Abstract Amid growing calls for Australian universities to engage meaningfully with Indigenous knowledges, this article examines how Indigenous-led, place-based inquiry can reorient academic practice toward culturally regenerative possibilities. Drawing on a Cooperative Inquiry conducted with Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar, we follow six Noongar-led experiences involving Country, language, ceremony, deep time, embodiment and more-than-human relations. Through cycles of experiential, presentational and reflective practice, these engagements restructured attention, temporality and conduct, foregrounding relational ethics of permission, reciprocity and refusal. Multimodal forms including movement, image and creative response were treated as epistemic practices, enabling us to register affective and relational reorientations that are not readily accessible through propositional forms alone. Our analysis traces how these reorientations unsettled extractive research habits and repositioned knowledge-making as embodied, participatory and accountable to Country. We argue that culturally regenerative university practice does not emerge through policy statements, curricular add-ons or inclusion alone, but through lived, relational engagements that reconfigure how knowledge is generated, held and shared. The study contributes empirical insight into how such reconfigurations unfold in practice and highlights the institutional conditions required to sustain accountable relationships with place.
The special issue, “Meeting Global Challenges through Families and Community Environmental and Sustainability Education: Generating Action Competence” aims to discover and address ways of meeting global educational and political challenges of sustainable futures from the perspective of families and community involvement. With contributions from multiple disciplinary and multidisciplinary fields it is organised around four thematic areas. Namely, Education for Empowering Communities for Change through Climate and Cultural Heritage; Families and Communities Educating for Sustainable Futures; Interdisciplinary Approaches to Education for Building Resilience in the face of Environmental Complexity and Uncertainty; and Integrating Methodologies for Researching and Developing Action Competence for Environmental and Community Sustainability through Education.
Extreme weather events caused by human created climate change not only cause catastrophic impact on human and the more-than-human populations but can also trigger permanent changes to place. With these changes, stories shift, in turn influencing knowledge and cultural systems. This article is a dialogue between Natalie Davey and Renée Newman, about the role of art, story, mapping and “jarriny” (translating to totem) as a tool for education on extreme weather events and climate crisis. We also consider the vital role custodianship plays in response to and recovery from an extreme weather event, as was the case for Natalie Davey during, and in the aftermath, of the Fitzroy River floods in Western Australia, 2023.
This article brings together a transdisciplinary collective of academics to critically explore the impacts of planetary thinking across the higher education sector in settler colonial Australia. Growing out of weekly critical practice dialogues between scholars in the fields of Indigenous studies, education, design, philosophy, geography, art, literary studies, communication, urban research and political science, the authors undertake a pluriversal counter-mapping of the university as a place where many worlds meet. Resisting tendencies towards universalisation which continue to dominate discussions of the planetary, the article proposes a pedagogy which embraces multiple worlds, natures and temporalities to open dynamic potentials for integrating planetary thinking into teaching and learning across the university.
