LT – Black Knowing with Professor Lester Rigney

Murri Country

This week on Let’s Talk – Black Knowing, join Chelsea & David for a masterclass in Indigenous Intellectual Sovereignty with Professor Lester-Irabinna Rigney. Together, these extraordinary Black Knowers talk through the urgent struggles of the present moment, and the role that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, sovereignty, and knowledge will play in transforming the crisis conditions of the present. They talk through the ongoing epistemic warfare of colonisation, and the relentless erasure of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s intellectual sovereignty in this amnesiac settler colony. And they reflect on the big questions facing communities in this moment: what does a world without oil look like for Aboriginal people? How do Aboriginal people explain sea level rise and increasing salination globally? What does it mean that 100% of the young people incarcerated in the Northern Territory are Aboriginal? And what is the role of Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous knowers in addressing these questions?

In a truly extraordinary live conversation, these scholars talk through the ethical and political challenge of intellectual work: to be skeptical of the promise of colonial progress and to critique the persistent inequality of the present, while also remaining committed to intellectual work that might actually enable transformation and justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The task of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander intellectuals, to paraphrase Professor Rigney, is to make transformation possible, rather than despair convincing. If our intellectual work is not addressing the biggest questions of this moment – if it’s not committed to meeting the rising oceans inundating the homelands of our coastal kin and Pacific neighbours head on – then who is it really for?

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