Author Archives: Helen Verran

Researching and Delivering Services in Governance in the Present of the Liberal Government’s Indigenous Advancement Strategy

A group of us in the Contemporary Aboriginal Knowledge and Governance section of TNI are committed to working an analytic which takes world—the here and nows we find ourselves participating in, as emergent.  This refuses the conventional modern analytic that has as given, an ‘out-there’ to be known or governed by an ‘in-here’ which knows or governs.  Instead in worlds taken as emergent, all participants—human and non-human, mix up in the present here and now.  We learned to think this way in the 1980s and 1990s when we worked for various Yolngu organizations, our learning taken in hand by particular generous old Yolngu men and women. This way of thinking led to the Garma Maths Curriculum which featured as a ABC Quantum video clip in my seminar at TNI last month.

Later we discovered that this analytic approach, one that we had painfully and slowly been inducted into, can relatively easily be connected to a variety of analytics that currently flourish in the academy: the frames embedded in the works of Foucault, Deleuze, Serres, and Latour, and Pyne Addelson (who is not a 20th century French poststructuralist like the others, but an American Pragmatist philosopher).

So what might our analytic approach to working with governance in communities from the ground-up offer in the present of the Abbot government’s ‘three musts’ of services provision in Indigenous communities?  Under the new policy of ‘Indigenous Advancement’ the ‘three musts’ of services provision in Indigenous communities are the following: Services provision must get kids in schools; people in jobs; and provide safe communities.

Hmmm….Our work in services provision involves waiting for, and starting from, governance problems that, like stories “just come along”, as one of our Yolngu colleagues, Yingiya Guyula, puts it. Currently Juli and Trevor working in Gapuwiyak, and Anthea in Ramangining, find themselves working with groups of elders who want to ‘bite the bullet’ and set up corporations.

While the story of this work is not mine to tell, as a member of the team I am concerned.  Despite having I, as much as an old Yolngu woman, find myself out of my depth. I find myself wishing I had studied law, and knew more about contracts theory.  Are there any lawyers out there offering services pro-bono?

Talking about our Governance Work at the Open University ‘Transforming Data’ Workshop. London Sept 2014

This workshop is intended as an exploration of what happens analytically when ‘data’ are put up against, compared with, juxtaposed with or thought through other sorts of knowing and doing. What happens when data practices are compared with or thought about in conjunction with that which lies outside them, or seems ‘other’ to them? It poses these questions in a time when data and the digital are being heralded as the means to unite, connect and level the world as known and governed. Thus this workshop is intended to problematize assumptions about what connectivity or unity might consist in, and to serve as a reminder of the existence of difference, otherness, what we do not yet know and cannot just include.

I was invited to present at a workshop of British researchers convened around this theme. I prepared a paper based on work that Matt Campbell and Michael Christie had published about governance practices around Alice Springs Town Camp houses. Of course these governance practices involve data: information assembled—often by Indigenous research teams like those Matt works with in Tangentyere Council. But also, these governance practices involve storying: the circulating of multiple narratives about each individual house. Both data and stories contain information crucial to good governance of the houses in Alice Springs Town Camps. ‘How can these be worked together?’, I asked. How can each information form be valued in its own right, and the differences between them respected? I proposed that governance can develop as a politics of dissensus which takes difference seriously if we learn how to do that.

But, in my talk I did not narrate this paper because I felt some background needed to be offered before the significance of the distinction between ‘doing data’ and ‘doing stories’ could be appreciated. Here are the slides (slightly modified) of the talk I gave. Of course Matt, Michael and I will discuss whether the paper I wrote and which was commented on by a discussant, might have a future. A lively discussion focusing in part on objects of governance and the forms of information they might require for a rich life, ensued.

TNI Governance Research – Presentation Slides