[Anthropgrad] CAEPR Seminar 28 May, 12.30-2pm Tim Rowse

[Katarina Ferro]

CAEPR Seminar
28 May 2008, 12.30 -2pm; AD Hope, Humanities Conference Room

The politics of 'the gap' in Australia and New Zealand
---Tim Rowse, Research School of Social Sciences, ANU.

*Abstract:* This paper is part of a longer project about the history of 
Indigenous population statistics in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. 
In the contemporary use of official statistics by Indigenous and 
non-Indigenous policy intellectuals, a particular understanding of 
social justice has emerged. Public discussion highlights the population 
binary 'Indigenous/non-Indigenous' and finds unjust the 'gap' between 
Indigenous and non-Indigenous values of certain socio-economic 
variables. I will answer two questions:
(1) How did we get the binary that we now use? I will identify moments 
in the recent past in which there has been debate about where the 
boundary (defining the Indigenous/non-Indigenous binary) should be placed.
(2) What is the relationship between evoking the 'Indigenous people' (a 
politico-juridical entity) and quantifying the 'Indigenous population' 
(a socio-demographic entity)? Indigenous advocacy in Australia and New 
Zealand does both, but there is a tension between these two ideas. I 
will argue that our research and advocacy should draw on the data about 
'Indigenous population' to give more consideration of the differences 
among the 'Indigenous people', in order to develop a more complex theory 
of social justice.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/anthropgrad/attachments/20080526/d9d72a14/attachment.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: katarina_ferro.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 337 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/anthropgrad/attachments/20080526/d9d72a14/attachment.vcf