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"This is our city" - 'White Counter Cultural Movements', Community Cultural Events and Indigenous ProtocolDeirdre Howard. There are a broad range of community activities organised by whites that occur annually in Newcastle, which attempt to incorporate Indigenous issues. Such events include community cultural events; public events organised to raise white people's awareness about human rights; anti-racism activities; and public events organised to raise white people's awareness about Indigenous rights. It is not so much the events that this paper is interested in, but instead the paper considers whether white attempts to incorporate Indigenous issues into Newcastle public events really accommodates difference. That is, whether it gives voice and space to Indigenous people about their rights, rather than simply imposing a duty of tolerance and adherence to some fundamental Western emancipatory values and goals, such as social and equal rights or multiculturalism emulating the current Federal Government's Indigenous policy. In postcolonial Australia, I link this analysis to a discussion about Indigenous 'gatekeeper' organisations in Newcastle, as well as how Indigenous protocols operate as guidelines for whites engaging Indigenous communities in contemporary Australia society.
My analysis is informed through my own engagement with the Indigenous community as a white anthropologist and white activist through my observation of, and participation in, different public events in Newcastle that the Indigenous community was involved in Presenters Deirdre Howard
(Australia)
Research Academic and Deputy Director Justice Policy Research Centre, School of Law University of Newcastle Deirdre Howard is a Research Academic and Deputy Director of the Justice Policy Research Centre, which contributes to and supports the development of effective legal policy and law reform through high quality research. She was awarded a first class honours (sociology) degree by the Australian National University in 2000, and was further awarded the George Zubryzcki Prize in 2001 - a biennial award for best result in Sociology IV. She has completed two innovative multi-method qualitative research theses. Amongst other data, her analysis draws on 2 years intensive ethnographic fieldwork, Federal parliamentary speeches, policy documents and media statements, Commonwealth archival material, and print media articles. Her PhD Thesis entitled Recentering Whiteness: 'Practical' politics, Moral conservatism, and the marginalisation of Indigenous rights in contemporary Australian society is a critical whiteness study of the social reproduction of Indigenous marginalisation that works at a number of different levels, as it must to look at the interplay between white Federal policy, its discursive frameworks and their historical shifts
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(30 min. Conference Paper,
English)
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