Chapter Two: Relational Coexistence: identities present, past, future (original) (raw)

2024, Toward A Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State

This chapter continues to draw on life story narratives from my white Australian family to understand oneself and one's family at the intersections of environment, race, gender, class, history, economics, poverty and colonisation in Australia and globally. The historical narratives locate the context of contemporary Climate action, Black Lives Matter and Me Too people movements. Diverse and macro tapestries imagine the subjectivities of the future in relational coexistence with Indigenous sovereignties. I seek a more profound understanding of the identity of oneself and the nature of reality: space, time, matter and consciousness. This chapter examines Foucault, Quantum Mechanics, Indigenous Standpoint Theories and Buddhism for plural ways of understanding the self, the nature of reality, and the multiple paths to nonviolent interdependent ways of being in Australia and internationally. The chapter engages with historical contexts, social relations of power, colonisation, and anti-colonialism and the theories underpinning such identities' development. It outlines the social constructions of social identities, tearing out the matrix of power relations, especially in the context of the scientific approach, often used to negate qualitative methods of inquiry to reduce legitimate authoritative research into merely the physical science, evidenced today by the demolition of arts and humanities vis-àvis technological science in universities of neo-liberal nations such as Australia. The chapter proposes a contemporary understanding of ourselves, space and time.