Evaluation of the Integrated Services Pilot Program from Western Australia

Independent evaluation of refugee-focused programs in developed nations is increasingly a mandatory requirement of funding bodies and government agencies. This paper presents an evaluation of the Integrated Services Centre (ISC) Pilot Project that was conducted in Australia in 2007 and early 2008. The purpose of the ISC program was to provide integrated support to humanitarian refugees in settlement, physical health, mental health and employment. The Pilot Project was based in two primary schools in Perth, Western Australia. The evaluation utilized a flexible qualitative ‘engaged’ methodology and included interviews, focus groups and telephone interviews with the key stakeholders, project staff and a small number of refugee families. The strength of the qualitative methodology (including data that is narrative rich) is that it highlights issues as perceived by each stakeholder and provides insights into the daily work by ISC staff that helped to uncover unintended outcomes. Despite the fact that the ISC evaluation was supposed to be a ‘before and after’ design, the researchers acknowledge a common weakness in many evaluations (including the ISC) that when baseline data is required, evaluators are recruited after the project has begun. This issue is discussed in the paper. It is critical that independent evaluators are able to begin collecting baseline data as soon as programs are launched, if not before.     

Challenging the colonisation of birth: Koori women’s birthing knowledge and practice

Background

The 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples states that Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination for social and cultural development. This fundamental right has been impeded worldwide through colonisation where many Indigenous peoples have had to adapt to ensure continuation of cultural knowledge and practice. In South East Australia colonisation was particularly brutal interrupting a 65,000 year-old oral culture and archives have increasing importance for cultural revival.

Following the River’s Flow: A Conversation about Single Session Approaches with Aboriginal Families

Alison Elliott and James Dokona were interviewed by Henry von Doussa, and this article is the written version of that interview. In it, Alison and James separately refer to issues such as early skepticism about the applicability of a single session therapy approach with Indigenous families (Alison), a growing experience of its ‘fit,' philosophically and culturally, and the hope that can be engendered in one conversation. They underline the importance of the oral tradition, and other cultural concepts such as Dadirri (deep listening) as well as the trauma-informed principles of choice, collaboration, and empowerment, through using their language, asking permission, working together on solutions, and not coming across as an expert. The article is infused with the practical ideas and the values inherent in the authors’ work, including permission-seeking, reflection, containment, and their use of a whiteboard as a resource to capture multiple perspectives, a genogram (including pets), and to facilitate yarning. The flow of this conversation in itself reflects James’ imagery of the therapeutic conversation being like a river running – you don’t know which way it’s going to go.     

Can increased educational attainment explain declining Indigenous fertility?

Prior research shows that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are more likely to have children and have more children, on average, than non-Indigenous women. However, like those of the total Australian population, fertility rates of Indigenous women have been declining since the 1970s. The decline has been more significant in recent years. Between 2006 and 2016, an increasing proportion of Indigenous women postponed childbirth from their teens into their 20s and 30s, leading women to have fewer children over their lifetimes. During the same period, there was a rapid increase in educational attainment among the Indigenous population. This paper examines educational gradients in fertility among Indigenous women and whether the observed fertility decline is linked with the increased educational attainment. Using data from the 2006, 2011 and 2016 Australian Census of Population and Housing and applying a shift-share decomposition analysis, we find that education has been a big driver of falling fertility rates in non-remote areas. In remote areas, education has had a much smaller effect (except for youngest women).     

Sexy and sovereign? Aboriginal models hit the ‘multicultural mainstream’

Long argued by post-colonial scholarship, Indigenous sexualities have been variously cast as pathological and abject, or fetishized and exotiziced. In the Australian context, Aboriginal sexualities have never been granted a normalized, agentic visibility in the white Australian imaginary. Since the 1990s, however, there has been an increase of ‘sexy’ Aboriginal ‘stars’ in the Australian media. This newfound visibility invites fresh questions about race, beauty, appropriation and resistance, most particularly in ways that centres Aboriginal narratives: What does it mean to be visible and ‘mainstreamed’ in a media that ‘values diversity’, whilst denying sovereignty for Indigenous people? This question is significant in the Australian context, but also has relevance for rethinking race, sexuality and media representations in colonial contexts internationally. The paper explores this newfound exposure through the voices of two Australian Aboriginal women, Samantha Harris and Magnolia Maymaru. These women have come to national and international fame as celebrated models in a fashion industry priding itself on becoming more inclusive and multicultural. It focuses on their responses to journalists over the course of their careers, as well as how the stories construct beauty and Aboriginality. I draw on Indigenous feminist scholars, particularly the work of Irene Watson, who foreground the subject of sovereignty and remind us that discourses of multiculturalism have a charged meaning for Indigenous people. I also draw on the insights of Elizabeth Povinelli who considers how sexuality intersects with discourses of empire, and how Indigenous people employ ‘creative engagements’ with liberal multiculturalism. Positioning sovereignty and multiculturalism side by side, I reflect on how Samantha and Magnolia enact a sovereign sexuality, and what this might look like. Rather than fix colonial alterity or reproduce multicultural ‘inclusions’, their narratives skirt, sidestep and ‘dance’ with the discourses constructing their lives, attending to race while transcending its colonial limits.     

China’s minority preferential policies and the schooling of indigenous Tibetan children: the weakest link

Since the introduction of the Chinese colonial education system into Tibet in the 1960s, the Tibetan language has been caught in the crossfire. Because of Tibetan language’s perceived strong relationship with national identity and its alleged separatist implications, the Chinese leadership has always maintained an uneasy and sceptical outlook on it. Textbooks in Lhasa and other urban areas are exceedingly written in Chinese. The invalidation of mother tongue in the schooling process causes serious emotional trauma resulting in low academic achievement and low proficiency in the native language. The People’s Republic of China’s constitution guarantees the freedom of all nationalities ‘to use and develop their own spoken and written languages’. The trajectory of Tibetan language has, however, reflected the political winds sweeping across the plateau rather than educational imperatives. Therefore, this conceptual paper uses language-as-problem, language-as-right and language-as-resource framework for the critical analysis of language policy in occupied Tibet. Additionally, the role of social media is explored in language revitalisation despite PRC’s draconian language policing political agenda. A strong additive bilingual education with the sustained use of Tibetan language of instruction is advanced for enhancing both Tibetan and Chinese proficiency and academic achievements of indigenous children.     

Getting There,Being There,Staying and Belonging: A Case Study of Two Indigenous Australian Children's Transition to School

Indigenous Australians are among the most unhealthy populations in the world and yet they reside in a country where the non‐Indigenous population enjoys high standards of well‐being. Education has been identified as the key mechanism for closing this equity gap. At school commencement many Indigenous children are already at risk of disengagement. This four‐year longitudinal study of two Indigenous boys from a socially marginalised community examined key factors affecting transitional trajectories into school. While child characteristics affected level of achievement the critical factors in sustaining positive educational engagement were social support, school practices, inclusion of family and positive expectation.     

Negotiating disability and colonisation: the lived experience of Indigenous Australians with a disability

Disability among Indigenous Australians lies at a nexus between the ongoing impact of European settlement from 1788 and the social effects of living with a disability. Colonisation, with its political, social, economic and cultural concomitants, continues to impact on Indigenous experience, extending to the institutions and services concerned with disability. There is little attention paid to Indigenous Australian disability in general, and the need to decolonise disability has recently been emphasised. Ethnographic research in Brisbane, Australia among Indigenous people with a disability (mostly related to diabetes) confirms the ongoing impact of colonisation. While this experience pervades all aspects of their lives, it also moderates their experience of living with a disability in positive ways. However, while individuals can negotiate their personal experience of disability, the decolonisation of disability services presents challenges that need to be addressed.     

Colonization,coloniality and bio-power: biopolitics in Queensland,Australia

This essay illustrates how a Foucauldian theory of power could re-examine postcolonial, coloniality or colonization contexts, as opposed to the current structuralist and hierarchal theories of understanding power that colonization studies, such as coloniality/modernity or postcolonial studies, use to theorize colonization and race. I argue that a structuralist and hierarchal conceptualization of power relations in understanding colonization and its relationship with racism can be problematic, and that the Foucauldian heterarchical (non-hierarchal) understanding of power relations instead draws a more complete picture of the operation of colonization. In order to demonstrate this claim, I firstly briefly explain how colonization has been mainly theorized through postcolonial and coloniality studies. Then I introduce the relevance of Michel Foucault’s work in the problem of colonization, focusing on his theories of racism and the idea of biopolitics. Then I illustrate how a heterarchical theory of biopolitical power was used against Indigenous Australians in Queensland via the implementation of the Queensland Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act of 1897. Lastly, I offer some preliminary notes for conceptualizing the global assemblage of the ‘State of Exception’ in the context of colonial Queensland, Australia.