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The Lives Behind the Statistics: Policing Practices in Aboriginal Literature
Abstract
In contemporary Australia Aboriginal parents, and parents of Aboriginal kids, work to prepare their children for potentially negative encounters with police. Racialised policing practices target and enact state sanctioned violence upon Aboriginal communities. Statistics evidence these practices, with Aboriginal people being over-represented in all aspects of the criminal justice system. This paper explores the stories behind the statistics through a detailed examination of Boori Monty Pryor’s young adult fiction novel Njunjul the Sun. Close reading of this text illustrates how Aboriginal literature can deepen our understanding of social indicators through narrativising the complex and nuanced experiences of police and policing practices, including racist police violence.
... The violent arm of the Australian state, the police, killed ten beloved First Nations family members in custody in this colony between 2 March and 15 August 2021, and more than 476 beloved First Nations people since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was conducted in 1991 (See the Guardian's Deaths Inside database, also Razack, 2013). If not for colonial police and prisons, if not for the racism that the capitalist carceral state relies on (Wang, 2018;McKinnon, 2019), these people would be with us today. The colonial legal system in 'Australia' still puts children age ten in prisons. ...
The existing landscape of infrastructure governance discourses tends to focus on closing “governance gaps” commonly based on fractured and opaque neoliberal planning and delivery processes, privatisation and financialisation issues, and inequitable distribution and undemocratic decision‐making processes. These gaps represent a deeply troubling erosion of infrastructure’s capacity to serve public interests or confront crises of climate injustice. However, the literature rarely confronts the uncomfortable politics of decolonising infrastructure or acknowledges ongoing permutations of settler‐coloniality, implicating infrastructural framings of land, development, property, ownership, and decision‐making power. This paper reflects on the current state of infrastructure governance literature about ongoing settler‐colonial legacies in urban planning and development. Explaining some of the ways unceded Indigenous land has been exploited to facilitate settler state infrastructure development in major Australian cities, we then draw a line to the complicities of contemporary infrastructure governance. This foundation is considered using a systematic method to review infrastructure governance literature and reveal stark gaps in engagement with settler‐coloniality and the politics of decolonisation. In light of these silences, we reflect on disciplinary responsibilities to redress research practices and suggest two reflexive approaches centred on to truth‐telling and deep listening.
This chapter explores the epistemological and methodological questions we encountered when undertaking research on a perpetrator intervention program for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander men convicted of serious sexual offending (including against children) in Queensland, Australia. The chapter begins by providing an overview of the research project and its findings. The project sought to document the work of Indigenous Elders in providing cultural and spiritual support and mentorship to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander individuals who have been released from prison following a period of incarceration for serious sexual offending. Here, we draw on semi-structured qualitative interviews with a range of local stakeholders and service providers who contributed to the research. Our purpose is to critically interrogate their views on the intricacies of working with mandated clients in ways that reflect culturally safe practice.
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