Rights to culture and knowledge

The HumanKIND project was a collaboration with the Museum of Freedom and Tolerance, WA. The project provides a safe online platform for young people from diverse backgrounds to share their voices, languages and stories. The digital platform provides a space for young people from marginalised communities to share their experiences and their language. The young people featured are in the launch include the Burmese Chin young people and young people from the Bardi and Bunuba communities in the Kimberley – https://humankind.mftwa.org.au/the-children-of-bardi-and-bunuba/

This project seeks to understand how notions of belonging and difference are perceived and experienced among African communities in Perth and the ways in which belonging is constructed, dismissed, confirmed, denied or mystified through lived experience. It seeks to understand the experiences of both African migrants and Africans born in Australia to migrant families, looking at the different ways in which belonging is felt or constructed by the two groups. It also studies how racialised discourses and practices influence belonging and the ways in which such experiences lead to inequality of outcome and opportunity, constraints on choice and control, and human rights violations and other forms of injustices. The immediate outcome of this research is the publication of a journal article, community outreach and the development of useful research networks and skills. It is envisaged this is the first stage of a much larger project.

Curtin University funded project.

Oral traditions in Indigenous communities are framed by unique Indigenous epistemologies. This research project explores innovative methodologies for preserving Indigenous oral histories which empower Indigenous people to tell their own stories in their own way. This project supports an emerging national network of researchers from Curtin, the University of South Australia, the University of New England and the National Film and Sound Archive.

Curtin University funded project.

New national and transnational narratives of Indigenous political autonomy are emerging which contest and negotiate accounts of Australian history. This project unearths a seemingly hidden treasury of knowledge about early political activism by Noongar people in Western Australia from the turn of the twentieth century until the 1930s. It contributes to emerging narratives of autonomy by amplifying significant Western Australian voices.

Funding body: ARC Discovery Project

The archives in Western Australia contain hundreds of letters written by Noongar people between 1860 and 1960. Captured in the letters are many silenced stories of courage and activism. This research project will reunite letters with descendants of the letter writers. With these hidden stories restored to the families, the letters will come alive and once again be part of the Noongar living culture and history.