Research Seminar: Unsettling the reason of time: Indigenist epistemology and the child in the Australian Curriculum

Dr. Stephen Kelly, Chief investigator in the ARC Discovery Project: Culturally Responsive Schooling (2022-2024) is co-presenting with Professor Lester-Irabinna Rigney.

Abstract: Colonial settler societies’ differing concepts and experiences of time entangle in enactments of curriculum knowledge and the governing of human subjects. The paper examines how an Anglo-Eurocentric historical representation of time is used as a principle of reason to establish the conditions of epistemic progress through curriculum and cultural accounts for human agency, a teleological understanding of human development, and representations of the individual as a subject of knowledge. Here we question how representations of temporality are deployed in curricula to problematise human potential and the subjectification of individuals through the promise of securing human flourishing. We connect this discussion to the way people of the First Nations of Australia report their understanding of time as a principle to order an immanent experience of materiality, recurrence, and becoming. This dialogue foregrounds how differing cultural conceptions of time establish conditions of possibility for experiencing and understanding the world.

• Dr Stephen Kelly, School of Education
• Professor Irabinna Rigney, University South Australia

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