"Don't we already do that?" In search of an Indigenous and non-Indigenous academic symbiosis

Abstract

In this article the authors, two white academics working in Social Work and Education at a regional Australian university, describe a conversation with Indigenous and non-Indigenous colleagues as to how to go beyond the idea of Indigenising the curriculum to create and maintain spaces for more respectful, ethical academic teaching, learning and research. A qualitative ethnographic approach is applied to the analysis of the conversational data. Guided by Victor Turner's ideas of liminality, possible ways are identified in which non-Indigenous academics can tentatively begin to contribute to, rather than avoid, a discourse about how to legitimately teach, write and research in academia located within disputed colonial spaces.