Competing Projects of Settler Nationalism: The Voice of Parliament

Overview

Delivery method

Online

Duration

1 hour

Audience

All HC and PHAC Employees

Description

Join Australian Centre Fellows' Dr Kim Alley and Dr Dan Tout as they discuss settler nationalism in so-called Australia.

ABOUT

This webinar explores the dynamics of settler nationalism in the recent debate over the Indigenous Voice to Parliament in Australia. Kim Alley and Dan Tout argue that both the conservative ‘No’ and progressive ‘Yes’ campaigns treated First Nations peoples as objects to be managed within the settler colonial national space. While conservative settler nationalisms sought to (re)construct a white settler nation founded on fantasies of terra nullius, ‘progressive’ settler nationalism sought to build a ‘mature’, reconciled nation-to-come by incorporating limited forms of Indigenous difference within the settler national body.

Between these apparently opposing forms of settler nationhood, the unity and coherence of the nation is maintained as either immanent or imminent, while prior and persisting Indigenous sovereignties are denied and disavowed. In examining, these settler nationalisms, they also seek to reflect on the necessity of undoing settler investments in the idea/ideal of Australia, and the limitations they seek to impose on Indigenous rights and sovereignty.

PRESENTERS

Dr Kim Alley is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Melbourne’s School of Social and Political Science. Dr. Alley is an Aboriginal academic and researcher, with more than ten years' experience in researching and teaching Indigenous Studies, Australian Politics and Middle Eastern Politics and History. Her work focuses on settler colonial histories and political violence (with a special focus on Australia and Palestine), while also examining settler nationalism, race and identity, social movements for change and liberation, transnational activism, and resistance politics. Dr Alley’s work seeks to highlight how such histories and activism impact and inform Indigenous Settler relations today both in Australia and internationally.

Dr Dan Tout is a Lecturer in History and Sociology at Federation University and an Arena Publications Editor. He is an early-career researcher with wide-ranging, interdisciplinary interests and expertise centred around the history and contemporary shape of relations between settlers and Indigenous peoples, in Australia and around the world. His current research is focused in particular on settler-colonial nationalism and its impacts on and implications for First Nations peoples and politics. In 2023, Dan was an inaugural Visiting Fellow with the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne. His Fellowship project was focused on developing a fuller theorisation of settler nationalism, with the aim of elaborating the nature and political implications of settler nationalism in contemporary so-called ‘Australia’, and around the settler-colonial world.