ICS Seminar Series

Megan Watkins,  Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and a member of the Institute for Culture and Society at UWS, will present on: 'Asian Success and the Ethnicisation of Educational Achievement'

Despite the Australian Government’s embrace of all things Asian, most evident in its 2012 White Paper, Australia in the Asian Century, and the inclusion of a cross-curricula focus on Asia in its soon to be implemented National Curriculum, many Australians harbour a deep suspicion of ‘Asia’ and, in particular, ‘the Chinese’. This is nowhere more evident than in concern over the phenomenal performance of many students of Chinese backgrounds in Australian schools. Rather than viewing this in a positive light as an example of the success of Australian multiculturalism, more often than not it attracts negative attention with these students’ achievements recast as a form of deviance and a potential threat to the Anglo majority. Ethnicity provides an easy rationale for this success and there is little nuance around cultural variation or the particular practices that may contribute to such exceptional performance. Instead it is linked to reified attributes and cultural pathologies that get in the way of understanding complex cultural, social and educational processes. Together with an analysis of the media representation of ‘Asian Success’; this paper draws on recent research in schools around multiculturalism. It examines both teachers’ and students’ perceptions of ethnicity and how practices of multicultural education have contributed to a broader ethnicisation of educational achievement. As a point of contrast it then reports on one school’s approach to rethinking multiculturalism, as teachers begin to challenge their preconceived notions of the ‘Asian’ parent forging effective partnerships and unearthing an alternative demotic discourse around diversity.

Elizabeth Strakosch, postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, will present on: 'Between Settler Government and Sovereignty'

 Domestic policy is framed in particular ways – as neutral, technical, and concerned with social well being rather than political identity. Through a discussion of recent Australian Indigenous policy, I suggest that it is simultaneously a site of cultural encounter and political formation. Between the end of ATSIC in 2004 and the beginning of the Northern Territory ‘intervention’ in 2007, Indigenous policy shifted its focus from political inclusion to the technical redress of disadvantage. I suggest that this repositioning of Indigenous people as a domestic social policy ‘problem’ itself works to enact sovereign inclusion, and to construct a highly territorial form of political community. In Australia, Indigenous people fall within the territorial boundaries of the state, but are at least partly located outside settler sovereign authority. Sovereign struggles are therefore dispersed throughout the ‘inside’ spaces of an apparently settled political community, and this is linked to a particularly intense and performative border politics. This discussion raises broader questions of how liberal political communities are simultaneously constructed through governmental care and sovereign performances of control.