Kulturkampf

[Potato]

For the Aussies

Embedding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge in Australian space policy
Dr Lara Daley
$528,491


Guided by Yolngu and Gumbaynggirr Custodians, Dr Lara Daley’s project will help shape culturally respectful and environmentally responsible space exploration.

Learning from songlines, creation stories and deep cultural connections between people and sky Country, the research will develop intercultural guidelines to help inform space policy, public education and industry practice. The project aims to broaden Australia’s understanding of space by recognising long-held Indigenous knowledge systems and their relevance to sustainable human activity beyond Earth.

https://www.newcastle.edu.au/newsroom/featured/early-career-researchers-awarded-more-than-2.1m-arc-decra-funding-to-drive-future-innovation

We're really leaning into the whole magical native trope.

Biography

Lara Daley is a Research Fellow in the discipline of geography and environmental studies. Lara's research is grounded in trying to live their responsibilities as a white, non-Indigenous person on unceded Aboriginal lands. Their research takes place through intercultural, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, human and more-than-human research collectives on Gumbaynggirr Country (mid north coast NSW) and in North East Arnhem Land. Led by Aboriginal Elders and Custodians, Lara's research attends to human and more-than-human connections and protocols, the urban as Country, and so-called 'outer' space as already known, cared for, and inhabited through Indigenous ontologies and systems of governance.

Lara is a member of Yandaarra, from Gumbaynggirr Country on the mid-North Coast of NSW. Yandaarra means 'shifting camp together' in Gumbaynggirr and, together, the group, led by Aunty Shaa Smith and Uncle Bud Marshall, looks to better understand, and practice, caring for ourselves, each other and Country in this current time of radical environmental change.

Lara is also a member of the Bawaka Collective with Dr L. Burarrwanga, Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs and Banbapuy Ganambarr, four senior Yolŋu sisters from Northeast Arnhem Land with their daughter, Djawundil Maymuru, and Kate Lloyd and Sandie Suchet-Pearson from Macquarie University, and Sarah Wright from the University of Newcastle. The Collective’s work promotes a deeply collaborative Indigenous-led understanding of time/place, extending more-than-human methodologies and challenging human centred, non-Indigenous and Western understandings (and practices) within the academy and beyond it. Together they have explored what it might mean to take Indigenous ontologies of co-becoming seriously, in ways that might help better understand theoretical concepts such as space and place, and also to move towards a de-colonised, Indigenous-led practice in development studies and natural resource management.

Lara completed their PhD on the interface between urban activism and Aboriginal ways of knowing and being in/as Urban Country in 2019.

Qualifications

Doctor of Philosophy in Human Geography, University of Newcastle
Bachelor of Communication, University of Technology Sydney

Somehow, indigenous people are inhabiting and caring for "so-called" outer space?

Oh well, I guess astronauts better start practicing their acknowledgement of country speeches for when they land on the fucking moon.

Also, started with a Bachelor of Communication, so she originally wanted to be a PR Barbie, but got consumed by the woke mind virus.