Call for Papers: Land, education and settler colonialism

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 TBC)

Contact: Beth Marsden: beth.marsden@unimelb.edu.au

CALL FOR PAPERS

We welcome historically and interdisciplinary approaches that explore how the ties between land and education, with a focus on Australia and New Zealand in the context of broader settler colonial histories. Topics might include:

• First Nations dispossession, access, and exclusion in education

• First Nations engagement, resistance, and self-determination in schooling

• Settlement legislation and schooling

• Archives, memory and narratives of land

• Survey and allocation of land use

• Agriculture and pastoralism and mining

• Decolonising and land back movements

• Private vs public land and education

• Education, economic policy and labour

• Australia and New Zealand in transnational perspective

• Legal frameworks governing land allocation for education

• Legal and institutional links between land policy and schooling

• Land grants to churches and church schools

• Local studies of schools and land relations

• Learning about land

• Education for land use: agriculture, mining, resource management

Format 10-15 minute informal papers with option for shorter provocations/work in progress 

Please express your interest in presenting by sending a short EOI of title, 200 word abstract and 100 word biography to Beth Marsden before 30 September 2026: beth.marsden@unimelb.edu.au

If you are interested in attending please hit the "Register your Interest" button and we will be in touch nearer the time.

Image credit: Hundred of Tatiara, SA, showing Council of Education and University of Adelaide endowment lands, and the school reserve.