Higher education towards the bardo: decolonising origin stories and place relations

Abstract

ABSTRACT The continued erasure of place and politics from modernity’s education systems and disciplinary knowledges perpetuates racialised and ecological injustices and extractive relations. In this paper I affirm the necessity of using evolving methods of critical place inquiry and relocalisation in higher education to redress these erasures. I illustrate an approach which centres the geopolitical (place and politics entangled) in a critical, inventive and relocalising inquiry enacted on sites of the gold rush on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, Australia. This brings to notice and questions the relations of mining with the origin stories and narratives of the state and its education institutions. I draw attention to the proposition that higher education is moving towards a transitional space, the bardo, requiring the death of its old forms and preparing the ground for new forms to grow, and point to possibilities for supporting the death of higher education as we know it.