Indigenous Australian Studies

Future Developments to include an honours year
In 2012 a further 8 units of study will be introduced. These units will build on the existing offerings. By 2013 students who have successfully completed an Indigenous Studies major will be eligible to enrol in an honours year.

For descriptions of Units of Study offered in Sem 2, 2011 and Sem 1, 2012, please see the Indigenous Australian Studies page


The following units of study will be offered in 2012

Semester 1   Semester 2                                                                      
KOCR2600 Introduction to Indigenous Australia   KOCR2600 Introduction to Indigenous Australia
KOCR2601 Indigenous Land & Culture   KOCR2610 Indigenous Community Development
KOCR2603 Indigenous Health & Communities   KOCR2611 Issues in Indigenous Histories
KOCR2604 Politics of Identity, Gender and Knowledge   KOCR3605 Writing Country: Indigenous Ecopoetics NEW
KOCR2607 Indigenous Creative Expression    
KOCR2612 Introduction to Aboriginal Literature      
KOCR3602 Race, Racism and Indigenous Australia      
     
     

The following units of study will be introduced in 2013

KOCR3612 Transnational Indigenous Poetics  
   


NEW UNIT OF STUDY OFFERINGS - semester 2, 2012 and 2013

KOCR3605 Writing Country: Indigenous Ecopoetics

Prerequisite: 12 senior Arts credit points
Coordinator: Dr Peter Minter
Contact: peter.minter@sydney.edu.au
The representation of nature has been central to human expression for thousands of years. Contemporary transnational ecopoetics situates nature and culture amidst present-day ecological catastrophes and political environmentalisms. This unit examines a uniquely Australian contribution to this field - “Country” - which for Australian Indigenous peoples denotes special cosmological, filial and custodial relations to land. Surveying a range of Indigenous and non-Indigenous works of poetry, non-fiction and art, “Writing Country” defines an Indigenous poetics of nature and explores its broader ecopoetical promise.

KOCR3612 Transnational Indigenous Poetics

Prerequisite: 12 senior credit points from Table A
Coordinator: Dr Peter Minter
Contact: peter.minter@sydney.edu.au
This unit engages in a transnational study of Australian, Pacific, Asian and American Indigenous poetry and poetics. It surveys a range of key twentieth and twenty-first century Indigenous poets and their principal texts, reading them as exemplars of the encounter between Aboriginal cultural and poetic traditions and western modernity, postmodernity and the postcolonial. The unit explores the centrality of poetry to Indigenous cultures, its spiritual, social and political functions, and the distinctiveness of its contribution to a contemporary transnational poetics.


For more information please contact the Koori Centre on 9351 6113 or noeleen.smith@sydney.edu.au.