Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius;
Understanding the Ways in Which Aboriginal Women Speak Blak to Colonial Australia

Artistic terra nullius refers to the violent erasure of Aboriginal women and builds from the historic notion of Aboriginal People as ‘absent.’ This research set out to respond to the work of Aboriginal women excluded from white art & cultural institutions & public space. I practised community ways of ‘being, knowing and doing’ to witness, participate in & respond to Aboriginal women’s community work, art making & resistance.

This work is generating insight about how Aboriginal women are at the intersection of colonial injuries, including gender, race, class and social positioning. By subverting settler modes & canons of art with anti-coloniality & resisting in spaces like academia, violent justice systems, public life & social media, Aboriginal women recreate strategies of survivance. The exegesis & art created in response weaves diverse strands of ‘ghost weaving,’ threading cultural practices as ‘acts of sovereignty’; writing, speaking, performing, art, matriarchal knowledge, memory, healing, daily acts of repair, familial story, theory & installation to express loss & unconditional love.
Aboriginal women’s contributions speak back & blak to ongoing coloniality with healing & daily acts of resistance & repair.

Psychology and disability activism in Indonesia: Disrupting normalised patronising knowledge and practices

Compared to other social issues in Indonesia, disability tends to get less public and academic attention, including from psychology. Drawing on my experience of being involved in disability activism, in this presentation I will share on how scholars in the area of disability studies in Indonesia have attempted to challenge the marginalisation of disability in the academic settings and practices. The marginalisation of people with disability has been academically reproduced through patronising research and interventions. Against this background, I argue that developing knowledge and practices, which are more responsive to the lived experiences and struggles of people with disability, is a greatly needed form of solidarity. In the case of psychology in Indonesia, promoting such a solidarity requires several changes related to how disability has been commonly approached. These include disrupting the normalised exclusion, moving away from the hegemony of ‘normal versus abnormal’ discourse, being more critical to the domination of rehabilitative models of intervention, and orienting toward locally contextual knowledge and practices of disability.

Keywords: disability, Indonesia, psychology

From apolitical “inclusion” to decolonial solidarity: Building communities of resistance against coloniality

Settler colonialism and coloniality are deep-rooted, pervasive sociopolitical and cultural structures. These structures are crucially implicated in the precarity and displacement that constitute the lived realities of the vast majority of people in the global South. Communities denied of the “right to have rights” are engaged in the fight to reclaim their dignity, rights, land, and their place in the world. Yet his fight implicates all of us; it is imperative to resist manifold vectors of injustice from our different relations to precarity and (dis)placement. This includes troubling apolitical ideas of inclusion that incorporate or accommodate people into profoundly unequal and violent structures—existing structures that privilege harmony or accord above disruption or dissidence. Anchored in my decolonial and transnational feminist praxis alongside communities fighting against state violence and repression in Northeast India, this talk will grapple with multiple dimensions of structural violence—from its colonial underpinnings to ongoing resistance struggles against it. I will attempt to narrate these stories in ways that not only confront the consequences of histories of power and oppression, but also hold up desire—interweaving stories that uncover social lies, legitimize rage, honor grief and pain, and allow for creativity, love, and communality.