Editorial

Abstract

This special issue of the Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, titled ‘South-South Dialogues: Global Approaches to Decolonial Pedagogies’, aims to contribute to the field of Australian Indigenous Studies and Education by further diversifying the perspectives, conversations and conceptual tools to engage with Indigenous pedagogies. Through a south-south conversational and conceptual approach, this special issue expands the conversation of Indigenous pedagogies internationally and conceptually from a global south location. At the same time, this special issue means to be a re-iteration of the first ‘South-South Dialogues: Situated Perspectives in Decolonial Epistemologies’ conference held in November 2015 at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, which displayed a south-south conversation lead by local and global Indigenous perspectives. This special issue further theorises what many local and global scholars view as implied in Indigenous education: that the mainstream field of education can be re-examined using a decolonial viewpoint, one that is led by the views of Indigenous peoples and people of colour from the ‘global south’. This issue also responds to a re-awakening of decolonial theories that have been embodied in ‘Southern Theory’ (Connell, 2007), Indigenous Standpoint Theory (Nakata, 2007), coloniality/decoloniality (see, for instance, Maldonado-Torres, 2007), among others that continue to re-examine the conditions in which colonisation continues to be epistemologically exerted and continue to propose ways to contest it. This re-invigorated conversation is one that can be addressed by a genuinely horizontal intercultural dialogue lead by the southern perspectives. This was, one way or another, what was observed and lived in the ‘South-South Dialogues’ conference that felt like the starting point of a newer form of knowledge production and pedagogy.