ICS Seminar Series - Professor Bronwyn Carlson

Date: Thursday, 3 June 2021
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: The seminar will held online via Zoom. Please RSVP to email yan.wang@westernsydney.edu.au by 5:00pm Wednesday, 2 June, to receive the Zoom details.

Indigenous Futurism

Presenter: Professor Bronwyn Carlson

Discussant: Dr Corrinne Sullivan

Chair: Dr Jessica Weir

ABSTRACT

Indigenous activist and writer Erica Violet Lee explains in her essay Reconciling in the Apocalypse that ‘In knowing the histories of our relations and of this land, we find the knowledge to recreate all that our worlds would’ve been, if not for the interruption of colonization.’

Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon (2012) coined the term ‘Indigenous Futurisms’ which sees Indigenous people as always-already imagining and building other futures. ‘Indigenous Futurisms are not the product of a victimized people’s wishful amelioration of their past,’ Dillon (2016, 2) explains, ‘but instead a continuation of a spiritual and cultural path that remains unbroken by genocide and war’. As Palyku author and scholar Ambelin Kwaymullina asserts, ‘Indigenist Futurisms are hope’. The Centre for Global Indigenous Futures takes this approach.

In this presentation I will speak to the Centre’s agenda by discussing Indigenous Futurisms and Futures.

BIOGRAPHY

Bronwyn Carlson is a Professor and Head of the Department of Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University. She is the director of the Centre for Global Indigenous Futures and the managing editor for the Journal of Global Indigeneity. Bronwyn is the author of ‘The Politics of Identity: Who counts as Aboriginal today? (2016)’ and has been awarded three consecutive ARC grants focussed on Indigenous people and digital platforms such as social media.