Storying: a Reflection on Entanglements with Indigenous Australian Methodology

• Main Author: Slater, Olivia JE
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: CERJ, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge 2020
• Subjects: Indigenous Australian methodologies; Storying; Applied Drama; Moreton; First Nations
• Online Access: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/311229; https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.58324

This article explores a First Nations PhD student’s personal narrative of navigating the entanglement of obligations, relationships, and methodology, while undertaking research with their own community within the Australian settler state. The experience of First Nations PhD student in our journey toward epistemological resonance confined by our unique geopolitical contexts is not adequately represented in any one discourse. Not only are First Nations PhD students dispersed throughout disciplines with unique specific circumstances, we are relative newcomers to the academy. On my journey I privilege my scholarly Matriarchs, Ngugi and Waka Waka scholar Professor Tracey Bunda and Goenpal scholar Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson, while also honouring my own Elders and Matriarchs. I am undertaking fieldwork with Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company, a long running Aboriginal theatre company located in Boorloo (Perth, Western Australia). Phillips and Bunda’s Storying (2018) underpins my pedagogical approach in the classroom, which highlights students’ understandings of, and critical engagement with, culture, identity and belonging, in a high school drama classroom. I also experiment with Storying as a method of writing, further illustrating the entanglement of the work and the work’s outcomes. Moreton-Robinson provides the broader critical perspectives needed to acknowledge the role the settler state has to play in the attempted erasure of Indigenous Australian knowledges. As a result, this article stories the lived experience of a First Nations Education student in the context of studying at the University of Cambridge, while also undertaking fieldwork on their Whadjuk Noongar homelands of Boorloo.