Call for Papers: Land, education and settler colonialism
Description
This is a one-day research workshop focusing on histories of land, education and settler colonialism.
Settler colonialism is fundamentally a project of land: its acquisition, governance, and transformation to suit political and economic aims. Yet the processes through which land is claimed and controlled have not been confined to legal or economic domains alone. Institutions such as education systems have been central to the operation and maintenance of settler colonial societies and have played a critical role in mediating relationships to land.
Stolen land has also been put into the service of education explicitly, evident through the endowment of vast reserve lands as a funding mechanism for education across the settler colonies of North America, Australia and Aotearoa. At the same time, schooling has been shaped by settlement policies, local economies, and the material conditions of places, producing uneven and contested outcomes across different regions. Both land and education have been central to state building in settler colonial societies.
By bringing land and education into the same analytical frame, this workshop seeks to move beyond treating schooling as a discrete policy domain. It foregrounds how educational institutions are embedded within broader structures of land laws, ownership, economic development, resource extraction, and governance. It also opens space to examine Indigenous resistance, adaptation, and resurgence in and around educational settings. It shows the need for historically grounded, place-based analyses that attend to the entanglement of land, legislation, and everyday institutional practice, and to their enduring impacts on First Nations communities.
When: Wed 9 December, 10am-5pm
Where: University of Technology Sydney, Building 10 (Room 580)
Contact: Beth Marsden: beth.marsden@unimelb.edu.au
The call for papers has now closed
PROGRAM
Format 10-15 minute informal papers with option for shorter provocations/work in progress
9:30-11am | Session 1: Structures |
Tamson Pietsch | Land Endowments and Public Education in the Anglo-settler world |
Joel Barnes | Wealth derived from land and university funding |
David Goodman | The Georgia Land Lotteries and Education |
11-11:30am | Morning tea |
11:30-1 | Session 2: Case studies |
Penny Vlies | Eliciting Country: The 1949 Native Education Curriculum |
Sybil Nolan | Education and settler colonialism in the Victorian Mallee: a case study of Goyura |
Ruby Ekkel | Tree-mindedness and transcendence in school gardens |
1- 2pm | Lunch |
2-3:45pm | Session 3: Systems |
Julian Rawiri Kusabs | Whenua (Land), Tino Rangatiratanga (Sovereignty), and the 1969 Transfer of Māori Schools to the New Zealand Education Board System |
Nancy Cushing | Imagining a Clean Slate: Founding postwar universities on stolen lands |
Beth Marsden | Closer settlement legislation and school system expansion |
4pm | Drinks at Abercrombie Hotel |
Image credit: Hundred of Tatiara, SA, showing Council of Education and University of Adelaide endowment lands, and the school reserve.
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