The notion of Indigenous epistemologies and “ways of knowing” continues to be undervalued within various academic disciplines, particularly those who continue to draw upon “scientific” approaches that colonise Indigenous peoples today. This paper will examine the politics of contested knowledge from the perspective of three Indigenous researchers who work within Yunggorendi First Nations Centre for Higher Education and Research at Flinders University in South Australia. In particular, the authors outline a collective process that has emerged from conversations regarding their research projects and responding to what Ladson-Billings and Donnor (2008, p. 371) refer to as the “call”. In developing an Indigenous standpoint specific to their own disciplines and their research context, the authors demonstrate how these collective conversations between each other and their communities in which they work have informed their research practices and provided a common framework which underpins their research methodologies.
This paper explores how Foucault's concept of the panopticon, power and knowledge impacts on the identity of young Nunga males in a secondary educational institution. I argue that the regulation of the Nunga body in schools is embedded in the discursive formations of knowledge about Indigenous people and the workings of power that are tied up in discipline, surveillance and management of bodies in schools. Through the Indigenous concepts of 'play', 'playing up'/'stylin' up', I draw attention to Nunga males' resistance to surveillance and management in the schooling environment through understanding themselves as Nungas and their performance of identity through the popular culture of rap to turn the surveillance gaze back upon itself. For young Nunga males turning the gaze back on itself is an act of constructive defiance that allows them a space to explore their own identities through performance rather than through the knowledge production constructed by the hegemonic racialised institution of the school.
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