Key insights: • Critical Whiteness Studies and the idea of "reversing the gaze" offer valuable tools for decolonising natural resource management cross-cultural collaborations with First Nations. Abstract Issues of race and sovereignty... more
Key insights: • Critical Whiteness Studies and the idea of "reversing the gaze" offer valuable tools for decolonising natural resource management cross-cultural collaborations with First Nations. Abstract Issues of race and sovereignty are embedded in every cross-cultural collaboration in natural resource management (NRM). This article aims to bring these issues to the forefront by incorporating the term whiteness. Whiteness enables a critique of the privileging of Western sovereignty and the so-called objective and universal value of Western science. By reversing the gaze away from the colonised Other and onto systems descended from colonial authority and its inheritors, whiteness identifies how race privilege works. A critical whiteness lens provides an analytical and practical tool for decolonising NRM. We provide a case study of the South Australian Department of Environment and Water to consider how NRM professionals reproduce and deconstruct whiteness in nuanced ways, where (a) participants are defeated by Western sovereignty when whiteness is seen as normal or as the only way; (b) the privilege of Western sovereignty begins to be unsettled; and (c) the gaze is reversed. Thus,Western sovereignty is problematized, and solutions to persistent problems are found in collaboration. We argue that reversing the gaze is a process that opens spaces to co-develop context specific solutions with Indigenous nations that decolonise cross-cultural engagement in NRM and respect Indigenous sovereignty.
Research Interests:
Objective To review the literature on nutrition interventions and identify which work to improve diet related and health outcomes in Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Research Interests:
Australia is built upon a foundation of colonial conquest, and continues to implement government policies and systems of management based on a colonising logic and the denial of Indigenous sovereignty. This study employed qualitative... more
Australia is built upon a foundation of colonial conquest, and continues to implement government policies and systems of management based on a colonising logic and the denial of Indigenous sovereignty. This study employed qualitative methods and discourse analysis, drawing on critical whiteness studies to explore the experiences of six non-Indigenous Australians who work for the South Australian Government in Aboriginal Partnerships and Natural Resource Management. The paper reveals that participants are largely critical of colonial structures of government, and the inequalities that arise. Despite this critical awareness, there was often difficulty in finding a language to describe the ‘fog of whiteness’, along with the tendency to describe ecological knowledge at the expense of more complex issues of First Nations sovereignty.
Accepted for publication, International Indigenous Policy Journal, 2018, Vol. 8 (1).
Accepted for publication, International Indigenous Policy Journal, 2018, Vol. 8 (1).