AustLit

'Australian Indigenous studies: research and practice is an important and timely intervention into the scholarship currently informing the design and delivery of Indigenous studies in school curricula. Aimed primarily at school teachers and guided by the Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority and the Australian Institute for School Teaching, the book offers a critical response to the ideological orthodoxies evident in both contemporary Indigenous studies curricula and approaches to teaching Indigenous students and their dependence on one-dimensional, culturally over-determined representations of ‘the Indigenous’ as they are promulgated by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. These representations and their continued reproduction — across various educational, governmental and other sites — typically construct indigeneity as radically different from and incommensurate with its non-Indigenous other, and it is this static binaristic notion of indigeneity that Australian Indigenous studies challenges. In making its alternative case for intercultural Indigenous studies, the book calls upon readers to complicate conventional understandings of indigeneity as a mode of identity construction and to recognise that it is simultaneously informed and made ambiguous by location-specific cultural, historical and other experiences, diverse intersubjective interactions and other intersecting layers of identity.'  (Introduction)