When: 12.00pm – 1.00pm on Tuesday 29th August
Where: The Keats Reading Room, Psychology/Aviation Building (AVLG17), with video link to the Seminar Room, Science Offices at Ourimbah.
NB. This presentation will be recorded. Make contact with Stefania.Paolini@newcastle.edu.au if interested in viewing.
Title: Living in the Dysmorphic Body
Abstract:
What if you would look down to your arm and hands, see brown skin and feel nothing but disgust or confusion? This is a consequence of the Australian assimilationist policies enacted for Aborigines. Assimilationist policies impacted on those things which construct Aboriginality including culture, family and self-identity. So young people had limited exposure or experience of Aboriginal culture, family and no reinforcement to live ‘as an Aborigine'. This has resulted in a disjuncture between what they see in the mirror and how they interpret it. We now know this learning can become etched into their psyche, body, at genetic and multi-generational levels. Is this so with other Native Americans and Canadians?
What if you would look down to your arm and hands, see brown skin and feel nothing but disgust or confusion? This is a consequence of the Australian assimilationist policies enacted for Aborigines. Assimilationist policies impacted on those things which construct Aboriginality including culture, family and self-identity. So young people had limited exposure or experience of Aboriginal culture, family and no reinforcement to live ‘as an Aborigine'. This has resulted in a disjuncture between what they see in the mirror and how they interpret it. We now know this learning can become etched into their psyche, body, at genetic and multi-generational levels. Is this so with other Native Americans and Canadians?
Awarded Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship for 2017, Dr Gilbert will work at the UCLA American Indian Studies Centre. With qualifications in welfare, social work, women’s studies and a phd. in history, Dr Gilbert has publications in enabling education, stolen generations, Indigenous education, Indigenous research methodologies and social work with Indigenous people. Her last publication in Critical Social Work focused on teasing out the new workplace for Aboriginal workers in the neoliberal environment. Aboriginal workers in this context are understood to have ‘no history’ and somewhat interchangeable irrespective of qualification and yet Aboriginal workers who are specifically employed as Aboriginal people to do sometimes unarticulated ‘Aboriginal’ things. Hence they are not ‘ahistorical’. Her work at all times though has sought to understand how it is that Aboriginality can be a historically bound position, a political stance as well as a racial position and other things as well. Acceptance of the individual’s articulation of identity and Aboriginal identity is the core
substance to Dr Gilbert’s scholarship.
