catriona elder
My research is in the broad area of race, gender, national identity and belonging, with a focus on non-Indigenous identity in Australia. I am interested in theory building in the field of critical whiteness studies.
More specific projects include:
* A project on historical television drama in Australia.
This project has been designed to develop theory to assist in exploring the formation of non-Indigenous identities in a settler colonial context. It then seeks to apply these ideas to an archive of television historical drama series in order to analyse the ways in which national stories of arrival, departure, longing and belonging have been narrated in Australia. The project will consider Australian television series made from the industry's earliest productions (the late 1950s) to the present day. The focus is on historical dramatizations - precluding documentary forms of history - and so draws on programmes that involve either entirely fictional historical narratives or ones based on well-known historical events. These sources are analysed to examine what types of stories non-Indigenous Australians have told about their history and how they figure and re-figure stories of belonging in the context of the defining structure of colonization.
* A collaborative project on whiteness and space.
This comparative project uses an innovative whiteness studies approach to explore the implementation of programs that challenge white privilege in a range of spaces (educational institutions, private businesses, public sector organizations and social movements). This project is being undertaken with scholars from University of Capetown, University of Leeds, University of Southampton, University of Loughborough and the University of Lancaster. Several research threads are developing. One explores the concept of diversity as a framing practice for achieving equity in institutional settings. A second analyses the role of memory in shaping understandings of ethnic and racial equality in different national contexts.
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More specific projects include:
* A project on historical television drama in Australia.
This project has been designed to develop theory to assist in exploring the formation of non-Indigenous identities in a settler colonial context. It then seeks to apply these ideas to an archive of television historical drama series in order to analyse the ways in which national stories of arrival, departure, longing and belonging have been narrated in Australia. The project will consider Australian television series made from the industry's earliest productions (the late 1950s) to the present day. The focus is on historical dramatizations - precluding documentary forms of history - and so draws on programmes that involve either entirely fictional historical narratives or ones based on well-known historical events. These sources are analysed to examine what types of stories non-Indigenous Australians have told about their history and how they figure and re-figure stories of belonging in the context of the defining structure of colonization.
* A collaborative project on whiteness and space.
This comparative project uses an innovative whiteness studies approach to explore the implementation of programs that challenge white privilege in a range of spaces (educational institutions, private businesses, public sector organizations and social movements). This project is being undertaken with scholars from University of Capetown, University of Leeds, University of Southampton, University of Loughborough and the University of Lancaster. Several research threads are developing. One explores the concept of diversity as a framing practice for achieving equity in institutional settings. A second analyses the role of memory in shaping understandings of ethnic and racial equality in different national contexts.
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Books
This book explores this significant policy change from a cultural perspective, considering the ways in which assimilation was imagined in literary fiction of the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on novels from a rand of genre - Gothic, historical romance, the western and family melodrama - it analyses how these texts tell their assimilation stories.
Taking insights from critical whiteness studies this book analyses both the pleasures and anxieties that the idea of Aboriginal assimilation raised in the non-Aboriginal community. There are elements of these assimilation stories - maternal love, stolen children, violence and land ownership - that still have an impact in the unsettled present of many postcolonial nations today.
Papers
This book explores this significant policy change from a cultural perspective, considering the ways in which assimilation was imagined in literary fiction of the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on novels from a rand of genre - Gothic, historical romance, the western and family melodrama - it analyses how these texts tell their assimilation stories.
Taking insights from critical whiteness studies this book analyses both the pleasures and anxieties that the idea of Aboriginal assimilation raised in the non-Aboriginal community. There are elements of these assimilation stories - maternal love, stolen children, violence and land ownership - that still have an impact in the unsettled present of many postcolonial nations today.