Colloquium Organiser: Ana Tankosić

Colloquium Summary

Informed by translingual and critical race theory perspectives, this colloquium sets to explore cases of inequality and injustice in the context of Australia, where language and culture become a defining and defined, constructing and constructed, and revealing and revealed feature of social, ethno-racial, national, political, religious, and economic identity. Through presentations which address systemic marginalisation of Aboriginal and migrant communities, the colloquium seeks to deconstruct ‘Australian-ness’ as an ideological standard against which these groups are discredited, criticised, and discriminated because their linguistic and cultural identities are not in accordance with the widely held norms of the government and mainstream public. This may include discussion on linguistic racism and racism, stereotypes, accentism, and whitewashing in institutional and non-institutional contexts. More broadly, the colloquium examines the nature and effect of ideologically unmarked whiteness, as a construct in racialized binaries, which cancels the presence of everything else and “whitens out” others in the world of language and culture. In other words, different linguistic and cultural identities are rendered invisible under the cloak of ‘other’ against the normative positioning of unmarked whiteness. Through presentations and a follow-up discussion, the presenters showcase their transdisciplinary work with CaLD communities from ‘down-under’, and challenge pervasive White monolingual assumptions about cultural and linguistic identities.

“Stop talkin’ city like, talk yarnin’ like”, Aboriginal secondary ‘student researchers’ together with non-Aboriginal ‘teacher researchers’ as allies: developing culturally relevant collaborative research methods to learn from each other

Helen McCarthy & Lissy Jackson

In a regional Western Australian Christian Aboriginal vocational boarding school, a research project set out to investigate if the school was preparing its young people to transition from school to life beyond school, including the workplace. Current students at the boarding school learned to become ‘student researchers’ interviewing former students’ to collect their respective post school experiences.

Shaped over a period, the project evolved intuitively by the student researchers themselves. Seldom within research projects are young people bequeathed responsibility to take up research leadership roles, influence the design of the research and actively shape it by their ideas, inculcate it resoundingly with their Voice. Concomitantly, several other influences were nurtured including embedding Indigenous ways of knowing and doing; Ganma-bringing together different ways of learning, Dadirri-listening deeply to the participants ensuring cultural safely, 8 Ways-visually mapping the sharing without losing history, integrity or story, Yarning-a deeply familiar talking style that helped participants draw on /out their experiences, shaped by the critical interpretive auto/ethnography methodology-where the ‘insider’ the students and the ‘outsider’ the teachers, converge. This encouraged a shared space for all perspectives within a parity of esteem, interspersed and interwoven within the young people’s language and culture.

The student researchers carefully applied proper research and ethical protocols to create a collection of stories honestly and respectfully. Designing the project experience as well culminated in the enablement of culturally and contextually appropriate multimodal resources including podcast development, song writing and performance, competence in using multimedia tools for interviewing and editing, a collaborative art design project cresting in a new school uniform shirt and the creation of an Application (App) software with ‘just in time’ linguistically and culturally appropriate answers to a range of questions that might possibly impact young First Nations people’s lives.

Keywords: Indigenous Methodologies; Aboriginal young people’s Voice; Cultural and Linguistic Parity of Esteem; Autoethnography; Allies

Exploring the systemic marginalisation of First Nations language learners in Australian schooling through the lens of decolonising race theory

Carly Steele

Building upon Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Brayboy’s Tribal Critical Race Theory (TribalCrit), Moodie (2017) argues that these theories, whilst useful, do not fully account for the experiences of Indigenous peoples because they are founded on ‘race’ instead of ‘place’. Moodie (2017) proposes Decolonising Race Theory (DRT) as an analytical framework to understand the how, through the seizure of territory, settler colonialism (Wolfe, 1994) operates to erase Indigenous sovereignty. Using DRT as the theoretical lens, this presentation explores how First Nations language learners are systematically marginalised in the Australian schooling system through an examination of educational policies and practices, and the politics and public discourses that surround them. Our analysis, using Blackmore and Lauder’s (2011) approach to researching policy, showed four key language education policy operants have emerged in this context: settler colonialism, neoliberalism and educational reform, socio-political factors, and language perspectives. Together, they act to deepen racial and linguistic inequalities perpetuated through the Australian schooling system. Lastly, I discuss future directions for research, policy and practice. Informed by CRT and DRT perspectives, I consider how the use of counter narratives and personal voices can be used to reveal entrenched racism and work to develop empathy and understanding.

Keywords: First Nations language learners; Australian school system; Decolonising Race Theory; Critical Race Theory

Poly-minorities and intersectionality in trans- perspectives: Challenging CaLD stereotypes

Ana Tankosić

Within trans- perspectives, the label poly-minority (Tankosić & Dovchin, under review) acknowledges the strength of CaLDs’ transcultural capital, including awareness of diversity, navigation of integration challenges, and the ability to draw on “diverse transcultural skills, networks, and systems of knowledge” (Mansouri & Al-deen, 2023, p. 1998), but it also reflects the “complexity of intersectional identity and multiple oppression” (Baskerville, 2022, p. 229). In spaces informed and characterised by Anglo-Western ideologies and discourses, poly-minorities are exposed to an overlapping form of marginalisation where cultural and linguistic stereotypes coincide and blend with ethnic, racial, and gender stereotypes. Drawing on ethnographic data with first- and second-generation CaLD migrants in Australia, I explore how intersectionality is reflected in different forms of social stereotypes which attempt to subordinate, inferiorise, and judge the ‘other’. These stereotypes are shaped and performed differently depending on the type of characteristics which reflect the poly-minority status of CaLD individuals. More specifically, in this presentation I focus on stereotypes which imply sexual objectification, exoticisation, and inferiorisation of CaLD women, as well as racialisation and deskilling of CaLD individuals from the Global South. The discussion of findings serves the purpose of uncovering underlying systemic and social disparities in Australia, as they are (in)advertently perpetuated and invigorated by a more dominant counterpart. Translingual transgressivism, in this sense, equips us with strategies to overcome intersectionality of marginalised identities through storytelling, diversification, and cross-cultural awareness.

Keywords: intersectionality; poly-minority; stereotypes; CaLD; Australia

“Asian drivers, you so sirry!” Linguistic racism on social media

Stephanie Dryden

The concept of cultural racism weaponises the (alleged) cultural traits of a minority group in order to target, stigmatise, and discriminate against them. One aspect of cultural racism that is emerging in the scholarly literature is its inter-relationship with linguistic racism, which diminishes and racializes minority groups’ linguistic repertoires in order to maintain existing cultural and linguistic hierarchies. This presentation examines the discursive construction of linguistic racism and other elements of cultural racism on anonymous social media posts, to discover the social implications of cultural racism in Australia. Using digital ethnography to shadow one Facebook page, new understandings arise regarding the ways that linguistic racism, through Mock Asian, and cultural racism, through Orientalist tropes, are used to target Asian-Australians’ culture and activities, using race, gender, culture and linguistic identities to frame Asians as perpetual foreigners in Australian society. What emerges are instances of hate speech that aim to diminish Asians’ driving skills through Mock Asian and Orientalism, drawing the overall assertion through these tropes that Asians are unsafe drivers on Australian roads. The marked cultural and linguistic mockery on the page call into question Asians’ citizenship through its valuation of Anglicised cultural and linguistic homogeny as the only legitimate Australian identity. When combined with the mockery of their driving practices, the page also questions Asians’ ability to integrate, and their hazardousness to the dominant Australian society. From these findings, the presentation closes by outlining the implications of how social media platforms moderate such content, and how education regarding linguistic racism and social media safety can be disseminated, particularly by government bodies.

Key words: Linguistic racism; cultural racism; Mock Asian; Orientalism; Facebook, Asians; driving

Talking inclusion and exclusion: creating the nation through ‘Australian values’

Farida Fozdar

This paper considers two decades of government recruitment of ‘Australian values’ as an exclusionary device, focusing on how apparently inclusionary words are combined in ways that convey exclusionary meaning. Using data from a range of sources (political speeches, official government documents, focus groups and a survey), the paper uses critical discourse analysis and elements of conversation analysis to consider how the notion of Australian values has been constructed as fundamental to Australian-ness, as explicitly linked to European and Judeo-Christian heritage (and thus racialized), and as a means for holding migrants to a higher level of morality and national commitment than others. The data is analysed to demonstrate how the right to national belonging is framed not as inhering in civic rights, but as commitment to living, and thinking, in a particular way. The ways some migrants embrace, and others resist, this construction, is also considered.

Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis; Conversation Analysis; Australian values; racialisation; exclusion; nationalism

What’s in a word? Imagined “Australian-ness” and being “Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CaLD)”

Toni Dobinson

In this presentation I examine a narrative used to define some migrant communities in Australia which creates a racialized binary and constructs these groups as “the other”. This discourse measures certain migrants against imagined “Australian-ness” because their cultural and linguistic identity is perceived to be at odds with the norms of the wider community. I unpack discriminatory and discrediting labels afforded to these groups in the past such as Non-English Speaking Background (NESB) (1980s) to the present- Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CaLD) (1996 until currently); both terms used to describe non-Indigenous ethnic groups mainly coming from countries in the Global South. Through qualitative, semi-structured, in-depth interviews and thematic analysis of these interviews, migrants disclose their feelings about being constructed as Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CaLD), seeing such labelling as being equally divisive and homogenising; blurring their lived experiences and needs, and ignoring the intersectional aspects of the groups. While the term is intended as ‘inclusionary othering,’ to raise awareness of diverse knowledges, cultures and languages, and assist in targeting lack of service provision, financial support, and access to resources, networks, and employment creation in these groups, it implicitly differentiates these individuals from the dominant group and creates a situation of “us” and “them”.

Keywords: CaLD; Australian-ness; 'us' and 'them'