The Other Others

Lucky dip yarn this week where I close my eyes and pick a random stranger from my inbox. Jackpot! We pulled Martin Henke who is working on human marine habitats. We coin together an interesting term - 'The Underview Effect', and wonder about how learning from this project might inform change on the shore.

In the tradition of cultural exchange and embassy between Ireland and Aboriginal Australia ('proper deadly!'), here is a very exciting yarn with criminologist and surveillance expert Diarmaid Harkin about our shared experiences of colonial violence. The yarn follows a through-line of historical surveillance and oppression under English rule to today's post-covid escalation of dodgy tech applications in policing globally. There is also a bit of a book review of Irvine Welsh's Filth. Dr Diarmaid Harkin is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Deakin University in Australia. He is the author of the book Private Security and Domestic Violence: The Risks and  Benefits of Private Security Companies Working with Victims of Domestic  Violence. He has also researched the Consumer Spyware Industry and worked with the Office of the eSafety Commissioner on a project examining National responses to technology-facilitated abuse in the context of domestic and family violence.

A great yarn with one of Australia’s most respected Aboriginal educationalists. Professor Lester Irabinna Rigney is a Narungga / Kaurna /  Ngarrindjeri man who has been generous enough to sing my family into country around Adelaide over the past few weeks while I complete a residency at The University of South Australia. He is Professor of Education in the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion, and was previously a Distinguished Fellow at Kings College, London. Mostly, he's one of the holy trinity in Indigenous scholarship that you always cite when justifying using an Indigenous Standpoint in your research. I'm privileged to be writing a paper with him now on education futures, and here we share some of the foundational thinking and yarning we've been doing, the collective sense-making that always must be taken care of before you even begin identifying a specific research question in our field.

A different kind of string theory here, with two geniuses Siena Stubbs and David Turnbull, running some thought experiments and yarns to answer the question, 'What is real?' Siena Mayutu Wurmarri Stubbs is a photographer, a young Yolŋu woman of the Gumatj clan of the Yirritja moiety. Her homeland is Buwaka. David Turnbull is a retired scholar whose work has been an inspiration for a lot of thinking around spatial cognition in our lab. He says that science is an Atlas. Yeah, it's like that. Get ready for a fast ride around the universe. If you want more of David's work, check out this generous online publication: http://territories.indigenousknowledge.org/

Second public sharing of an Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab think-tank session, in which we grapple with our ongoing thought experiment about Extinction Offsets.

Strange, strange yarn with Aboriginal thinkers Lily McKnight and Claire G Coleman (sci fi author of Terra Nullius and The Old Lie) about whether stories without heroes are possible or even desirable, science fiction, and a deep dive into some thought experiments about the metaphysics of identity.

We play with a fable, that might become Story if enough people and place can work on it, with Daniel Schmachtenberger, founding member of The Consilience Project. https://consilienceproject.org/ Daniel is a thinker/doer who works on catastrophic and existential risk, civilization and institutional decay and collapse as well as progress, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science.

Big yarn with Daniel Christian Wahl, the expert of experts when it comes to intentional communities and cultural systems emergence. We talk about our discomfort when people use our work for purposes we're not really aligned with, why intentional communities fail and why so many people are into it at this moment in history.

A beautiful unlikely connection - Carol Sanford doesn't like introductions - all the books, all the MIT's and the rest. If you Google her you'll find a lot of promo material on her work in regenerative entrepreneurship, corporate consultancy and a misleading headshot. She's calling in from an aged care facility where she lives, and she is wonderful. She has written a great book on the toxicity of feedback, and is currently working on a new one about the horrors of behavioural psychology.