How do indigenous knowledges inhabit the neoliberal knowledge economy?
The Institute for Contemporary Critical Thought is pleased to invite you to join us for a seminar and discussion with Miranda Johnson, on the trials and tribulations of indigenous knowledges under neoliberalism.
The classification of ‘Indigenous knowledge’ denoting a distinct system of ideas and practices held and produced by Indigenous people has seen a remarkable rise to prominence in academic research globally in the past three to four decades. This is the same period in which neoliberal reforms have taken hold in many countries around the world. In this seminar, Miranda Johnson presents a different argument about the relationship between Indigenous knowledge and neoliberalism in a particular case, that of Aotearoa New Zealand. Over the past twenty years, what is known as ‘mātauranga Māori’ (Māori knowledge) in this country has acquired a significant profile in universities. The argument she present suggests that advocates of mātauranga Māori have made the most of opportunities presented in economic and institutional policy changes associated with the neoliberalization of universities. It shows that matters of epistemology cannot be divorced from questions of material context and economic policy change. This strategic advocacy is not the work of purported ‘non-moderns’ operating in an ontologically distinct world but, rather, of political actors critiquing and opening up institutional spaces for the purposes of advancing their knowledge project.
Miranda Johnson is an associate professor of history at the University of Otago. She previously held positions at the University of Sydney and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first book The Land Is Our History: Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State (OUP, 2016) examined transnational Indigenous rights movements in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. She has co-edited another volume Pacific Futures: Past and Present (2018) and published widely in journals such as American Historical Review, Public Culture, and Postcolonial Studies, as well as in numerous edited volumes, and for public venues. The seminar topic is part of a wider project on the postcolonial and neoliberal imaginaries of the New Zealand settler state in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Pre-readings to stimulate reflection and discussion for the session will be forwarded to those who register.
