Toward the dialogical study of politics: hunting at the fringes of Australian political science

Abstract

Australian political science is broadly derivative of British-European liberal ideas and prescriptions. It supports Settler governance by following dominant political dynamics, and struggles to engage with Indigenous political ordering other than through British-European settler-colonial logics. In response, this article experiments with a dialogical approach to studying political science that is responsive to Indigenous frames of reference and attentive to the colonial political relationship that Indigenous and non-Indigenous people share. We first document and attempt to break with the structural politics of knowledge that conditions Australian political science. We then deploy an idiom for advancing macro-level and informal insights for knowing liberalism on the Australian continent. The final section outlines a selection of key challenging questions that Australian political science needs to address if it is to enter into more appropriate relations with Indigenous political ontology and peoples of the continent.