Skip to main content

CIPR

  • Home
  • About
    • Annual reports
  • People
    • Executives
    • Academics
    • Professional staff
    • Research officers
    • Visitors
      • Past visitors
    • Current PhD students
    • Graduated PhD students
  • Publications
    • Policy Insights: Special Series
    • Commissioned Reports
    • Working Papers
    • Discussion Papers
    • Topical Issues
    • Research Monographs
    • 2011 Census papers
    • 2016 Census papers
    • People on Country
    • Talk, Text and Technology
    • Culture Crisis
    • The Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia
    • Indigenous Futures
    • Information for authors
  • Events
    • Workshops
    • Event series
  • News
  • Students
    • Study with us
  • Research
    • Key research areas
    • Visiting Indigenous Fellowship
    • Past projects
      • Indigenous Researcher-in-Residence
      • Sustainable Indigenous Entrepreneurs
      • Indigenous Population
        • Publications
        • 2011 Lecture Series
      • New Media
        • Western Desert Special Speech Styles Project
      • People On Country
        • Project overview
          • Advisory committee
          • Funding
          • Research partners
          • Research team
        • Project partners
          • Dhimurru
          • Djelk
          • Garawa
          • Waanyi/Garawa
          • Warddeken
          • Yirralka Rangers
          • Yugul Mangi
        • Research outputs
          • Publications
          • Reports
          • Newsletters
          • Project documents
      • Indigenous Governance
        • Publications
        • Annual reports
        • Reports
        • Case studies
        • Newsletters
        • Occasional papers
        • Miscellaneous documents
      • Education Futures
        • Indigenous Justice Workshop
        • Research outputs
        • Research summaries
  • Contact us

Research Spotlight

  • Zero Carbon Energy
    • Publications and Submissions
  • Market value for Indigenous Knowledge
  • Indigenous public servants
  • Urban Indigenous Research Network
    • About
    • People
    • Events
    • News
    • Project & Networks
      • ANU Women in Indigenous Policy and Law Research Network (WIPLRN)
      • ANU Development and Governance Research Network (DGRNET)
      • Reconfiguring New Public Management
        • People
        • NSW survey
    • Publications
    • Contact

Related Sites

  • ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences
  • Research School of Social Sciences
  • Australian National Internships Program

Administrator

Breadcrumb

HomeNewsCAEPR Seminar - Therapy Culture and The Intentional Aboriginal [Anangu] Subject - Sarah Holcombe
CAEPR Seminar - Therapy Culture and the Intentional Aboriginal [Anangu] Subject - Sarah Holcombe
Friday 29 April 2016

 

Where - Humanities Conference Room, First Floor, A.D. Hope Bldg #14 (opposite Chifley Library), The Australian National University, Canberra.

When - Wednesday, 4 May 2016 - 12.30 - 2.00pm

 

 

 

 

 

This seminar is drawn from a chapter in a work-in-progress book Human Rights in Aboriginal central Australia: Towards the Practice of Theory.   

The particularly rich locations where there are active attempts by the State and their agents at inscribing an agentic human-rights holder subject, as a reformed Aboriginal self; is through policy interventions labelled as 'behavioural change programs' for the perpetrators and the victims of spousal violence. There are several of these operating in Alice Springs, including within the jail, but the focus of this seminar will be on the Cross Border Indigenous Family Violence Program that operates in remote central Australian communities. The other therapeutic intervention of relevance in this field of gender violence is the Outreach Service offered by the Alice Springs Women's Shelter. As therapeutic technologies, both the Program and the work of the Outreach Service actively attempt to engage with the inner subjectivities of the participants or clients, as they attempt to question and dismantle the socio-centric 'structures of feeling', to co-opt William's terminology, that guide or orient Anangu decision-making. These therapeutic technologies aim to foster the responsibilisation discourse where individuals are created and taught and cajoled to become reflective outward looking agents free to make choices that change their status from 'victim' to actor and from 'perpetrator' to empathiser.

For my purposes, the role this therapeutic technology plays in the production of individuals 'free to choose' offers an insight into the incremental transformation of subjects into human rights holders. Although this human rights discourse may be nascent as a politically reformative program in this region, it is implicit in the formation of the modern citizen-subject in myriad ways.

Biography:Sarah Holcombe is an ARC Future Fellow in CAEPR at the ANU undertaking an ethnographic project exploring the local effects of human rights discourse in Aboriginal central Australia.  She has a diverse research background in remote Aboriginal Australia, which includes applied anthropology with Northern Territory land Councils and research management as the Social Science Coordinator for the Desert Knowledge CRC. She has undertaken research on the social sustainability of mining in Indigenous communities; alternative economies; Indigenous community governance; integrity systems in research with Indigenous peoples. Her research is increasingly focusing on legal and political anthropology.