paper.
A version of this paper was presented at
the IBG/RGS Conference at the University of Plymouth and it will be published
in slightly revised form in the Journal of Geography in Higher Education.
At the conference, the presentation included illustrations in a MS Powerpoint
presentation. Click here to see that presentation (HTML)
(PDF).
Click on these links to download this
document in MS Word (RTF) or Adobe Acrobat (PDF) versions for printing.
Openings and cultural
dominance
Geography
encourages and expects critical engagement with the world around us. Working in
its nurturing communities, we can forget that university education is an
important mechanism of cultural dominance. We teach skills of critical
thinking. We debate power, meaning and identity. We encourage tolerance,
ethical sophistication and openness. In some departments, we even encourage
dissent and action. Yet social control and cultural dominance is one of the
products of the liberal education provided by modern universities. In civil
service bureaucracies, transnational corporate hierarchies, criminal justice
systems, international development agencies, local government fiefdoms and
national legislatures one can find geographers contributing to cultures of
dominance.
For
those of us who came to intellectual maturity under the influence of
Geography’s ‘radical’ and ‘relevance’ revolutions, this is an uncomfortable
reality. Issues of social and environmental justice have been a common
benchmark against which we have measured our own performance as public
intellectuals. Yet patriarchy, poverty, exploitation, violence, despoliation,
and injustice persist. Equal employment opportunity remains an issue even in
geography departments. Equitable access to student places in universities
remains problematic. Inevitably, many of us confront a mismatch between our own
values and the hegemonic role of universities in reproducing inequitable,
unsustainable and unjust social and environmental relations. Dominant cultures
are woven from diverse threads. Tertiary education is one of the more important
because it authorizes and accredits those who exercise authority. Geography
graduates, of course, also staff the institutions of dissent and resistance.
How our students use the education we offer is an open-ended question.
Empowerment through education means different things to different students. For
many whom the dominant culture dominates university education continues to
offer a path out of poverty and oppression. Knowledge is power, and education
provides access to it. Geography’s ‘environmental’ and ‘cultural’ turns have
simultaneously nurtured both dominant ideas of ‘best practice’ and powerful
critiques of dominant practices. For others, our teaching offers tools for a
different sort of dissident engagement with the system. We all recognize such
paradoxes.
In
this paper, I want to draw on my own discursive community to explore prospects for decolonising our discipline
and our students’ geographical imaginations. In particular, I want to reflect
on the need to strengthen the links between our ‘teaching’, ‘research’ and
‘community service’. Indeed, I will advocate a constructive engagement in which
these elements of our professional practice that are so often dealt with as if
they were alternative career paths are dealt with as a dialectical unity. I
will argue that in educating for justice and sustainability, we not only have
to integrate environmental, socio-cultural and political-economic perspectives
with the students in our classrooms, but we also need to address multiple
fractures within our universities and beyond. Although I am particularly
engaged with issues of indigenous rights, creating a recognition space for
those rights is as much about dealing with the mainstreams of the dominant
culture at several scales as it is about working directly with indigenous
groups. Ultimately I want to suggest that our task as teachers is to construct
opportunities for our students, our colleagues and ourselves, to engage in the
work of decolonisation and justice-building wherever we are. These
opportunities can be found in undergraduate courses, postgraduate supervision,
research projects, and our community service roles as public intellectuals.
More widely, I would like to suggest that our role involves contributing to the
enhancement of our societies’ geographical imaginations.
The motivation for my concern arises from the Australian Awards
for University Teaching a self-described ‘prestigious’ award established
cooperatively by the Australian Government and The Australian, the
Murdoch-owned national newspaper. The award is offered annually in several
categories, and announced with great fanfare at least in The Australian!
The ‘winners’ are acknowledged as outstanding teachers, and a substantial prize
goes with the award. Given the low standing accorded to teaching in many
Australian universities over a very long period, this seems like long overdue
recognition. It is, however, an innovation that is accompanied by major changes
in higher education policy. Increasing class sizes, increased casualization of
employment, pressure on tenure, reduced government funding, and a dramatic
policy shift away from education as a public good, to education as a private
benefit for which the user should pay, and in which industry rather than
government should invest. Students have become customers, funding has shifted
towards a ‘user pays’ principle, and market forces are increasingly relied on
to make curriculum decisions. A ‘competition’ between teachers fits this policy
shift well. It also risks damaging the cooperative relationships that underpin
good teaching.
When
I was awarded the Social Science award in late-1999, I considered simply
donating the prize money to establish a scholarship fund for Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander students to study undergraduate Social and Environmental
Science. Although there has been a considerable increase in indigenous
participation in higher education in recent years in Australia, it remains
tenuous, fragile and uneven. There are very few Aboriginal or Torres Strait
Islander geographers, and even fewer teaching in Geography Departments. I was
confident that a substantial scholarship fund started with my prize money would
quickly attract other donations. When I requested approval from the relevant
government department, however, the answer was No! The money was for me to
use on my projects and it had to be spent within twelve months. Committing the
funds to a scholarship was not considered spending it. On other words, I was a
winner and I had to act like a winner.
This
approach sets the outstanding teacher as somehow apart from their nourishing
community of colleagues, students, support staff, research participants and
family. The image of teacher-as-hero, teacher-as-spectacle affirms the
industrial and funding pressures from the neo-liberal policy settings. Teaching
innovations emphasize new technologies, new approaches, new ways of reducing the
cost (and frequency) of the face-to-face relationship between teachers and
students. In pursuit of excellence, we risk losing its foundational elements
such as inspiration, vision and substance. Most regrettably, we risk tying good
teaching down to a particular sort of classroom, with a particular sort of
student, learning a particular sort of knowledge, for a particular sort of
employment outcome. We risk accepting a script for our students’ and our
societies’ geographical imaginations which mitigates against students’ engaging
in anything other than an individuated, competitive, self-centred pursuit of
excellence and best practice (as endorsed by the dominant culture of the day).
Deep colonizing or
decolonization? Good intentions are not enough
Deborah
Rose (1999) uses the term ‘deep colonizing’ to discuss this situation, which
characterizes many post-colonial situations. As Rose sees, it:
In Australia, as in other settler societies, many … practices [of colonization] are embedded in the institutions that are meant to reverse the processes of colonization. Colonizing practices embedded within decolonizing institutions must not be understood simply as negligible side effects of essentially benign endeavours (Rose 1999: 182).
Even
with the best of intent, university education can exemplify the deep
colonization that Rose refers to. In fact, benign intent can be one of the most
pernicious of deep colonizing practices because it reinstates the patronizing
authority of the dominant culture. In Australia, in the wake of a damning
investigation of government programs of social control over indigenous
Australians that amounted to genocide, we have had senior government figures,
including the Prime Minister, defending the policies because they were
well-intended. We cannot, they say, impose current ethical standards on past
practices. If they meant well and were acceptable by contemporary standards,
current generations have nothing to apologize for. Of course, careful research
reveals that throughout the period of colonial dispossession, there were
dissenting voices who spoke up against the prevailing values that excused
genocide (see eg Reynolds1998). It is easy to use the excuse of changing
standards to avoid responsibility for past abuses. But again, careful research
provides a very different account. Christine Tandy, currently completing her
PhD at University of Newcastle (NSW), investigates institutional practices at a
NSW home for Aboriginal boys in the early-20th Century and assesses them not
against current human rights standards, but the contemporary provisions of the
relevant League of Nations’ agreements (Tandy 1999). She notes that Australia
was a strong advocate of these standards in other places, but finds the
practices at the Boys’ Home clearly breached them in many ways. In more recent
times, we have had many similar discontinuities between espoused values and
practices. For example:
·
Prime Minister Howard’s
unsightly belligerence as he lectured delegates to an indigenous reconciliation
meeting on why he could not apologise for previous government policies of
family separations,
·
the Immigration
Minister’s assertion in international media interviews during 2000, that the
principle reason for indigenous disadvantage in Australia was their isolation
from other civilizations and their failure to invent the wheel, and
·
the current government’s
refusal to allow United Nations inspectors to review conditions in refugee
detention centres and their angry criticism of the United Nations Treaty system
because the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination found the
1997 amendments to the Native Title Act were racially discriminatory.
In
these actions we see the patronizing authoritarianism of ‘good intentions’. A
nation which (eventually and after inexcusable delay) defended East Timor’s
right to self-determination, has steadfastly avoided discussing the idea of
self-determination for its indigenous populations, and suggests the
impossibility of the sort of treaties that have successfully punctuated recent
Canadian politics because it would be socially divisive and threaten national
sovereignty. Universities have long been complicit in the construction of
well-intended racist discourses. We can easily identify the role of other
disciplines anthropologists, for example, were critical in shaping policies
of ‘protection’ and ‘integration’; archaeologists were important in shaping
(and later re-shaping) the popular images of ‘stone age’ peoples. But geography
was also an instrument of paternalistic racialized discourses. Geography’s
colonial encounter creates for the discipline a compromised genealogy in
Australia:
The work of the geographer goes hand in hand with that of the pioneer … No work can be more productive … than one which has for its object the perfection of the knowledge we already possess of ‘our great land’; the existence and distribution of its natural resources; the natural advantages offered to the settlement on Australian shores of numbers of the white race, and the preservation and civilisation of the various indigenous races (Marin la Meslee 1885: ix).
This
well-intentioned advocacy of ‘our great land’ was foundational of a
geographical imagination which saw Australian environments as “empty, unknown,
and waiting for (white) settlement” (Howitt & Jackson 1998: 159). Even
dissenting figures such as Griffith Taylor, who is widely credited as the
‘father’ of academic geography in Australia and who used environmental
determinism to demonstrate why large areas of the continent were unsuitable for
‘white’ settlement or any settlement at all contributed to the racialized
discourse of geography (eg Head 2000: 44-54).
For
generations this authoritative voice shaping the nation’s geographical
imagination also held sway in the classroom. Captain Cook ‘discovered’
Australia! Aborigines were ‘primitive nomads’! Australia’s unique landscapes
were produced through isolation from anthropogenic influences! This is the
authoritative voice of junior texts; of learned men of scholarship; of those
who know and know best. This is precisely the authority that McDowell (1994)
aimed to unsettle in an influential paper that sought to open the discursive
and pedagogic space of the classroom to polyphony. She focused particularly on
the relevance of authoritative texts in the contemporary classroom, and the
task that we set ourselves of “trying to introduce ‘there’ to our students who
are ‘here’ (McDowell 1994: 245). Yet, this image reinforces the absence of the
people that postmodernism so easily labels as ‘other’ from the ‘in here’ of
university classrooms. McDowell is also concerned with the voices of students,
the modes of expression we allow for student work, and the implications of
teacher-learner/learner-teacher relationships in terms of wider considerations
of truth, power and privilege.
Freire
long ago unsettled the particular boundary between learners and teachers (eg
Freire 1972: 99). His characterization of the relationship as dialogue, rather
than authoritative monologue, recasts knowing (and the creation of knowledge)
as an active process involving knowing subjects. It is, Freire writes part of
“their transforming action on reality” (1972: 99). Giroux’s concept of a
‘border pedagogy’ takes this further by considering the politics of identity in
contemporary settings. Giroux advocates an approach to teaching that challenges
traditional teaching that “teaches students about the world from the dominant
self’s point of view (Cook 2000: 14). His approach allows the taken-for-granted
borders between people, groups, places and things, to be “challenged, crossed
and refigured” (Giroux 1991: 512). Giroux also advocates the creation of
“borderlands … [where] production and acquisition of knowledge is being used by
students to rewrite their own histories, identities and learning possibilities
(Giroux 1991: 512). Giroux’s “borderlands” are the recognition spaces that
interest me, although I want to extend them beyond students and writing.
Janmohamed reminds us that:
pedagogic institutions are sites where borders are constantly drawn and redrawn borders that define epistemic, ethical, cultural, social, political, economic, gender, racial, and class spaces (Janmohamed 1994: 248).
Freire
actively nurtured border intellectuals who would transgress the hegemonic
categories and create new intellectual spaces, new visions of possible
landscapes. Such border intellectuals occupy liminal, transgressive,
indeterminate spaces. Their view of pluralism, multiculturalism, identity
politics and struggle are generally different from those scholars who treat
these phenomena as objects of study and case material for their teaching.
Teaching geography in the
borderlands
Cook
(2000) provides a valuable discussion of efforts to develop a border
pedagogical approach to geographical teaching. He discusses his course on
“multicultural historical geography” under the title “Histories and Cultures of
the Transatlantic”. Triggered by Massey’s work on a “progressive sense of
place” (1991, 1992, 1995), Cook’s course considered the “horrors of the triangular
trade” between Africa, the Caribbean and Europe (2000: 16), and used student
journals for assessment:
I did not want students to learn about these things in an abstract sense … I wanted them to trace out the co-implicatedness of the supposedly discrete ‘places’, ‘economies’, ‘states’, ‘cultures’, ‘peoples’ and so on … And I wanted the to write themselves into and out of the changing histories and cultures on/of this multicultural ‘space of betweeness’ (Cook 2000: 16-17, emphasis in original).
My
own experience has been in working with students to create a conceptual toolkit
for resource management that occurs within similar borderlands. My third year
unit Resource Management aims to render visible much that is conventionally left
invisible in resource management education. It
explores the proposition that we must rethink resource management in order to make resource management
decisions more accountable to four core values social justice, ecological
sustainability, economic equity and cultural diversity. It encourages students
to consider the conceptual toolkit required to do this, by considering three
basic steps. We first need to develop new ways of 'seeing' the field of
resource management in ways that make visible the complex consequences of resource
management decisions. Second, we need to develop new ways of 'thinking' that
accept the contextual complexities of resource decision-making. And finally, we
need to develop new ways of 'doing' resource management (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Steps towards a literacy in resource geopolitics (from
Howitt, forthcoming)
Although I use indigenous
experience as an exemplar, flexible assessment options allow students to
complete around 65% of their assessment on topics of their own choice. This
allows them to explore issues of class, gender, environmental and other
politics in their field of interest, rather than trying to provide a
half-digested version of what they think I think.
An important
element in this course is the emphasis on thinking tools. Using the work of
Bertell Ollman (1992) and others, we recognize that resource localities and
landscapes are less clear-cut, less manageable than they once seemed. The
boundaries between ‘here’ and ‘there’, between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between
‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are all more blurred than many had previously assumed.
In the process, the task of managing resources has been made to seem more
difficult, disorienting and uncomfortable than it does in the neat and orderly
systems and models of the dominant technocratic resource management paradigms.
Having 'seen' this, however, the paramount challenge is to find ways of
thinking about it without becoming paralysed by overwhelming complexity,
confusion or detail. This is imperative because the actions (and omissions) of
professional resource managers are embedded within wider social processes
resource management decisions are affected by both their material and
discursive contexts.
Having arrived at
the proposition that new 'ways of thinking' about resource management are
needed, the students are required to debate the practical, ethical and
intellectual imperatives for a conceptual framework. Their responses to this
‘theory-building’ task are often inspirational. Let me offer just a couple of examples
(go to Powerpoint presentation to see student materials).
In
this year’s class, two students presented unconventional final assignments. Sally
Northover constructed an actual toolkit a cardboard box with a User’s
Guide, safety advice, and numerous tools such as multicultural spectacles, an
ecological hammer (with ecologically sustainable nails), a social wrench (with
human rights bolts and social justice nuts), an economic screwdriver (economic
equity screws included), a cultural paintbrush (cultural diversity paint
included), a political saw, ethics glove, optimistic light globe and progress
tape measure. Each item was physically present in the tool box as a cardboard
cut-out but the user’s manual provides some powerful insights into the task of
professional resource management.
Natalie Smith, an accomplished
visual artist, tackled the thorny question of geographical scale and the
implications of cross-scale complexities in her final assignment. She tackled
the Buildings and Grounds Department of the University and got permission for
an installation piece on the day final assessments were due. She wanted to
invoke a vision of scale, interconnectedness and complexity that demonstrated
why context and geography really matter in resource management.
The
challenge of assessing this sort of work in terms of specific assessment
criteria developed on the assumption that written text is the norm for
university assignments raised many comments from other students and teaching
colleagues. Yet the assumption that ‘new ways of thinking’ must, or even can,
conform to existing criteria and forms is one we must allow our students to
challenge. There should be no ‘mould’ that restricts the scope of the
geographical imagination. The strength of a disciplinary framework does not lie
in its ability to constrain ideas within explicit limits, but in its ability to
provide a vantage point from which ideas can be put together coherently and
rigorously in new ways.
My
consideration of indigenous experience in resource management systems as an
exemplar of the issues of justice, equity, sustainability and diversity that
underpin my Resource Management course opens up another borderland for
many students. Despite the popular movement for reconciliation in Australia,
many students can still reach their final undergraduate year with very little
experience of indigenous people. Our investigations of indigenous rights in
resource management systems put much public debate about native title, stolen
generations, mining impacts and so on into new perspectives. Role plays that
confront students with processes of cross-cultural negotiations, personal
research that links issues of social justice to students’ preferred employment
paths and a final assignment that asks students to reflect on what they think
they have learned in the course all create a dynamic that opens up some
uncomfortable liminal spaces.
Teaching in the
borderlands outside the classroom
Unfortunately,
only a few indigenous students have taken this course. Access to tertiary
education continues to reflect the reprehensible legacies of colonial
relations, and processes of deep colonizing. Although Macquarie has a
relatively high level of indigenous participation, most students are currently
completing a small number of specialize programs in Community Management and
Early Childhood Education. I teach a version of the Resource Management
course in one of these programs, and have run joint role plays with students
from the two courses with good effect, but limiting my teaching to university
classrooms would greatly limit my ability to contribute to the construction of
transgressive recognition spaces. In Australia, repression of indigenous
identities has taken many forms through the years (see HREOC 1997), but
suppression of indigenous languages, and restricted access to education have
both been well-documented mechanisms of indigenous marginalisation and
disadvantage. Although there are now policies aimed at retention of and support
for indigenous and community languages in Australia, one of the legacies of our
colonial past is a complete reliance on English to teach geography. For
students from indigenous and non-English-speaking backgrounds, this reflects
and reinforces colonial power relations even when we appear to pursue education
for justice and understanding. Increasing participation and retention rates in
an education system that is structurally flawed does not produce
decolonisation. Rather, it reinforces the idea that the ‘colonial-we’ have
something that the ‘colonized-they’ must acquire to achieve their potential.
Having privileged ‘book learning’, ‘science’ and ‘scholarship’, even the most
liberal universities struggle with knowledge that fails to conform. I am always
conscious that the term ‘discipline’ in the context of deep colonizing
practices of universities is an ironically ambiguous term. In disciplining
thought, we risk continuously constructing a hall of mirrors that affirms what
we already think we know. We replace the pedagogical ideal of dialogue with a thinly
disguised monologue. Again, Rose provides a powerful image of this situation:
A critical feature of the system is the ‘other’ never gets to talk back on its own terms. The communication is all one way, and the pole of power refuses to receive the feedback that would cause it to change itself, or to open itself to dialogue (Rose 1999: 176-177).
This
is the antithesis of Giroux’s ‘border pedagogy’ and Freire’s ‘education as the
practice of freedom’. Yet it is perhaps quite close to pedagogical practices we
fall back on when things get tough in the classroom, or when we are not
self-consciously ‘teaching’. This is the well-intentioned teacher deciding what
their students need. It is also the well-intentioned government framing
genocidal policies because hegemonic values insist they are good for poor,
disempowered people. This is the expert, unwilling to listen to non-experts for
fear of losing their accredited expertise. And even when the ostensible object
of study and concern is the marginalized ‘other’, the mirror turns the gaze
back onto the pole of power. Witness, for example, the seductive critique of
ethnography from the mid-1980s that seemed poised to disrupt the colonial
narrative of conventional ethnography. With some exceptions, much of this effort
really only shifted the ethnographic gaze from its conventional object to the
ethnographer-as-subject. Here again we see the irrelevance of good intent, and
the power of deep colonizing in practice as the goal of decolonising
ethnography was subverted. Rather than delivering the power of scholarly
critique to the ‘objects’ of earlier ethnographic research, the narrative
centre switched to the ethnographer. Has Geography experienced a similar shift?
In our work, whom do we valorise as ‘audience’, and what sort of audience do we
really want? To what extent do we simply accept the audience that walks through
the classroom door? And to what extent do we seek to either open the doors
wider ourselves, or walk through them into a very different sort of ‘teaching’?
Worlds Turned Upside
Down: juxtaposing the borderlands of inside and outside the classroom
Spatial
and temporal juxtaposition has long been a powerful pedagogical tool. How many
of us completed (or set) ‘compare-and-contrast’ exam questions thinking that
this would test students’ knowledge and understanding of what we were trying to
teach them? Indeed, I often use juxtapositions to begin turning upside-down
students’ taken-for-granted view of things. In my Resource Management
course, for example, I commence with an unaccompanied rendition of Leon
Rossleson’s wonderful song about the fate of the Diggers in the English Civil
War (see Leon
Rosselon’s Home Page). To unsettle assumptions about ‘capitalism’ as the
only source of economic and environmental misery, the students are quickly
confronted with the environmental and cultural damage inflicted by the Soviet
approach to resource management in the early-1990s in the Far North. I aim to
take students outside their familiar ground, and to demonstrate that the common
sense they derive from home may be a less-than-useful starting point for making
sense of the challenges of professional resource management. Of course I’m not
alone. Massey’s juxtapositions of the ‘out there’ and the ‘in here’ helped to
shape her representations of a ‘non-parochial, global sense of place’ (Massey
1987, 1992, 1995, 1996a, 1996b). Jacobs’ investigations of the edges of empire
(1996) that exist within the conventional core and periphery of colonial
geographies challenged older rigidities in our reading of space. McDowell’s
juxtaposition of her classes at Cambridge and the Open University (1994)
challenged us to rethink our own pedagogical positions. Her image of polyphony
as a fundamental challenge in geographical pedagogy echoes as strongly today as
it did when her paper was published in 1994. Dealing with polyphony is an issue
both within and beyond the classroom.
Beyond tokenism:
polyphony inside the classroom
One of the greatest challenges in
dealing with diversity in the classroom is recognising that students often seek
to grasp a simple version of whatever complexity we present. The political
diversity of the indigenous rights movement in Australia has been more publicly
revealed in recent years with the appointment of more conservative indigenous
leaders to government positions by the Howard Government, the more nuanced
commentary of some indigenous intellectuals such as Noel Pearson (2000), Marcia
Langton (1998), Mick Dodson (1994) and Bill Jonas (2000), and the
radicalisation of others in response to the hard line stands taken by the
Howard Government and several states on issues such as the Stolen Generations,
the amendment of the Native Title Act, mandatory sentencing in the
Northern Territory and Western Australia, the reconciliation movement, treaties
and other matters.
How does one provide meaningful
access for students to this polyphony of authentic indigenous voices? Using
texts alone is too restricting, but having a guest speaker or two give a
lecture in a lecture series just will not do either. Although this simple
response of multiplying the voices that students hear is attractive, it flirts
with tokenism of the worst sort a misrepresentation of diversity as a
singular voice or limited range of voices. There is a certain authorisation
that occurs when a teacher invites an Aboriginal speaker to present to the
class. For students already overwhelmed with material that tries to open their
eyes to the previously invisible the hidden histories, and new ways of seeing
cultural landscapes the temptation is to see and hear this presentation as
somehow representing ‘the’ Aboriginal voice on the topic concerned and as
privileged and authorised by the teacher.
But what to do? As a teacher, one
cannot simply hand over the classroom to a passing parade of one-off presenters
in order to capture diversity. How many guest speakers is enough to avoid the
trap of tokenism? Do we need gender balance? Age balance? Regional balance?
Political balance? Sexuality balance? How many texts is enough to encompass
diversity? How many is too many because it swamps the learner?
In the mid-1990s my colleagues and
I sought to develop a program of visiting Indigenous Teaching Fellows that would
bring a diversity of indigenous people onto campus to present a set of lectures
in a ‘Special Interest Seminar’ hosted in the Geography Department under the
title Indigenous Voices and Perspectives, and would be available to work
with teachers in other course, individual students, and to undertake their own
projects. The course ran with special funding for one year. A field of nearly
thirty applicants produced a final list of six visiting fellows, who attended
the campus for periods of three to six weeks. Their lectures were recorded,
along with extended interviews with each person. Several commenced their own
research and publishing projects, and others identified future projects and
liaisons with Macquarie researchers. Students evaluated the program very
favourably, as did most indigenous participants. From an institutional point of
view, it seemed like a wonderful solution: a relatively low-cost, high-profile,
mutually-beneficial solution to the challenge of tokenism. Yet maintaining it
as a program required allocation of non-existent on-going funds, and we were
unable to secure its future.
Applied peoples’ geography: polyphony beyond the classroom
David Harvey’s notion of an
“applied peoples’ geography” (1984: 9), has long appealed to me. As an undergraduate, Harvey had spoken strongly to my personal
concerns. A group of us had run our own seminars on Social Justice in the
City (1973), geography and activism, a conference on geography and
imperialism, and an alternative course called Problems of the Australian
Region[1].
As students we were engaged in a range of political actions inner city child
care, residents’ action groups, race relations, student politics and reading.
Harvey’s Marxism battled with Freire’s pedagogy for our attention. Kropotkin,
Althusser and Ollman were our companions as we quested to become barefoot
geographers making new sense and contributing to the making of new
geographies. As Swyngedouw recalls (2000: 43), the radical engagement with
Marxism, anarchism, activism and social science at this time was passionate.
Even at our industrial outpost at Newcastle, NSW, we recognized the need for
change, and the relevance of geographical work that grappled with change. Our
fantasies about a ‘barefoot geography’ drew inspiration from the geographical
expeditions of Detroit and elsewhere, and were still echoing in Harvey’s later
formulation:
The geography we make must be a peoples’ geography, not based on pious universalisms, ideals, and good intents, but a more mundane enterprise that reflects earthly interests, and claims, that confronts ideologies and prejudice as they really are, that faithfully mirrors the complex weave of competition, struggle, and cooperation within the shifting social and physical landscapes of the twentieth century … The geographical studies we make are necessarily part of that complex of conflictual social processes that give birth to new geographical landscapes. Geographers cannot remain neutral (Harvey 1984: 7).
While education was a focus of my
own praxis, I also pursued a research path that reflected my ideas of “applied
peoples’ geography” and the pursuit of applied research that was not a
disengaged and dispassionate construction of objective knowledge, but a
co-construction of knowledge and understanding and a simultaneous exercise in
building the capacity of community organizations to do their own research,
their own social analysis, and to frame their own strategic responses to their
own circumstances. Let me illustrate with examples from three overlapping fields
of endeavour mining and indigenous peoples, social impact assessment and
treaty-building.
Decolonization and mining
Mining has
been instrumental in the dispossession and oppression of indigenous people in
Australia over a long period. The interface between transnational resource
companies and Aboriginal communities has been one of my core concerns since the
late-1970s. My first independent research was an honours project on Cape York
Peninsula in far north Queensland, where I hoped my efforts would support the
land rights movement. Perhaps unsurprisingly my honours thesis (Howitt 1978)
did not change the world, but it bore fruit 12 years later when I was invited
back to review the community relations program established by the Rio Tinto
subsidiary Comalco. I was commissioned by the executive of Weipa Aborigines
Society (WAS) to review the previous twenty years of WAS's operations. WAS had
been established by Comalco in 1973 as a vehicle for funding community
development projects in Napranum (then Weipa South) without inflaming the
politics of Aboriginal land rights in the area.
The Weipa bauxite mine, which
commenced production in 1963, was one of the first of a new generation of
remote northern resource projects which were playing a crucial role in integrating
Australian raw materials in emerging global markets. The Queensland Aborigines
Act 1936, which was in operation with relatively little amendment until the
mid-1970s (see eg Rosser 1987) controlled every aspect of life for Aboriginal
people and prevented them from taking legal or political action to protect
their rights. Mission paternalism and government antagonism made it difficult
for Aboriginal leaders to raise concerns about the proposed mine in the 1950s
without facing extreme sanctions, including removal from the area. Despite
their efforts to participate in the development boom Comalco's presence thrust
upon them, local Aboriginal people were marginalised and pauperised by the
process of development at Weipa (see eg Suchet 1996, 1999; Howitt 1995, 1998;
Stevens 1969). Many of the negative impacts of the mine and related
developments were well-entrenched before they received academic, government,
church or company attention. As one community member put it to me during
fieldwork at Napranum aimed at redressing this history of neglect and abuse in
the early-1990s:
Comalco can't ignore us and we can't ignore them … They've been part of the damage done to Aboriginal people. They're taking part of our self-respect and telling us what to do … I wouldn't have talked like this five years ago - this talking comes from oppression and I think how oppressed my older people were … They're mining the land of Aboriginal people. To understand the link between that land and our people is important for Comalco (Fieldwork interview, ex-Chairperson, Weipa Aborigines Society, Napranum July 1992).
The Aboriginal families who
bore the brunt of the damage imposed by the mining at Weipa faced a systematic
response of unjust, unbalanced and unsympathetic state governments, ambitious
corporate processes and complicit public silence.
My review
of WAS challenged some aspects of Comalco’s dominant narrative of regional
development at Weipa. In challenging this 'imagined centre' (Howitt 1995), my
Aboriginal colleagues and I were not only trying to overturn deeply entrenched
views of development. We were also actively asserted a range of alternative
'centres' for a narrative of local and regional sustainability and justice.
These focused on a range of Aboriginal priorities, including such diverse
concerns as improved employment in mining and related industries, better
training and educational opportunities, language and cultural maintenance
programs, land claims and land care issues, improved cross-cultural programs
within the mining company.
Pursuit of this agenda has
involved not just conventional research, but also a lot of field-based
teaching. As a result of the initial work for WAS, the Aboriginal community
effectively negotiated a hand-over of the organization and its facilities to
Aboriginal control (see Howitt, Callope and Savo 1998). In Aboriginalising WAS
as Napranum Aboriginal Corporation, we commenced organizational development,
management training and community engagement programs. We also pursued a social
impact agenda which eventually wove into a wider regional agenda for
negotiations about native title. This work also led to invitations from Rio
Tinto itself to engage with their senior management about more appropriate
strategies for recognition and respect in their dealing with native title and
community relations.
In many ways, the challenge has
been to decolonise our dominant vision of regional development as centred on
the corporate narrative either positively or negatively and to displace the
mining corporation from its central place in regional development stories. The
teaching task, then, has continued to be to find ways of imagining decentred
regional narratives that re-place the narrative core with the polyphony of
local concerns, contextualized across scales.
Decolonization and impact assessment
The field of impact assessment has
been another focus for developing an “applied peoples’ geography”. In many
jurisdictions, resource developers are required to provide an assessment of the
social impacts of new projects as part of the approval process. In most cases
SIA is harnessed to the task of securing approval for a project that is already
designed. Developing an empowering alternative to Aboriginal marginalisation
from the impact assessment process has been a priority for many practitioners
in recent times. Gagnon et al (1993) considered experience in Australia,
Thailand and Canada and concluded that there is no simple preferred method for
SIA that is empowering for affected communities. Rather, they concluded, the
task is contextual it involves working with the parties involved to assist
“affected grassroots groups to secure influence over and standing (even if
tenuous, circumstantial or informal) in formal SIA procedures” (Gagnon et al
1993: 247). I have suggested that three criteria are fundamental to securing
empowering outcomes from SIA research. The methods adopted must be empowering
in themselves, participatory in terms of the affected groups, and
interventionist. In many ways, these criteria contradict the ‘scientific’
ideal, but affirm the notion of engagement. There is no simple, objective
criterion for measuring ‘impacts’. And there can be no justification for
identifying negative impacts and not seeking to intervene in them. As I put it
some time ago:
A learned report which documents carefully the direction and speed with which a community is being flushed down the drain by a flood of negative impacts is hardly an adequate response in terms of the Harvey manifesto (Howitt 1993: 131).
Again, one is drawn to field-based
teaching approaches to put this sort of research into place, because the task
is not just a matter of collecting and analysing data, but of working with
affected community groups to achieve a shared understanding of their concerns,
likely consequences and appropriate responses to impact scenarios. It is also a
matter of working with (or perhaps on) development proponents to achieve a
degree of recognition of consequences, meanings and possible alternative.
O’Faircheallaigh (1996) discusses an approach that integrates economic and
social impact assessment research into indigenous negotiation strategies for
major resource projects in Cape York. Ross (1999) suggests the need to
integrate a range of contextual factors into the assessment and response
process. In work on the Kakadu Region Social Impact Study, part of my role was
to work with the regionally-based Aboriginal Advisory Group on how the setting
of terms of reference, the conduct of research and the clarification of their
own goals and concerns could use the resources and opportunities made available
by the formal social impact study process to achieve their own priorities
(Howitt 1998). In more recent work Sue Jackson and I were engaged by the
Northern and Central Land Councils in the Northern Territory, to provide an
assessment of the impacts of the proposed Alice Springs to Darwin Railway on
Aboriginal people (Howitt & Jackson 2000). Our task was to consider impact
issues over the entire 1,410km length of the route. This involved dealing with
seventeen language groups and over sixty affected communities. Our report had
to be credible, cost effective and timely. Part of the context in which we were
working was that engineering plans were already completed even though final
route negotiations were still underway in some places.
It is worth noting here that
sacred site concerns, community relocations, public safety and issues of access
to and amenity in some communities were all issues of concern in the railway
impact study. The Northern Territory Government wanted a report that was
restricted to ‘tangible, physical impacts’, and some Land Council negotiators
simply wanted a report that would leverage more concessions from government. On
the ground, however, the affected peoples needed assistance to understand the
likely issues, information on which to frame their requirements for safety
programs, compensatory procedures, and their own decision-making processes.
The field-based teaching task in
such circumstances is substantial. One’s expertise must engage with the
multiple universes of different language groups and different cultural values.
In one memorable meeting, I was required to sit with an interpreter in the dirt
explaining the rail construction process and the idea of a ‘corridor’ and the
‘permanent way’. The government was seeking clearance of a construction
corridor 200 400m wide, with long term leases over a corridor 100m wide. It
was clear that many of the women in the group had no vision of the construction
process involved, or the distances. Very quickly my ‘research moment’, intended
to elicit responses from this group about their concerns about safety issues in
the area, was transformed into a ‘teaching moment’, with the soil cleared away
for simulated construction, and sticks, soil and imagination enlisted to
deconstruct the construction process and reconstruct the local landscape with a
vision of a railway. Trees were identified at the appropriate distances from
our group, and the effect of the clearing of the landscape to make way for the
railway simulated with my hand. With considerable concern, many of the women
understood for the first time just what a dramatic impact the project would
have locally.
A large part of our task in the
railway study was also educating government decision-makers and engineers who
looked at the traditional country of people like these women and saw empty
space. In this process one can see the landscape being reinscribed as terra
nullius, despite the judicial recognition of native title. Viewed from
Canberra or Darwin or Adelaide, it was easy to imagine that the proposed
railway would traverse an empty landscape. Yet, for the Aboriginal people
associated with these areas, the landscape is already full. It is a landscape
full of named places, It has a rich social, economic and cultural history.
Their realities are deeply challenged by the engineers’ imagined emptiness. For
them, part of the impact assessment process was about affirming ways of fitting
the proposed railway into this already crowded landscape. Teaching this to the
engineers was just as important in our study as was the documentation of safety
issues and framing recommendations for action.
Decolonization and indigenous governance
My most recent challenge as an
educator outside the classroom has arisen from an invitation to work with the
Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement in South Australia (ALRM) to prepare for
statewide negotiations with the South Australian state government over native
title. Following preliminary meetings with representatives of government and
the pastoral and mining industries, ALRM convened an historic meeting of Native Title claimant groups in Port
Augusta to consider the proposal that we proceed towards a negotiated
settlement of native title claims, rather than relying on legal resolution in
the courts. The Aboriginal vision for a negotiated settlement includes a number
of key principles acceptance of the principles of Aboriginal laws, acceptance
of non-extinguishment of native title as a basis for discussion, and
affirmation that native title interests have a right to negotiate with
interests who wish to use land in which native title is claimed.
For the past twelve months,
we have held a series of consultative and decision-making meetings with
claimants, culminating as a series of Congress Meetings which have effectively
constituted a new scale in South Australian politics the scale of tribal
governance. The scope of the proposed negotiations remains a subject for
further discussion amongst native title claimants, and with other stakeholders,
but the South Australian Government has already acknowledged that ‘everything
is on the table’. Again, this task has presented a range of obligations in my
role as a ‘teacher’ outside the classroom. As principle consultant to ALRM’s
Native Title Unit, I have worked closely with my Aboriginal colleague, Parry
Agius, and a team that has included a former state treasurer adviser, a former
state Solicitor-General, a leading barrister, several geographers and others to
present a vision of decolonization of the state. Our fundamental challenge to
all involved, including native title claimants along with government,
pastoralists and miners, has been to imagine the social, political and
ecological landscapes of South Australia with recognition of native title. How
might we re-construct the state with native built in, rather than excluded?
Our vision has been refined
and understood through an iterative process of meetings, debate and challenge.
Throughout the process the temptation has been to tell people why this was a
good vision that they should buy. It is so easy to fall into the traps of
paternalism and didactic pedagogy. But we’ve been blessed with team members who
have reminded us that it is us who have to listen, to respond, to reshape, to
include. In moving towards the construction of new scales of inter-tribal
cooperation and governance in this process, our task was to present the raw
materials for others to refine, not to do the deal and deliver it as the best
we could achieve.
In early December 2000, at
the final Congress meeting for the year, we faced the juxtaposition of our
deliberations with the State Parliament’s consideration of legislation that
would have the effect of extinguishing native title over several classes of
tenure where our legal advice is that native title could persist. One hundred
and fifty Aboriginal delegates moved from their own Congress to witness the
debate in the Parliament, and came away distressed, saddened and angry at what
they witnessed. They were galvanized into a powerful vision of common purpose
and sophisticated unity. Their response was not a simplistic notion of
political solidarity, but a commitment to a process of working out how to work
together, how to retain and strengthen their local scale identities and
interests while negotiating a statewide structure of recognition, compensation
and reform.
Freedom to narrate the
world
Toni Morrison’s image of a literary ‘freedom to narrate the world’
(1993:64) parallels Geography’s quite literal construction of the colonial
world through maps and data, and its current concerns with global scale change.
Jacobs has expressed surprise at the infrequent connection in discussions of
postmodernism and global cities of contemporary social processes to
colonialism, imperialism and postcolonialism (Jacobs: 1996: 1). I am equally
bemused by the limited engagement with diverse ‘others’ in relation to
geographers’ teaching practices in universities. Monk’s assessment of teaching
about the ‘Other’ and consideration of ‘Otherness’ in last year’s JGIHE
Lecture notes some difficult silences (Monk 2000).
In
Australia, the dual ‘others’ of hostile environments and incomprehensible
indigenous peoples have long haunted the dominant culture’s geographical imagination.
Images of hostile climates and environments, frontier social relations,
external threats from the ‘north’ are deeply embedded in Australian
imaginaries. The exclusive nature of Australian universities is hardly
surprising when one recognizes the extent to which exclusion has underpinned
Australian policy settings for a century or more. The White Australia policy
sought to exclude non-White migrants from entry until it was finally repealed
in 1973. Labour laws, curfews and pass laws, education regulations, health
regulations and mission policies, all sought to discipline Aboriginal people to
conform or be excluded. Economic policy sought to exclude imports. Industrial
policy sought to exclude non-union members from closed shops. And universities excluded
those outside the elite (with a few exceptions for scholarship ‘winners’
admitted on merit). Dramatic reform to provide open access to tertiary
education in the early-1970s, has been whittled away by governments of the left
and right. The inclusive visions of multiculturalism and reconciliation have
been unsettled by a white backlash and the willingness of the major political
parties to engage in wedge politics (Langton 1997).
Although
he does not deal directly with pedagogy, the philosophical work of Emmanuel
Levinas provides some insights into the relationship between the dominant self
and the incomprehensible ‘other’. Levinas advocates an approach to the
construction of knowledge, meaning and understanding that contrasts with Rose’s
deep colonizing monologue of power. He emphasizes the importance of
face-to-face relationships with the ‘other’ and the difference between
‘speaking’ as an active relationship, and ‘the spoken’ as a frozen text to be
engaged with at a distance. For Levinas, the ethical relationship which
underpins the act of teaching, the act of research, the act of contemplation,
the act of seeing and being is built upon engagement. For
Levinas, the relationship of difference, between the self and the other, is
foundational in human existence. It is this relationship, Levinas argues, that
offers humanity a prospect for transcendence and individual and social
responsibility. He considers relations
between the self and the other in terms of an ethical imperative in which the
face-to-face encounter develops terms for understanding our place in society.
"Intersubjective space" that space in which one relates to the
other(s) “is not symmetrical" (1989 [1947]: 48). He constitutes
intersubjective space as a moral space. We occupy moral landscapes in which
ethics (responsibility, reciprocity, proximity, collectivity and co-existence)
frame and temper interpersonal, structural and political relationships. It is
this, Levinas suggests, that distinguishes justice from charity (1989 [1947]: 48).
It is this that places an engaged ethics at the core of an “applied peoples’
geography”.
Unlike
many philosophers, Levinas did not relegate space to a role of absence or
negation. Rather, he applied a very contemporary understanding of space as
simultaneously a concept of separation and relation. He is interested in
relations "whose terms do not form a totality" (1969: 39), such as
the self-other relation; and in totalities which implicate embodiment and
emplacement. So, for Levinas, aggregation of the self and the other does not
produce a new, larger singularity. The relationship, this alterity, is
"produced in being" and is "irreducible to the distance
establishe[d] between the diverse terms"; it is to be grasped as a
relationship of movement in time and space - "as the traversing of this
distance" rather than as an exercise of thought, analysis or documentation
(Levinas 1969: 39-40, emphasis in original). In these ideas of difference as a
concrete engagement, as face to face encounter, as conversation, Levinas offers
a view of embodiment, emplacement and place-making that opens new avenues for
discussion of scale and its application as a concept in contemporary cultural
geography.
In
this vision of engagement between the self and the ‘other, Levinas also
provides a seductive view of the task of teaching. Like hooks (1994), who
considers the place of passion in pedagogy, Levinas places eros at the heart of
his ethics, as the most explicit domain of engagement. He similarly elevates a
notion of engagement with infinity to the centre of his theological vision, and
in the process destabilizes our conventional notions of scale (see Howitt,
2000).
As
Derrida reminds us in his compelling discussion of monolingualism, language,
education and recognition create ambiguous routes to overcoming oppression and
marginalisation (Derrida 1998).
Education, literacy and professional standing offer individuals their ticket
out of their social disadvantage. But the journey is hard. Like all travel, it
offers glimpses of what might be. It forces reflection on what was. It creates
new identities and unsettles old assumptions about the boundaries around us. At
the same time as education offers the skills, knowledge, understanding,
networks and opportunities that allow individuals to escape the constraints of
their context, they also place conditions on access to the transformational
space.
For
many Aboriginal students, for example, the process of education involves
separation from family for long periods, relocation away from country,
withdrawal from various social and cultural obligations and commitments. In
previous eras these were precisely the procedures used by governments and
missionaries to undermine cultures of sovereign identities. The process of
individuation through education affirms the need to conform to external rather
than internally defined criteria of excellence, achievement and contribution.
Politically, this was the mechanism used by colonial governments bent on
dispossession in Aotearoa New Zealand and the USA. Fragmenting collective
rights (and the responsibilities that give rise to the web of relationships we
gloss as ‘culture’) and reconstituting them as individual rights is not
recognition. And providing conditional access to higher education, dependent on
students’ willingness to conform to the standards of philosophies that have
negated the foundations of their existence is neither recognition nor
reconciliation.
The challenge, it seems
to me, is to escape a reconstruction of identity as victims. For many
indigenous groups, their experience as the dispossessed, the victims of
development, the people without history, has become central to their
contemporary identity. Moving forward to take up opportunities to forge new
identities presents people with enormous challenges individually and
collectively. Sir Tipene O’Regan recognized the ambiguity that comes with
success when he urged Ngai Tahu people to move forward following an historic
negotiated settlement of their claims against the national government. The
South Island Maori in Aotearoa New Zealand had carried on their struggle for
seven generations. In 1997, with negotiated settlement of the Ngai Tahu claims,
he said:
In many ways it has become our culture, a culture of grievance … that has consumed our tribal lives down through the years as generation after generation has struggled for ‘justice’. At the same time, though, that struggle has bonded us together in a special way. It has shaped our tribal organisation over the years and given us a focus that other tribes have not had. Despite language loss and cultural deprivation we have been able to hold together a cultural core of whakapapa and identity. We have, on the whole, stayed close to our ancestral lands and coasts. Those that have moved away stay in touch with that core and every year more and more of them re-connect with us.
It is important, as we stand at this historic juncture, that we should remember those who have helped to bring us here. The generations of our old people who travelled from hui to hui, year in year out, debating and petitioning, raising their meagre funds and going without: it was they who kept the Ngai Tahu Claim breathing. It was they who handed it on to our generation.
But they did not hand it on to us simply so we could, in our time, just keep it breathing. They kept the Claim alive so that it could one day be resolved, so that it would end. In many ways it is more comforting to keep a grudge going. That way we can always blame others for our troubles. It saves us from facing uncomfortable new challenges. However, we did not inherit the tradition of the Ngai Tahu Claim as a "comfort rug" to be passed on to our young. It was handed on to us for a purpose: that we might find an answer (Sir Tipene O’Regan http://www.ngaitahu.iwi.nz/steppingstone.htm).
Education
presents the same sorts of challenges to many of our students. Older Aboriginal
women who come to university to provide a role model for younger people find
themselves engaged by learning. They find themselves drawn in to the
development of skills, the realm of ideas, in ways that strengthen their
resolve to move on from their particular forms of personal oppression. Some
find that too unsettling, and return to the comfort of keeping their grudges
going. We have become better at servicing the needs of these students through
tailored programs and specialist support services. But what we have not yet
done is to succeed in transforming our educational institutions to provide
genuine recognition and respect. How might we transform what we do so that
students from the dominant culture are equally challenged by the recognition of
ontological pluralism in our education systems? How might such recognition
transform border pedagogies?
Conclusions: constructing engagement
To avoid the colonising power relations that accompany the decontextualised assertion and imposition of Eurocentric knowledges, thoughts and actions need to be contextualised in specific places. Engaging in these situated places … embraces the multiple worlds that … [the dominant culture] silences, ignores, devalues and undermines … (Suchet 1999: 4).
Nearly a decade ago McDowell articulated the challenge in tertiary
geography classrooms as recognizing and accommodating polyphony and unsettle
the authoritative place of the ‘teacher’. In this paper I have suggested that
there is a new challenge for geographical education in tertiary institutions
constructing engagements between ‘students’ in diverse settings, inside and
beyond the confines of the conventional classroom, to address the intellectual,
social, economic and environmental consequences of ‘deep colonising’ even in
our most progressive university programs. Drawing on personal experience, I
have tried to identify some of the prospects for decolonizing the geographical
imagination we foster through our teaching. In particular, I have suggested
that we must weave a dialectical unity between our ‘teaching’, ‘research’ and
‘community service’ if we are to meet the challenge of an “applied peoples’
geography”. In educating for justice and sustainability, it is simply not
enough to integrate environmental, socio-cultural and political-economic
perspectives with our students. We must also overcome multiple fractures within
our universities and between universities and marginalised and excluded groups.
References
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