A higher education pedagogy for settler listening with Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

Abstract

This article focuses on a higher education pedagogy of reading the exemplary novel of Indigenous Australia, Carpentaria (2006) by Waanyi author, Alexis Wright. The multiply awarded and multiply translated novel gives an epic view of contemporary Aboriginal life. Its dramatization of listening relations is profoundly insightful for the current historical moment in Australian Indigenous-settler relations. Our pedagogy of settler listening emerges from the invitation by the Indigenous signatories to The Uluru Statement from the Heart (2017) calling on all Australians to aim for a “better future” for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Our pedagogy has even more relevance since the defeat of the 2023 “Voice” referendum that symbolically and practically aimed to ensure that better future through a permanent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advisory body to parliament. We describe our pedagogy through the scholarship in political listening studies and the “ethics of reading” the combination of which engenders responsiveness and responsibility in a reader that is potentially (trans)formative of relationality. We argue that when higher education curriculum is attentive to pedagogies of listening relations to marginalized voices, the conditions for settler listening are being achieved both within higher education and beyond.