Doing decolonisation: cultural reconnection as political resistance in schooling

Abstract

As the final piece of scholarship in the special issue, this paper pulls together data from the Aboriginal Voices project to analyse how Aboriginal students in Australia today experience schooling, particularly in relation to the futurity of their identity as sovereign First Nations Peoples. Using Decolonising Race Theory as a key methodological framework in this special issue enabled an assessment of the purpose and effects of coloniality to acknowledge the survival and innovation of First Nations Peoples in resisting and imagining a future otherwise. In doing so, the empirical data, and provocations, presented throughout this collection, opens up possibilities for exploring how the centrality of sovereignty impacts young Aboriginal students’ interactions with and experienced success within the Australian schooling system.