Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 22 February
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
When we talk about resolving relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, most discussions are concentrated on political recognition and reconciliation. In her 2014 book Mohawk Interruptus, Audra Simpson proposes an alternative: refusal.
Pushing back against the widely-presented idea that questions of statehood, territory and multicultural politics are settled, Simpson visits the Wheeler Centre to make her arguments for alternative notions of sovereignty and cultural recognition amongst First Peoples.
Simpson is a Mohawk scholar based at Columbia University, whose research combines ethnography, history and political theory in her study of race, diversity and statehood. Simpson’s work is concerned with how power is experienced, shared and institutionalised in relations between settler states and indigenous communities. Can sovereignty exist within sovereignty? What legal and diplomatic tensions would that introduce … and what would justice look like?
In a time when Australian society is engaged in debates around constitutional recognition, a treaty and community closures, this event will offer an alternative view on local dialogues – drawn from the insights, challenges and tactics of First Peoples across the world.
After presenting a lecture, Simpson will further unpack her provocative arguments with Emma Kowal, author of the acclaimed Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia.
Presented in partnership with the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University.
Featuring
Audra Simpson
Audra Simpson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is the author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014) and co-editor (with Andrea Smith) of Theorizing Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2014). She has articles in Cultural Anthropology, American Quarterly, Junctures, Law and Contemporary Problems and Wicazo Sa Review. In 2010 she won Columbia University’s School for General Studies “Excellence in Teaching Award.”
She is a Kahnawake Mohawk, and Simpson returns to her reservation often, saying, 'My family is there, my research is there, the people I love most in the world are there.'
Emma Kowal
Emma Kowal is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Alfred Deakin Research Institute of Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University. After studying medicine and anthropology at university she moved from Melbourne to Darwin to pursue a career in Aboriginal health as a doctor and public health researcher. Her PhD research was recently published as Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia (2015).
In 2007 she returned to Melbourne to begin postdoctoral research on the use of genetics in Indigenous Australian communities, work that has led to the formation of the National Centre for Indigenous Genomics at the Australian National University where she is Deputy Director. Her ongoing research explores the role of human biology in the founding of Indigenous studies in the 1960s.