Books by Elizabeth Strakosch
"Reading Elizabeth Strakosch’s incisive account of the procedural mechanisms whereby neoliberal ... more "Reading Elizabeth Strakosch’s incisive account of the procedural mechanisms whereby neoliberal settler colonialism seeks to reduce the politics of conquest to a welfare issue reminds me of second-wave feminism’s transformative insistence that the personal is political. Lucidly, methodically and with great intelligence, Strakosch shows how, in the twenty-first century, the technical has become political, as she uncovers the technocratic ruses whereby Australian governments have sought to convert the unresolved question of Indigenous sovereignty into a depoliticised managerial agenda, the preserve of service delivery rather than international relations. The implications of this astute analysis are immediate and profound".
Patrick Wolfe, La Trobe University, Australia.
Papers by Elizabeth Strakosch
The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics, 2020
This chapter argues that the relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-I... more This chapter argues that the relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous societies in Australia is complex and conflictual, and that the nature of that relationship is itself a site of conflict. It identifies and elaborates the dominant ways of understanding the relationship in the Australian context: policy, rights, nation-building, and sovereignty. Different registers have been more influential at different times, but all have been present throughout the history of Indigenous–state interactions. While the policy register is dominant in academic and public discourse, this chapter suggests that viewing the relationship in terms of sovereign political orders is more useful.
Memorials in Times of Transition, 2014
Postcolonial Studies, 2020
ABSTRACT This article explores the value of theorising about colonialism that is specific rather ... more ABSTRACT This article explores the value of theorising about colonialism that is specific rather than universal, informed by our locations in colonial struggles and driven by engagement with our continuing material colonial relationships with land, place and people. We do this by examining recent scholarly engagements with our contemporary precarious global economic and environmental conditions, particularly within settler colonial theory. We argue that using analogy to think our way out of material colonial and racial relations can obscure the authority of Indigenous peoples and reproduce colonial epistemologies. This attempt to create solidarity through political equivalence risks reifying imperial relationships and resecuring white possession. Rather than seeking to evade our positions as colonisers embedded in violent political systems, we argue it is possible for colonisers to act in solidarity from a position of complicity. Working towards justice from our own locations involves building solidarity across differences, without first needing to reduce these differences to sameness.
Abstract, open and inclusive memorial forms appear most often in instances where nations attempt ... more Abstract, open and inclusive memorial forms appear most often in instances where nations attempt to memorialize their own crimes. They seem to be capable of allowing both the perpetrating nation and its victims to express their histories in a single, integrated monument, and thus to encapsulate a new unified postconflict identity. A close examination of the central symbolic space of the Australian capital, however, reveals more complex political interactions. The state’s use of open memorial forms to publicly remember the experiences of Indigenous peoples under colonialism allows these events to be included and ‘overcome’ without substantially confronting Indigenous identities. The interactive, passive monument reflects back the preexisting understandings of viewers, struggles to challenge the surrounding traditional memorials, and delegitimises ‘unofficial’ but more disruptive expressions of victims’ stories. This suggests that, where the processes of restitution are controlled by ...
Indigenous peoples constitute permanent and culturally unique minorities spread throughout the se... more Indigenous peoples constitute permanent and culturally unique minorities spread throughout the settler states of both North and South, characterized by prior claims to the territory they inhabit and an ongoing experience of colonization (UNDESA 2010a: 6). They do not have a formal political voice within the international state system, and must instead assert jurisdiction against powerful state institutions that have an interest in denying their political existence. This has meant that Indigenous marginalization and poverty have generally been classified as domestic social policy problems of settler states and neglected by the global community. However, over the past 40 years, Indigenous transnational activism has led to greater visibility of their claims. Recent milestones include the first meeting of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII, in 2002) and the adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). This global recognition makes it more diff...
Those interested in sustaining a national narrative of progress and patriotism have been outraged... more Those interested in sustaining a national narrative of progress and patriotism have been outraged by suggestions that past treatment of Aboriginal people might constitute genocide. The term immediately raises the spectre of the Jewish Holocaust, and to conservative nationalists implies a direct moral comparison between Nazi and British colonial policies. In defence of the national past, Keith Windschuttle has produced a work justifying the actions of the settlers and denying systematic violence and mistreatment of Aboriginal people. Given that no one has seriously suggested that any form of moral equivalence exists between Nazi Germany and colonial Australia, Windschuttle’s defensiveness is counterproductive. It serves to create parallels between the two situations by employing the same methodological template as Holocaust deniers. As A. Dirk Moses has observed, both Windschuttle and Holocaust deniers use a fundamentalist form of documentary positivism, ignore convergences of eviden...
Australian Journal of Political Science, 2019
In the United Kingdom and America, political scientists are involved in increasingly intense conv... more In the United Kingdom and America, political scientists are involved in increasingly intense conversations about the implication of the discipline in racial and colonial hierarchies. As a recent volume by Bhambra, Gebrial and Nisancioglu begins, ‘the call to decolonise univeristies across the global north has gained particular traction in recent years’ (2018, 1). In the contemporary ‘post-race’ world, these interventions insist on the importance of naming and challenging ongoing inequalities and role of disciplinary knowledge in maintaining them. In 2016, Kennan Ferguson asked in Perspectives on Politics ‘Why Does Political Studies Hate American Indians?’, and in 2018, two key edited volumes were published: Dismantling Race in Higher Education edited by Arday and Mirza, and the Bhambra, Gebrial and Nisancioglu volume cited above (Decolonising the University). Most recently, Political Studies Review published two articles on the need for and possibilities of decolonising political science pedagogy in the British context of empire and race (Begum and Saina 2019; Emejulu 2019). The chair of the Political Studies Association of the UK responded in the same issue, acknowledging that ‘these two pieces challenge the discipline to be better at inclusivity’ and that ‘this issue is a key concern for political science’ (Wilson 2019, 207). In Australia, however, we are not subjecting ourselves to sustained academic self-examination nor discussing how we might contribute more effectively to scholarly and public debate in this domain. Here, political science generally continues its long running approach of positioning Indigenous people as subjects and objects to be known and problematised by the settler-dominated discipline. Rarely are they seen as producers of knowledge and as members of unique sovereign polities. The emerging field of critical Indigenous studies systematically challenges this dynamic, ‘disrupt[ing] the certainty of disciplinary knowledges produced in the twentieth century, when the study of Indigenous peoples was largely the domain of non-Indigenous scholars’ (Moreton-Robinson 2016, location 174; see also Moreton-Robinson 2015; Tuhiwai Smith 2012; Watson 2015). It traces the links between imperialism and academic production over history, and shows that universities have done more than simply sideline Indigenous people as knowers – they have produced knowledge that has directly facilitated colonial rule and the dispossession of Indigenous people (Tuhiwai Smith 2012, see also Moreton-Robinson 2009). As articles in this symposium suggest, this rich body of Indigenous critical work is sidelined within Australian political science and its deep challenge is yet to be addressed. Will
Australian Journal of Political Science, 2019
Multi-task learning (MTL) has been shown to improve prediction performance in a number of differe... more Multi-task learning (MTL) has been shown to improve prediction performance in a number of different contexts by learning models jointly on multiple different, but related tasks. Network data, which are a priori data with a rich relational structure, provide an important context for applying MTL. In particular, the explicit relational structure implies that network data is not i.i.d. data. Network data also often comes with significant metadata (i.e., attributes) associated with each entity (node). Moreover, due to the diversity and variation in network data (e.g., multi-relational links or multi-category entities), various tasks can be performed and often a rich correlation exists between them. Learning algorithms should exploit all of these additional sources of information for better performance. In this work we take a metric-learning point of view for the MTL problem in the network context. Our approach builds on structure preserving metric learning (SPML) [3]. In particular SPML learns a Mahalanobis distance metric for node attributes using network structure as supervision, so that the learned distance function encodes the structure and can be used to predict link patterns from attributes. In the fundamental paper [3] SPML is described for single-task learning on single network. Herein, we propose a multi-task version of SPML, abbreviated as MT-SPML, which is able to learn across multiple related tasks on multiple networks via shared intermediate parametrization. MT-SPML learns a specific metric for each task and a common metric for all tasks. The task correlation is carried through the common metric and the individual metrics encode task specific information. When combined together, they are structure-preserving with respect to individual tasks. MT-SPML works on general networks, thus is suitable for a wide variety of problems. In experiments, we challenge MT-SPML with two common real-word applications: citation prediction for Wikipedia articles and social circle prediction in Google+. Our results show that MT-SPML achieves significant improvement over other competing methods.
Australian Journal of Political Science, 2018
ABSTRACT Contemporary Australian Indigenous policy changes rapidly and regularly fails to deliver... more ABSTRACT Contemporary Australian Indigenous policy changes rapidly and regularly fails to deliver its stated aims. Additionally, political and social relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian state remain complex and contested. This article draws on critical Indigenous theory, alongside the increasingly influential scholarly paradigm of settler colonialism, to draw these two elements together. It highlights the ongoing nature of colonial conflict, and the partisan nature of state institutions and processes. While policy is usually framed as a depoliticised, technical practice of public management for Indigenous wellbeing, I suggest that it also seeks to ‘domesticate’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, perform their dysfunction and demonstrate state legitimacy. This is especially the case in Australia, which has a long tradition of framing domestic welfare policy – rather than legal agreements – as the ‘solution’ to settler colonial conflict.
The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation, 2016
As many have argued, the Western political theory tradition tends to justify settler colonialism ... more As many have argued, the Western political theory tradition tends to justify settler colonialism and erase its ongoing effects. However, this chapter suggests that we can draw on resources from within that tradition to challenge problematic settler colonial dynamics, which can prevent us as settlers from engaging in genuine political dialogue with Indigenous peoples. As an example, I show how Arendt helps us rethink traditional settler visions of ‘decolonisation’, which are deeply entwined with the drive to colonial completion and the erasure of Indigenous political independence. While her overall body of work has a complex relationship to settler colonialism, she offers an important critique of political projects that paradoxically seek to end politics once and for all. Most importantly, she reinstates political action as a positive enduring condition, and offers an account of politics as the good life rather than as pathway to the good life. This allow us to move the political task facing Indigenous and settler relations from ‘fixing the problem’ Indigenous people pose for us and for the dominant state towards fostering a productive but uncomfortable political coexistence. However, she can only help us to see the need for deep encounter with Indigenous people and worlds. At this point a different and more deeply dialogic conversation must begin.
Neoliberal Indigenous Policy, 2015
Neoliberal Indigenous Policy, 2015
Neoliberalism and settler colonialism are sometimes framed as manifestations of a single Western ... more Neoliberalism and settler colonialism are sometimes framed as manifestations of a single Western structure of domination. For example, Walter Mignolo argues that they are both forms of modernist coloniality and rely on the same possessive capitalist logic (2011). As emerges throughout this chapter, both neoliberalism and settler colonialism reflect drives to possession of property, and work through racialised hierarchies. They emerge from the same global imperial histories and both work to structure encounters between Western Europeans and the rest of the world. However, this book does not reduce the categories to one another. While they are intertwined as part of the longer interaction of liberalism and colonialism, I explore how they articulate together in a particular context, without necessarily presupposing their fundamental sameness or even commensurability. It is true that in neoliberal Indigenous policy they tend to facilitate one another, but neoliberalism also poses problems for the settler project that this project struggles to address.
Neoliberal Indigenous Policy, 2015
Social liberal logics informed the official Australian policy of ‘selfdetermination’. From the mi... more Social liberal logics informed the official Australian policy of ‘selfdetermination’. From the mid-1970s until the mid-1990s, federal governments acted to establish progressive systems of self-management and legislative recognition (Jull 2004; Stokes and Jull 2000; Murphy 2000; Gibson 1999). The centrepiece of this policy regime was the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC). ATSIC operated through an elected regional council structure and was thus positioned as an authentic Indigenous political voice (Murphy 2000). The selfdetermination approach overlapped with and supported a social ‘reconciliation’ agenda, whereby the state aimed to reform mainstream attitudes and address past injustices (Gunstone 2007; Gooder and Jacobs 2002). Within the self-determination/reconciliation framework, Indigenous peoples were positioned as disadvantaged through collective historical exclusion but deserving of full inclusion in the Australian nation-state. It was the responsibility of mainstream governments to enact this inclusion through legislation, social welfare and support for limited forms of autonomy (Gibson 1999).
Neoliberal Indigenous Policy, 2015
As Alfred points out, If sovereignty has been neither legitimized nor justified, it has neverthel... more As Alfred points out, If sovereignty has been neither legitimized nor justified, it has nevertheless limited the ways we are able to think, suggesting always a conceptual and definitional problem centred on the accommodation of indigenous peoples within a ‘legitimate’ framework of settler state governance. When we step outside this discourse, we confront a different problematic, that of the state’s ‘sovereignty’ itself. (Alfred 2005: 34–35)
This book examines recent changes to Indigenous policy in English-speaking settler states, and lo... more This book examines recent changes to Indigenous policy in English-speaking settler states, and locates them within the broader shift from social to neo-liberal framings of citizen-state relations via a case study of Australian federal policy between 2000 and 2007.
Indigenous Studies Research Network, 2012
So who am I/we today in this new so-called 'post-colonial landscape'? (I say so-called po... more So who am I/we today in this new so-called 'post-colonial landscape'? (I say so-called postcolonial because from my lived experiences there is very little which is postcolonial to the Aboriginal experience in Australia).
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Books by Elizabeth Strakosch
Patrick Wolfe, La Trobe University, Australia.
Papers by Elizabeth Strakosch
Patrick Wolfe, La Trobe University, Australia.