The Other Others

Originally recorded by her for a different project, a sweet yarn with my friend Euvie Ivanova from Future Thinkers, an intentional community/metamodern/heterodox/sensemaking organisation. But I ended up asking most of the questions, and kinda stole the yarn away. Still you can find uninterrupted Euvie on her substack. http://euvieivanova.substack.com/ She has interviewed everyone from Jordan Peterson to me, and shares with us her experience of a largely male complexity science community encountering females being... well, complex... at the Emerge Conference in Austin, Texas (where good ideas go to die).

Yarn with Dennis Foley, veteran Australian Indigenous scholar, iconoclast, thinker. Brother Dennis reminisces about a lifetime of cultural embassy and inquiry with Native Peoples from around the world, from New Zealand to Taiwan and even Korea. He touches on a controversial paper he wrote a few years back about "the McDonaldisation of Indigenous research". McDonaldisation occurs when an institution adopts the characteristics of fast food chains - efficiency, calculability, predictability and standardization, and control. Foley once made the case that a lot of Indigenous research has come to reflect these traits, and revisits this critique. Turns out there's more to Indigenous Standpoint Theory than simply claiming an Indigenous standpoint...

The Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab team in our third yarn about impact investing in land-based systems of bio-cultural integrity. We're still struggling with this, but we know this is far more useful than struggling against it. John Davis sings us in - Chels Marshall, Josh Waters, Jack Manning Bancroft and Tyson Yunkaporta.

Jack and I, fresh from the lab, yarn with renowned evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. We figure out why, if Robyn arrived on a donkey, Jack would of course assist Robyn (as Jack's senior) off the donkey. But then, if the roles were reversed, would Robyn be obliged to help Jack off a donkey? Stick around for all these ancient lessons and more, from why a reputation-based economy might be a bad idea, to how come I cried when Dolph Lundgren passed away, when I hadn't seen the fella since Rocky 4? And of course, the ultimate question of civilisation - can anything ever be good again after being scaled beyond the local? It's all in the numbers.

Fresh yarn with Ferananda Ibarra from The Commons Engine, which sits in the Holochain 'ecosystem'. Is it possible to live by the patterns of creation in land, community and online all at once? Ferananda works in economics, governance and the commons, informed by living systems, the feminine and indigenous wisdom. Can truly distributed wealth and governance stand against imperialism and 'the mother of all DAOs?"

Lucky dip yarn this week where I close my eyes and pick a random stranger from my inbox. Jackpot! We pulled Martin Henke who is working on human marine habitats. We coin together an interesting term - 'The Underview Effect', and wonder about how learning from this project might inform change on the shore.

In the tradition of cultural exchange and embassy between Ireland and Aboriginal Australia ('proper deadly!'), here is a very exciting yarn with criminologist and surveillance expert Diarmaid Harkin about our shared experiences of colonial violence. The yarn follows a through-line of historical surveillance and oppression under English rule to today's post-covid escalation of dodgy tech applications in policing globally. There is also a bit of a book review of Irvine Welsh's Filth. Dr Diarmaid Harkin is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Deakin University in Australia. He is the author of the book Private Security and Domestic Violence: The Risks and  Benefits of Private Security Companies Working with Victims of Domestic  Violence. He has also researched the Consumer Spyware Industry and worked with the Office of the eSafety Commissioner on a project examining National responses to technology-facilitated abuse in the context of domestic and family violence.

A great yarn with one of Australia’s most respected Aboriginal educationalists. Professor Lester Irabinna Rigney is a Narungga / Kaurna /  Ngarrindjeri man who has been generous enough to sing my family into country around Adelaide over the past few weeks while I complete a residency at The University of South Australia. He is Professor of Education in the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion, and was previously a Distinguished Fellow at Kings College, London. Mostly, he's one of the holy trinity in Indigenous scholarship that you always cite when justifying using an Indigenous Standpoint in your research. I'm privileged to be writing a paper with him now on education futures, and here we share some of the foundational thinking and yarning we've been doing, the collective sense-making that always must be taken care of before you even begin identifying a specific research question in our field.

A different kind of string theory here, with two geniuses Siena Stubbs and David Turnbull, running some thought experiments and yarns to answer the question, 'What is real?' Siena Mayutu Wurmarri Stubbs is a photographer, a young Yolŋu woman of the Gumatj clan of the Yirritja moiety. Her homeland is Buwaka. David Turnbull is a retired scholar whose work has been an inspiration for a lot of thinking around spatial cognition in our lab. He says that science is an Atlas. Yeah, it's like that. Get ready for a fast ride around the universe. If you want more of David's work, check out this generous online publication: http://territories.indigenousknowledge.org/

Second public sharing of an Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab think-tank session, in which we grapple with our ongoing thought experiment about Extinction Offsets.