What is Decoloyarns?
Decoloyarns is an online publication featuring articles developed by any number of authors, and a circle of editors led by Indigenous cultural authority and direction.
Decoloyarns shares stories and analyses about how disciplines we love thrive in a forum where respecting Indigenous knowledges and thinking sits at the core of what researchers do. Each featured piece is a yarn (a process of conversation and storytelling to share and develop knowledge) about decolonising research – not as a theoretical and intellectual idea, but as a living practice.
Decoloyarns aim
Decolonisation means different aims and foci to different Indigenous peoples. As part of our editorial practices, each piece on this site is mentored by a First Nations cultural authority who uses discretion about how a piece addresses decolonisation. Overall, at the heart of Decoloyarns is Tuck and Yang’s 2012 work, Decolonization is not a metaphor.
This means Decoloyarns is not about talking around decolonisation to give settlers a sense of ease that non-Indigenous people can relax because “good things are happening” for Indigenous rights, in and around research and teaching. Yarns do not do decolonisation in and of themselves. You do decolonisation, reader – in partnership and relationship. Some yarns are for Indigenous readers, some are for settlers, and some hold different purposes for both.
Some yarns tell stories that fortify Indigenous insistence and demands, and share and expose real-world examples of what is possible in centring Indigenous authority, concerns, and knowledge in research and teaching, and where academic expectations and worlds are limited and need to break or be abandoned to achieve anything close to decolonisation on the terms of First Peoples on whose Country a project or institution depends.
Some yarns contain stories that act as a manual for inviting settlers to fundamentally change and push against how settlers do research, learn, and teach. Many of these yarns identify and undo settler assumptions about what is normal in the academy. These stories are about peeling back the veneer of what many of us are taught is banal, moral, ethical, and acceptable as academic practise, using ways of seeing, knowing, and doing that are offered by Indigenous people as experts. Yarns of this type are also designed to demonstrate what it looks like to fully recognise that our scholarly brains and bodies are literal property, and who occupies that property will determine how we each use our respective selves to stay focused on the intergenerational, and often distressing (given the conditions of colonisation), project of returning to live in Indigenous sovereignty.
Decoloyarns ultimately focus on processes of returning land, water, skies, scholarly authority and history to Indigenous peoples, and often specifically Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. What does it look like, feel like, and mean to embrace an approach to learning and research that centres Indigenous concerns? How is research challenged, improved, refined, expanded, reshaped, refused, and redefined when Country and First Peoples are respected? What are our responsibilities and what can we learn from each other?
While Decoloyarns are about research, they are written for everyone – because research goes beyond the academy. Anyone can contribute, whether you’re Indigenous or non-Indigenous, scholarly or not. If you’ve got an idea for a topic for a yarn, would like to be part of a yarn, or share something you’ve learnt from a yarn, visit our Submissions page.
Our history
Decoloyarns are a project of The Fenner Decolonial Research and Teaching Circle (The Fenner Circle). It was originally a series of articles hosted by the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University. We thank the Fenner School for helping us establish the original version of this space, where the Fenner community could enrich their passion for the environment and society. Decoloyarns moved to this website in July 2024.
Decoloyarns 