Academic literature on the topic 'Mparntwe'

From the perspective of urban planning, the history of the Town Camps of Mparntwe (Alice Springs) has made them a unique form of urban development within Australia; they embody at once a First Nation form of urbanism and Country, colonial policies of inequity and dispossession, and a disparate public and community infrastructure that reflects the inadequate and ever-changing funding landscape it has been open to. While these issues continue, this paper discusses the resilience of these communities through the Local Decision Making agreement, signed in 2019 between the Northern Territory Government and Tangentyere Council. One thing that has been critical to translating and communicating local decisions for government funding has been the establishment of an inclusive and robust process of participatory mapping—Mapping Local Decisions—where both the deficiencies and potential of community infrastructure within each Town Camp is being identified. As local community knowledge is embedded within these practices, so too are issues of health, accessibility, safety and a changing climate similarly embedded within the architectural and infrastructure projects developed for government funding. Being conceived and supported by local communities, projects are finding better ways to secure this funding, building on a resilience these communities have for the places they live.

The Ntyarlke Unit is a special program unit of the Catholic High School (CHS) offering education to Aboriginal youth from the town camps of Mparntwe (Alice Springs). These students are mostly Arrernte speakers and descendants of the traditional owners of the McDonnell Range country of Central Australia.

This article examines some of the underlying contextual issues – architectural, cultural and spatial – inherent in such a significant civic infrastructure project and draws comparisons to other major buildings of similar design or purpose.

Can educators and researchers rethink what theory does in public education so as not to repeat colonial theories and policies predicated on mis/conceptions of “terra nullius” and “terra incognita”? My initial concern as a teacher and administrator working in Northern Territory for over two decades, was the question: “What theories underpin public education policy directives and implementation plans?” Recently my focus has shifted to include what theory is and what it is doing in shaping whose lives (human and non-human) matter. The shift occurred because many theories appeared to perpetuate “more of the same” outcomes, specifically for Indigenous students and their communities. The shifts from what theory is to what theory is doing in the world occur through the daily rhythms – as a precedent of Arrernte practices – of walking Country. Through quotidian acts of walking, I begin to understand that theory is the inseparability of being, doing and thinking, what Barad’s agential realism calls “ethico-onto-epistem-ology”. To show how walking of country is doing theory, I diffractively read several texts (including the non-English and poetic). This gives a sense of what theory is doing in and of the specific matters it inhabits: Arrernte Country, colonisation, education policy directives, walking and creative expression. Theory is taken up through the ethics of those lives rendered un/thinkable, in/visible in public education in Mparntwe (Alice Springs). A diffractive approach in this context opens theory up, to express thinking differently with the commitment to unsettle education policy as a continued reflection of ongoing colonisation.

In Australia, pervasive deficit representations and positioning of Aboriginal peoples continue to impact on teachers’ capacity to meaningfully embed Aboriginal curriculum and pedagogies into their teaching. This sits within a policy context driven by standardization, competition and market forces focused on closing the gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal student outcomes to address the statistical dissonance caused by Aboriginal underachievement. Our analysis is informed by Bacchi’s (2009) ‘What’s the ‘problem’ represented to be?’ analytical tool. We reveal discourses that position Aboriginal peoples as the ‘problem’ and the effects of these on teacher practice. Using the 2019 Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration, which represents a national partisan vision of Australian education, we demonstrate how discourses of community engagement, Reconciliation and data-driven solutions continue to position Aboriginal peoples as incapable, and government as savior. This flags the silencing of Aboriginal peoples’ key concerns of racism, social justice, truth-telling, sovereignty, and treaty, all of which are central to the ongoing fight for voice, reparative justice and recognition. Until these concerns are heard and accounted for in policies, the gap will remain, teachers will continue to struggle to meaningfully engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policies and curriculum content and consequently fail Aboriginal aspirations.

This thesis is essentially a description of the grammar of Mparntwe Arrernte, the traditional language of Alice Springs, in Central Australia. The main aims of the thesis are two-fold: (i) to provide a comprehensive descriptive overview of the language and (ii) to give some indication of how the language conveys, reflects and responds to the socio­ cultural concerns of its speakers. To fulfill these aims, chapters surveying broad areas of the grammar are interleaved with chapters that survey particular grammatical and semantic phenomena in detail. A major concern of the thesis is to describe the semantic, as well as the structural, details of the grammar. Where possible, natural language definitions are provided for grammatical elements and structures. Chapter One is divided into four main sections: the first places Mpamtwe Arrernte within the context of other Arandic languages; the second provides an introduction to the post-contact history and culture of the speakers; the third is an account of the fieldwork for the thesis and the nature of the community's control over the research; and the fourth provides an introduction to the linguistic aspects of this work. It discusses the semantic and functional orientation taken here and introduces the four parts of speech - nominals, verbs, adverbs, and particle clitics - around which much of the thesis is organised. Chapter Two is a brief description of segmental phonology and introduces the orthography which is used throughout this work. Chapter Three centres on the description of nominals and nominal morphology. As nominals are defined by their occurrence, and position, within a simple noun phrase, the structure of simple noun phrases is also discussed. Chapter Four focuses in on one aspect of nominal morphology: case and case marking. The structure of the case system is outlined and the functions of each of the fourteen cases is discussed in detail. Chapter Five is primarily a description of verbs and verb morphology, although it begins with a look at case assigning predicates (including nominal predicates) generally. Chapter Six examines the "category of associated motion", a unique and elaborated grammatical category with which verbs may be inflected. Each of fourteen forms in this group is defined and their function in discourse and reports of events is discussed. Chapter Seven deals with adverbs and adverb morphology, focusing particularly on spatial concepts. Chapter Eight provides a basic inventory of particle/clitics and introduces the phenomenon of particle/clitic insertion into a verb stem. Chapter Nine focuses on one conversation and demonstrates the semantic contribution of five distinct particle/clitics to the conversation. The way an implicature of criticism and/or complaint is derived using these forms is also investigated. Chapter Ten discusses aspects of syntax. Complex noun phrases (including NPs modified by relative clauses), basic clause structure, discourse structure, and complementation are described. Chapter Eleven centres on switch-reference and demonstrates how a narrow syntactic definition of coreference fails to account for subtle semantic contrasts which can be expressed. This chapter also investigates the morphological relationship between switch­ reference and several other complex construction types. Appendix 1 contains twelve texts which are the source for many examples in the thesis. Appendix 2 is a lexicon containing the suffixes, clitics, and most of the lexemes which appear in the examples and texts.

Humanity is living through a time of major ecological crisis exemplified by anthropogenic climate change and planetary-wide ecological system collapse. This is a driver for widespread and intersecting humanitarian and social crises including resource wars, famine, mass migration, and displacement. These entwined ecological and social crises are underpinned by global colonial capitalism that fuels systems of violent and inequitable extraction of wealth and resources from lands, people, and creatures. Indigenous and settler scholars acknowledge that addressing and dismantling colonialism is essential to effective action on the impacts and drivers of climate change, and other ecological and social crises, and the development of sustainable societies for the future. The research proposes that for settler individuals and communities to take action against ecological and social violence, they must develop ways of being, doing, and knowing that attend to the issues of colonialism and extractivism. For settler-colonists, engaging with and through place is particularly important due to the centrality of land and the subsequent ongoing role of colonialism in severing, masking, ignoring, and denying the relationship between land and people’s embodied identities and lived experiences. Tender places uses creative and pedagogical practices to examine the moral responsibilities of settler people in the time of ecological and social crisis. The research seeks to develop tools, processes that support anti-racist and anti-colonial creative practice that respond to ecological crises. The development of these tools and process has occurred through iterative engagement with a constellation of feminist, anti-colonial, Indigenous and queer scholarship including the work of Deborah Bird Rose, Max Liboiron, Claire Land, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang. The practices and ethics of engagement with anti-colonial and Indigenous literature are outlined within the exegesis. This doctoral research is undertaken as creative practice led research, with a 50/50 split between the creative product and the exegesis. I recommend viewing the work after reading the exegesis. As the creative works were created in three iterations, presented in multiple locations, and include an ephemeral durational installation, I’ve produced a website to create a permanent record of the work for assessment and documentation purposes. You can view the creative work here: https://tenderplaces.net/. The creative practice was undertaken at the Ilparpa Claypans, a series of 12 ephemeral claypans, located on ‘crown land’, 13 km southwest of the township of Mparntwe/ Alice Springs, in the Northern Territory, Australia. The popular recreational site was chosen due to my decade-long relationship with this place, and my distress over the impacts of dumping, four-wheel driving, and invasive weeds witnessed over this time. I undertook this research through the lens of Australian settler culture, as a queer, female, fourth generation Northern Territory settler of Irish, Scottish, and German descent. I bring my lived experience as an artist and activist to this inquiry. Through the research, I developed a practice of reading, walking, and making at the Ilparpa Claypans, as a method by which to investigate the use of critical race and environmental humanities literature as an agent of defamiliarisation, with the aim to disrupt the settler gaze within place. I documented new ways of seeing and being with/in place, which emerged from this disruption through field notes, photos, and creative works. These creative translations informed the development of three artworks reflecting on the impacts and responsibilities of settler people and cultures to the Ilparpa Claypans. Postcards from the Claypans was the first iteration of creative practice at the Ilparpa Claypans, which took place from May to June in 2019. In this iteration, individual walks were documented on individual postcards and mailed to individual peers in different parts of the world. The second work, Shadow Work is an autoethnographic map of settler experience and the impact on the Ilparpa Claypans was developed in January, 2019. This map is comprised of twelve cyanotypes created from dumped refuse and weeds found at the claypans. The third work, Testing Ground, was an 18-day durational performance installation, which positions the researcher’s body in service to place through daily visits to the Ilparpa Claypans to remove buffel grass (an invasive weed) and dumped items. These recovered items were used to create an installation that made visible the impacts of the ecological harms on the Ilparpa Claypans, alongside a soundscape created from field recordings and a public process journal of the 18-day practice. The exegesis locates the research inquiry theoretically and methodologically, and articulates the process, findings, and impacts. The autoethnographic component of the exegesis draws on the creative works, reflective writing, field notes, and formal research documents, to examine the development and use of arts and place methodologies and methods as a research process. Creative and reflective writing are used throughout the exegesis as a mode by which to locate the reader with my lived experience of place and process throughout the research lifespan. This exegesis, Tender Places, identifies and contributes processes for settler people to reflect on their complicity individually and collectively in ongoing colonial and extractivist drivers of entangled ecological and social violence. The methods and methodologies utilised in this project can aid the development frameworks of moral responsibility for the action that addresses these violences in order to restore social and ecological justice.