Anthropologist Tess Lea has recently launched her remarkable new book, 'Wild Policy: Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention'.

Drawing on her years in “the field”, which included being a lurker in the Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program – until she was thrown out by a Commonwealth Minister, her many years working with Indigenous people, bureaucrats, and construction crews on Groote Eylandt, and helping to establish and work in the Karrabing Film Collective, Tess gives us a book that is totally enthralling.

Wild Policy is compulsive and absolutely necessary reading for all of us who, as Tess notes, “eat the mine[s]” that eat into unceded Indigenous land, where the violence of “the settler is reasserted everyday”. It is a call to arms on many levels: a reminder that the “familiar tools of scrutiny can blind us to what might also be there, hidden in plain sight, if we care to look askance”; to know that while “good policy” may not be possible, rerouting its effects may allow for multiple points of intervention; and that “sometimes all it takes is to start doing and expecting, differently”.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction and Welcome to Country - Elspeth Probyn 03:05 Note from the Author - Tess Lea 05:15 Speaker Introductions - Elspeth Probyn 08:15 Book Response - Heidi Norman 20:25 Book Response - David Ritter 32:25 Book Response - Jakelin Troy 41:15 Book Response - Ghassan Hage 53:20 Author Responds to Respondents 01:03:20 Condensing Decades of Research into a Book 01:06:00 Blending Different Mediums and the Power of Visuals 01:10:45 Ethnographic techniques and Indigenous Research Practices 01:19:35 Closing Remarks

Speakers

Professor Ghassan Hage, Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne Associate Professor Tess Lea, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney Professor Heidi Norman, Social and Political Sciences Program, University of Technology Sydney Professor Elspeth Probyn (Chair), Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney David Ritter, Greenpeace Australia Pacific Professor Jakelin Troy, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research, University of Sydney

This event was held via Zoom on Friday 11 September, 2020 in partnership with the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies. For more information about this event visit: https://bit.ly/3qlh0Df

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