This project is associated with an ARC Discovery Project, 'Investing in Aboriginal Languages,' which explores Aboriginal Language Centres as sites of cultural investment and exchange where Aboriginal language owners and users, researchers, and members of government and non-government agencies are participants.
Diverse language and culture practices are at work in and around doing the business of Language Centres: work to fulfil obligations to kin and country that are at least partially invisible to outsiders, recognition of who are experts and the nature of different expertise, language documentation and preservation, work under contract, and more. There are diverse forms of accountability to differently situated participants, various forms of investment, and different values, agendas, aspirations, priorities and timelines. How do we understand, make visible and support healthy investments and generative exchanges?
The PhD student will undertake field research in one or more Top End Language Centres as negotiated by supervisors, Indigenous Language workers and owners, and Language Centre management staff.
Depending on the disciplinary background of the student, the project could involve ethnographic and/ or linguistic work with images and words in quantitative-qualitative multi- and transdisciplinary research.
Team: Top End Language Lab
Supervisors: Steven Bird ( contact ), Bhanu Bhatia, Michaela Spencer, Michael Christie, James Bednall .
Stipend: $40k pa + Domestic RTP Fee offset.
Location: CDU Casuarina Campus + 3-month internship at a Language Centre & remote research in NT Aboriginal communities.
Apply: Send your EOI to Professor Steven Bird at [email protected] or call 08 8946 6153 if you have any questions.