Recording: Talloires Network Leaders Conference 2021

AUNTY GLENDRA STUBBS: I am the Elder in Residence at UTS. I would like to acknowledge and pay respects to the traditional owners on the land on which we meet, and that's worldwide now, this is worldwide, so the traditional owners are all those countries.

If we were at UTS, which we're not, we'd be on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and I'd like to say thanks for allowing us to be on their land and to have our beautiful UTS building there. As we share our knowledge, teaching and learning and research practices within this university, may I also pay respect to the knowledge embedded forever within Aboriginal custodianship of country. I also pay respects to the Elders past and acknowledge their struggles and strengths so that we can have opportunities that we're not afforded to older people in this country, Aboriginal people, and people of diverse backgrounds.

So I'd also like to acknowledge our non indigenous brothers and sisters and say thank you for working on this journey for us and holding our hands and walking besides us. If we were at UTS Broadway, we'd be on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. Today, and for many days, I am on the land of Gundungurra people because we've been in strict lockdown.

Universities are leaders and in most communities there's big picture thinkers and looking outside the box. Unis are, I believe, guided by the principles of engagement, integrity and making a difference. It has been an extremely difficult time for universities in our country, with little or no support, but the heart of universities battles on, as unis always do, getting involved in the big issues. So that's my little acknowledgment.

Verity said could I talk a little about engagement because I guess I've been doing that since the Bringing Them Home Report it was before that, learning from the past nobody even knows about because it's so far back in the past. So the Bringing Them Home Report was it's like a movement that happened in Australia, eh, Verity? Aboriginal people knew that there was a government policy that removed Aboriginal kids at birth from their parents because they were Aboriginal, but people didn't believe it and then all of a sudden there was this movement and people went, "Hang on, that's not right, that's really, really dreadful" and Michael Lavarch, when he was Attorney General, said that we'd have an inquiry. So that was my first start of engaging.

So to get people to talk about the most painful thing in their life was really difficult, but to be good at engagement, you have to actually get the whole story. Then you have to listen deeply and you have to be guided by the people that you want to share stuff with and I think that's the principles of all engagement.

So, I mean, for our mob, we don't so I guess the hardest one I ever did was like the Royal Commission into child sexual abuse in institutions and I think most countries have had the same issue. So for us we don't talk about this and when I went for the job at the Royal Commission, I did say to them, "I don't think we'll get anyone to talk about this", but because when you've been around for a long time you come with a sort of a sense of I'm not going to be harmed by this person, so you don't want to do any more harm and you have to listen. Have I got time to tell a little story?

VERITY FIRTH: Yes, please do, Aunty Glendra.

AUNTY GLENDRA STUBBS: Okay. One of my gigs two of my gigs, I had prisons but I had Tiwi Island. Tiwi Island was a mission that was, you know, taken over and the big boss, the Commissioner I think he was, he said to me, "Okay, so our first public hearing is going to be Tiwi." I said, "That's never going to happen" and he went, "No, that's going to be our first engagement" and I thought he hasn't done any history. I mean, for anybody that can Google the Sistagirls on Tiwi, you know, and can find out what happened there, you know, there was dreadful things that happened. The community took legal some people were brave enough to take legal action and everybody on Tiwis are Catholic. So it was against the heart of most people.

So the people that were 40 people were brave enough to go and say that this wasn't right, but then the Catholic Church sent them a message, a letter saying, "Oh, no, we're going to" what's the word, Verity you know, "We don't believe this, so we're going to fight this." But people on Tiwi English is their third language, so they get this piece of paper. They thought it was all done and dusted. They get this piece of paper that's saying, "No, you've got to come back to court on 12 December." No one turned up.

So it was put out and then the community so those people harmed themselves in the worst possible way. I don't really want to traumatise everyone at 9 o'clock in the morning. And we never had a public hearing and, you know, he got more peed off as time went on.

But it was never going to happen because there was no engagement beforehand, you know, and every month I went to Tiwi and in the end there was people brave enough to go out back to Darwin to tell their story, but it had to be done gently and with holding a hand and walking together with people and it was so brave of those people. They're so brave. So, yes, that's a story of how to engage when other people are bullying you to engage in another way.

VERITY FIRTH: That's a perfect way to introduce, Aunty Glendra, thank you so much, I think because really what you're saying is engagement takes time, right?

AUNTY GLENDRA STUBBS: Exactly, time and patience and listening deeply listening deeply to the people that you want to bring with you on this journey because otherwise they'll be off the bus.

VERITY FIRTH: Yes. And that's often what's hard to convince people of, that real change and change that sticks takes time. It can't be done overnight and you have to bring people with you. So thank you, Aunty Glendra.

VERITY FIRTH: So it's my pleasure now to be joined by Dr Mathew Johnson, Joanne Curry and Professor John Saltmarsh, all of whom are joining us from North America and we're going to be looking at the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification for universities and how it's being used internationally to celebrate and share good practice of university community engagement from across the sector and again, the Carnegie is we'll get to that. I was about to say it also talks a lot about why engagement takes time and needs to be authentic and genuine.

We're also delighted to be launching the Network for Community Engagement and Carnegie Classification Australia, which includes a collaboratively designed community of practice around engaged scholarship for universities and their partners, and we'll tell you a little about that later on.

So to welcome our panellists. Dr Mathew Johnson is the President of Albion College in the United States and leads the development of the Carnegie Foundation Elective Classifications, including the Elective Classification for Community Engagement and a multi year international Carnegie Community Engagement Classification project, which involves 26 institutions of higher education across the world.

He co founded and co directs the National Assessment of Service and Community Engagement and consults for universities globally. He has previously served as Associate Dean of the College for Engaged Scholarship, as well as Senior Fellow and Executive Director of the Howard R. Swearer Center for Public Service, at Brown University. Welcome, Mathew.

Joanne Curry is the Vice President of External Engagement at Simon Fraser University in Canada. She has made a career of advancing higher education locally, provincially and nationally and connecting the university with business and community. Her leadership has improved the university's capacity to enhance the social and economic wellbeing of British Colombia communities.

Joanne plays a strategic role in engaging with stakeholders and raising the profile of the university. She is the institutional lead for community engagement and accountable for government relations, communications and marketing, and ceremonies and events.

Joanne Co chairs Universities Canada Social Impact Committee and has served on the board of Community Living British Colombia. She is a member of SFU's Aboriginal Reconciliation Council and also the Aboriginal Strategic Initiative Working Group. Welcome, Joanne.

John Saltmarsh is Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Leadership in Education in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He publishes widely on community engaged learning, teaching and research and organisational change in higher education. John is a member of the Board of Trustees with College Unbound in Providence, Rhode Island, a Visiting Fellow at Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and a Ludington Center Visiting Scholar at Albion College.

From 2005 to 2016 he served as the Director of the New England Resource Center for Higher Education. He was also a Director of the national program on Integrating Service with Academic Study at Campus Compact. Welcome, John.

This is good. The conversation is starting and the room is building up as I speak. So my first question is really a place creating question and it goes to Mathew Johnson. So Mathew Johnson, can you tell us a bit about the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification what is it and why should it be considered the gold standard for demonstrating university community engagement?

DR MATHEW JOHNSON: Thank you, Verity, very much and thank you for all the participants and my co panellists for being here in my part of the world this evening.

The Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement is a designation that the foundation offers to institutions in the US and soon in international locations that signifies the foundation's endorsement of those institutions as having made broad and deep commitments within their institutional life to community engagement as defined by the foundation.

I think part of what makes it the gold standard from my perspective is that definition. It's a clear definition that calls on our institutions to build mutually beneficial, reciprocal relationships with communities and community organisations and community members.

In the context of mutually beneficial reciprocal relationships, it calls on us to examine the epistemological foundations really of the academy and to acknowledge that knowledge is generated both inside and outside the academy at the same time. So in such a relationship, we would be co creating knowledge. Once you have a full appreciation of that definition, it's hard for me at least to think of a more noble way to pursue the public purposes of our institutions.

The seconds aspect I would say that makes it the gold standard is that it is a self study process that takes the course of the better part of a year or more, involves often constituencies across the institution, and collects a variety of different types of information to raise questions about the alignment of mission, vision, strategy, the organisation and distribution of resources, around the ways in which the institution is committed to continuous improvement in those partnerships. So that's a couple of pieces I would say, Verity, that make it the gold standard from where I stand.

VERITY FIRTH: So I'm now going to ask Joanne Curry. Joanne Curry for those of you who don't know, we have recently had a pilot of the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification in Australia, so 10 universities got together to actually apply for the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification in order to work out how it worked in the Australian context and whether we needed to do some adjustments in order to be able to roll it out in the Australian context. Joanne Curry led that process in Canada, so the Canadian universities did a similar thing, and we've been really interested watching the Canadians as the Australians have been undergoing it because there's been some real similarities and differences and we've been able to talk through the processes we've both gone through this together. So Joanne, what were the major reasons motivating institutions in Canada to undertake the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification pilot process?

JOANNE CURRY: Great. Well, welcome, everyone. I'm really privileged to be with you today joining you from British Columbia, the unceded territories, and today is a significant first statutory holiday on the national day of truth and reconciliation, so a day for us to reflect on the horrendous legacy of residential schools in Canada.

I have personally been interested in the Carnegie Classification for over 20 years and I was attending US conferences and I fell into a workshop for institutions looking to complete the process and I just thought this would be amazing because it goes from the attempt to go from grassroots to institutionalised views, the very deep definition of mutual and reciprocal partnerships. So I just thought and the idea of looking to improve, measure and work across the institution.

I remember looking at question number 1 and not being able to successfully complete it and I thought okay, maybe we're not there yet, but in 2011, our university came up with a vision and mission to be an engaged university where community engagement was really at the centre of our vision and mission for our research teaching and community work.

I think with the 16 institutions across Canada, I think that they were excited with the idea they're all I think leaders in community engagement in various ways and very different institutional types colleges, institutes, research universities, teaching universities, Aboriginal led universities but I think we all share the idea of improving our practice and also moving our practice to really accomplish the definition of the deep and mutually reciprocal partnerships.

I think it's also a way for our executive to become more aware because every institution had amazing things happening across it and I think Mathew refers to this as the 1,000 flowers blooming, so lots of great work, but lots of passionate people that were burning out and how can we lift their work, how can we better support it institutionally?

And just finally, it was really to learn from one another. I think part of the excitement was the cohort was going through this together and we've really benefited from the Australian cohort. You've been slightly ahead of us and Verity has come in at various points. We just think your work has been brilliant and look forward to a global sort of community around the Carnegie Classification.

VERITY FIRTH: Thanks, Joanne. Now, John, Joanne sort of alluded to it there. Like part of what the Carnegie Classification is is almost an institutional response, right? Let's be honest about it it's often getting the community engagement people a seat at the table with the senior exec to actually say what are we going to shift in our institution that is going to better support and enable this work? And I know that you of course are part of your expertise is around organisational change and community engagement, so what are the insights that you think universities gain and where are the learnings that happen throughout this Carnegie Classification process and any other thoughts you have around this organisational change issue? How do we get universities to move in this direction in a more holistic way?

PROF. JOHN SALTMARSH: Well, that's an easy one.

VERITY FIRTH: Good.

PROF. JOHN SALTMARSH: Yes, so I just want to pick up on what Joanne was talking about too in terms of so why engage in this kind of a process? So having done this for multiple cycles in the United States, we know that there's not one reason. There tend to be multiple reasons sometimes, multiple reasons on the same campus, but we know that this sort of piece around institutional self assessment is really important. Mathew mentioned that.

And that may be sort of the key one. It just creates this opportunity to reflect on one's practice and figure out how you're going to improve it and doing that across an entire institution. We don't really have many opportunities like that. We do it with accreditation, maybe when we do strategic planning. So it's an opportunity to do that.

Another reason we found is that it creates legitimacy because a lot of these campuses have been doing this for a while, but it hasn't really been legitimised. So this process can bring that sense of legitimacy. For some of our campuses, also a sense of accountability, particularly our public institutions, where they can demonstrate accountability to the public good mission of their institution and how they're actually fulfilling that public good.

Then Joanne sort of talked about this too it becomes a catalyst for change, right? You can actually use this as a way to try to move their work forward on the campus. So as a tool, it's really helpful for that. Mathew and I always start workshops by saying the point here is not to get the classification, the point here is to do the self assessment so you can advance the work, right? That's what we are trying to do.

Then the last thing I would say is just it's about institutional identity, how do we want to be known as an institution, and from the Carnegie Foundation point of view, prior to the elective classification, the way we were known was essentially by this classification scheme that we had nothing to do with, but it put us into these different categories. Like we could be a research high institution or a research less intensive institution or liberal arts institution. So we get categorised. This provides the opportunity to say sure, I'm a masters high institution but I'm also a community engaged institution. So it's a way of claiming that identity. So I would say that's actually really important. Campuses are trying to distinguish themselves and this is a key piece.

To the latter point of your question around change, I would say the thing that's probably most important to understand here is that the foundation is really pushing campuses towards deep cultural change at their institutions. That's really hard work and when they say deep cultural change, what they mean is change in the academic core of the institution.

So while campuses can talk about engagement around students going out into the community and that's really important and we want to see that kind of volunteerism happening, or they might talk about it in terms of their economic relations and procurement and investment and employment and that's also really important, but Carnegie is trying to get to that's not the core of who we are as institutions. At the core of our institutions are about generating and disseminating knowledge, its academic core. So at the core of the classification is the question of is this institution committed such that this is central to the work of faculty and central to student learning? If it isn't, it's really hard to get classified, right? We hope you're doing all of those other things I mentioned, but the foundation is really looking at that academic core.

That is also the core culture of the institution and shifting that culture to those kinds of commitments can be very challenging, I think we all know that, but that's also where the deep change takes place, that deep and pervasive change that Mathew was talking about. We can talk more about that, but that's the key. I'm going to drop an article in the chat that Mathew and I did a little less than a year ago which really tries to get at these sort of cultural change pieces.

VERITY FIRTH: I think that's really interesting because the concept the reason it's such a deep cultural change is it almost goes against the very way universities, at least in the sort of western tradition, have been run for centuries, right, an expert model based on the expertise of the academy, and shifting to, as Mathew said, a co creation of knowledge model, where there is equal knowledge on both sides, is a pretty fundamental shift. Mathew, have you seen some really good examples of this, where there has been that shift?

DR MATHEW JOHNSON: Oh, yes. You know, I think John and I have seen, particularly now that there have been successive cycles in the US, many campuses who in their first application will be in a very nascent state and they talk about the right things that need to be done, but they haven't quite done them yet. They haven't quite figured out how to quality control for partnerships or how to do assessment related to student learning in engaged learning settings or perhaps they still are using two or three different definitions across the institution and haven't yet come together around a solid definition that is reflective of the commitments that are required in the classification's formal definition.

And then two years later or five years later they come back for a second time to apply and now they've operationalised a single definition. They have a clear assessment strategy. They've organised either a centre or some other organisational structure to begin the deep cultural change that John is talking about.

And perhaps they come back several years hence for a reclassification because perhaps they've earned it the second time and now we see not only those initial structures and initial commitments, but we see changes being made based on insights from the continuous improvement process they have embedded in their institutional culture, so their reporting on data they've collected, and how that's influenced their practice of community engagement across the institution and led to real changes in the way that they approach the work. So that kind of developmental pathway I think is present and common across the US experience where we've had multiple cycles of classification.

VERITY FIRTH: Yes, interesting. Joanne, so again to sort of give some context, Canada was running the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification as a pilot, we were doing it in Australia, and our job was to actually see, okay, this is good, this applies to us, this actually doesn't apply to us, or this is where we actually need to enhance the Canadian version of the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification to speak more directly to an issue that is pertinent to our universities. What were some of those that happened, Joanne, in the Canadian experience? Where did you feel there needed to be additions made to the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification for the Canadian context? Oh, you're muted.

JOANNE CURRY: The most significant area was on Indigenous and work with Indigenous communities and also Indigenous knowledge and recognising that and both John and Mathew have talked about sort of a deep and a cultural change and you mentioned, Verity, the kind of expert view and recognising community knowledge and this definition it sounds great, but to really enact and support it so it is mutually beneficial is really important. So that was probably the biggest area.

I know there was additions around justice and equity. My sense was Carnegie was already going there because this is not isolated to Canada and I certainly saw it in Australia's cohort as well, because I think that's just more of a global movement. As to some extent Indigenous I know that's important for Australia as well.

I guess what I'd have to say, though, at the beginning at workshops it's like we're special, we're different in Canada, and as we go through the process, maybe we're not so different after all, that there's just a lot of commonality. That's why I'm excited about the idea of the global sort of community because we'll be able to learn and share from each other and like our cohort ourselves, we recognise both our differences but also our common areas of work.

VERITY FIRTH: Yes. I agree, one of the best things about the Australian experience was because it's an accreditation and not a ranking, there is actually no competition, right? So you're sitting around with other universities and you're not actually convening with them. You're wanting to share knowledge and practice and listen to what they have to say and I think also the pilot context created that collegiality as well, but it was a rare space in higher education, where there was genuine collegiality.

JOANNE CURRY: Absolutely. We too often stratify according to levels. To learn from different approaches is extremely valuable as part of the process.

VERITY FIRTH: So Mathew, I'm going to come back to you and then I'm going to get John to elaborate as well. There's a number of these pilots now around the world. So can you give us a bit of an insight into where the pilots are and what they're doing to adapt the classification to their unique local contexts and how does the Carnegie Foundation address that adaptation?

DR MATHEW JOHNSON: That's a wonderful question, Verity. Thank you. You know, part of what I love about the internationalisation project is that it has, I believe, followed and remained true to the very notion of partnership that we're talking about in the sense that its model is to say to international partners we have one way of thinking about how we might classify institutions as community engaged, let's start there, but we want to learn from you in our partnership, in our developmental mutually beneficial partnership, how we might actually change our one way and be changed by the partnership even as you might develop a framework that is referential to the original framework here in the US.

So in that regard, Australia, as you say, has started the process and gone through thinking about what the US designed framework would mean, how it would need to be changed, and adapted and changed that framework in significant ways to be relevant in an Australian context.

The Canadian cohort is in the midst of doing that adaptation currently to make a framework that is relevant and meaningful in the Canadian context and what is so fun about it for me is that that has then been iterated back on the US framework and caused us to think differently about our own framework in quite profound ways and inspired new thinking in the US about indigeneity, about the centrality of race and equity in our own framework, and even caused us to rethink positionality of certain questions in the framework forwarding partnership much more prominently in our own framework and looking for and thinking about how the framework leads a school through a certain set of questions about itself that we only came to understand as clearly as we did by working with the two cohorts that are doing it internationally.

We're excited that there may, as soon as COVID allows, be a cohort in South Africa and perhaps another one now in Vietnam and, again, part of our excitement there is that we learn and change from the process of partnership and that is really the joy in the work to do it together.

VERITY FIRTH: And John, I just thought you may also have some insights into sort of the internationalisation of Carnegie and also the community engaged universities movement.

PROF. JOHN SALTMARSH: Yes, I would just pick up on what Mathew was saying maybe a couple of things. One is I do want to recognise what I think of as the original pilot, which was a group of 12 campuses in Ireland who went through a similar process that you've gone through in Australia and Canada in 2015 16. At that point their foundation was not really that interested in this international classification. So this was almost an attempt to convince some that this would be worth doing.

I would say, you know, we learned a lot from that process that I think is playing out now in the two other pilots and I would say probably most importantly was the way that we had to recognise how US centric the classification was and that it wasn't going to work in other cultural and national contexts and that there were some major differences.

So in Ireland major differences were around funding sources and the fact of having a state authority and a state authority that also had performance measures that were tied to those funding sources. We don't have that. But that was critical in terms of how you think about change, how do you position this on a campus, right? Then there were the cultural nuances around language. Just to give you an example, in Ireland, faculty referred to as staff, so you've got to translate the classification if you're going to make it work. That's just one example.

But also a cultural nuance of a country with deep Catholic heritage also has deep roots in volunteerism, so how do you figure that into the classification scheme and make sure that you honour that in that context.

So we learned a lot from that process as we went forward and I think it also convinced the foundation that this was actually something that we needed to pursue.

But going back to the core of your question, I think it fundamentally tells us there is no one classification. It's a classification scheme that's adapted to different contexts and that's what Mathew was getting at too.

I'm also going to drop in the chat an article on that Irish pilot that was in the great Gateways Journal, if anybody is interested.

VERITY FIRTH: I'm glad you plugged the Gateways Journal. It's a joint publication between UTS and Albion College, where Mathew Johnson is President. So please, everybody, go to John's link, but also explore Gateways Journal.

Also well, look, I am mindful to keep us to time because I know it's a long day ahead of us. I really want to thank our panellists. I hope that's been a nice little vignette for people to be introduced to the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification. We're around all day our international guests are probably not around all day, they have to go to bed, but we're around all day. Throughout the day we can answer any questions you like around the Australian process and next steps.

To that end, I just want to share quickly now of course it's not going to work properly. I want to share quickly some slides with you because we do in fact have a nice convenient QR code for people to have a look at. So today, in line with the Talloires Network, we're also launching the Network for Community Engagement and Carnegie Classification in Australia and we have a number of universities who've already signed up, our pilot universities, as well as new ones. Melbourne University is on board, Victoria University is on board. It's really exciting to bring people into the network.

And we're launching it today and the idea I'm just going to change that. That's the rather boring governance chart, but as you can see, we now have a national advisory committee which is steering this network. We'll have a national review panel which actually looks to running out the Carnegie Classification in Australia.

Our plan, however, this year partly because of all the challenges that are involved with COVID and lockdowns and everything this year we're not going to ask you to commence the classification. We're going to ask you to be involved in a community of practice which we're co creating with universities to build capacity and best practice for community engagement in Australia, basically to introduce the sector to the Carnegie Classification and run some workshops on how to apply and how to actually make it work from people who've done it themselves through the pilot process. We're going to be having monthly capacity buildings, information sessions around the classification framework but, more importantly, actual communities of practice around engagement full stop, so engaged scholarship, what does that look like in research, what does it look like in teaching and learning, and sharing the knowledge that we've all got and all of the great stuff that's happening in universities across Australia.

So if you're interested in joining that network, here is a cool QR code, and I know most people in Australia are very used to using QR codes. I don't know what it's like in Canada and the US, but QR codes is how we now have to log in when we go and do our supermarket shopping, and so forth. Here's a different type of QR code, a QR code that allows you to register for our community of practice. So please do so. We're really excited just to bring people on board and start to build a real movement in Australia around all of this.

Those QR codes are going to also remain up during our break, so we are about to move to a break. I do want to encourage people, however we're trying to put in some breaks so people don't get exhausted. The next session, however, is going to be really fun because the next session is called "How to do it right". You've heard from the universities this morning. Well, the next session we're going to hear from the community. We're going to hear from Professor James Arvanitakis, Executive Director of the Australian American Fulbright Commission; Cassandra Goldie, CEO of the Australian Council for Social Services in Australia, the peak body for our social services organisations; and Jihad Dib, who is a politician in fact in the New South Wales Parliament. He represents one of the most diverse electorates in New South Wales Parliament and of course he also used to be you might have heard of him a principal in a high school that faced considerable disadvantage and he really turned that high school around. So he's deeply engaged in community. And we're going to talk to them about what does it look like for you, how do we as universities properly engage in community and how do you think we should be doing it?

So we'll be doing that. That will kick off at 10am. We'll have a nice little opportunity there to ask questions. And then, of course, we're going to have some wonderful case studies from 11.15, produced by engaged scholars who are working in Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory as well as some wonderful communicating engaged scholarship case study being facilitated by Nareen Young of the Jumbunna Institute here in New South Wales.

So please take time to stretch your legs, make yourself another cup of coffee, and we'll see you all again at 10. Thank you again to our panellists. That was a wonderful opening session. Feel free to stay on and have a look at the sessions to come or of course to go to bed. We know what time it is over there. Thank you very much, everyone, and see you in 10 minutes' time for the next session.

PROF. JOHN SALTMARSH: Thank you, Verity.
DR MATHEW JOHNSON: Thanks, everyone.

I want to thank everyone joining us today, whether you come from education, public service or the community sector. We have a long and successful history of coming together in collaboration for public good, amplifying the impact and effectiveness of our work, and together we have real traction when it comes to solving complex societal challenges.

 

Now, I'm speaking from the university's point of view. Universities are public institutions. They're funded with public money for the purpose of public good and we can and do deliver real benefit to communities and society beyond the accreditation of future professionals. We are institutions that strengthen democracy and civic engagement, drive progress that brings real improvement to people's lives and we hold an analytical mirror to the forces that shape our culture.

 

Here at UTS, our social justice vision is for the university to be an agent for social change, transforming communities through research, education and practice. This means engaging in impactful research, instilling graduates with capabilities and skills for both work and to be citizens of this country and the world, and making sure that we work alongside communities, acknowledging that their knowledge, expertise and contribution are equal to ours.

 

If you were a part of the previous session, we talked explicitly about how that can sometimes be difficult for universities, that universities can often feel oh, well, we know it all, we're part of the academy, but a real part of proper community engagement is acknowledging the equality of knowledge that people bring experiences beyond the university and that they bring to any relationship. We recognise the unique perspective and experiences of higher education institutions, government, and the social sector. All have impact.

 

I'm honoured now to introduce our three distinguished panellists into the conversation and we're going to open up a conversation around these sectors' objectives, the challenges that they face and the importance of cross‑sector partnerships in their work.

 

So I'm going to start with Jihad. Jihad Dib is the Labor Member for Lakemba. He was first elected in March 2015. In June 2021, he was made Shadow Minister for Emergency Services and Shadow Minister for Energy and Climate Change. He is the State's first lower house Muslim MP in the New South Wales Parliament and his stated purpose is to make a difference in anything he does. He's recognised as a Member of Parliament who has a strong grassroots focus.

 

Prior to entering parliament ‑ I've still got a bit more ‑ Jihad was the Principal of Punchbowl Boys' High School, a school which had been on the verge of closure but undertook an internationally recognised transformation under his leadership, and it was in fact at Punchbowl Boys that we first met each other, Jihad, so I always remember that.

 

Jihad is a former Australia Day Ambassador, Commissioner on the Community Relations Commission for a Multicultural NSW, and board member of the Together for Humanity Foundation. Welcome, Jihad.

 

JIHAD DIB:  Thank you so much, Verity, and what a lovely introduction. I'd better tell the office to shorten it up a little bit. Of course I'm on Wangal land. I want to pay respects to Elders past, present, acknowledge First Nations people from all lands that we tune in from.

 

Now, Verity, I remember that first meeting that we had ‑‑

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Sorry, Jihad. I was worried you were launching into your piece. I was just going to introduce the others.

 

JIHAD DIB:  No, no, I thought I had a 15‑minute window. Right, okay. Just hello.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes. We'll come back to Jihad. Okay, Cassandra Goldie, Dr Cassandra Goldie. Cassandra is CEO of ACOSS and Adjunct Professor With UNSW in Sydney. Are you saying I'm a bit loud?

 

DR CASSANDRA GOLDIE:  I was going to say keep it short.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Everyone is embarrassed when their bios are read out. I know that feeling. I want to give credit to Cassandra. She represents the interests of people disadvantaged and civil society generally in major national and international processes as well as in grassroots communities.

 

Prior to joining ACOSS, Cassandra held senior roles in both the not‑for‑profit and public sectors, including with the Australian Human Rights Commission, Darwin Community Legal Service and as a Senior Executive of Legal Aid in Western Australia. I'm keeping it short, but she was also one of the Inaugural Westpac Australian Financial Review 100 Women of Influence as well as a 2021 Impact 25 Most Influential People in the Social Economy. So we're very happy to welcome you too, Cassandra.

 

DR CASSANDRA GOLDIE:  Thanks, Verity. Still trying to be influential, aren't we? 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Professor James Arvanitakis, who if he wants to go side to the camera now will show everyone his mullet ‑ there you go. He's growing a mullet for mental health, so I'm sure he'll give you the way you can donate. Professor James Arvanitakis is Executive Director of the Australian American Fulbright Commission and Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. James spent 12 months at the University of Wyoming as the Milward L Simpson Fulbright Fellow and previously was Pro Vice Chancellor (Engagement and Advancement) at Western Sydney University.

 

He's internationally recognised for innovative teaching, receiving the Prime Minister's University Teacher of the Year Award in 2012 and named as an Eminent Researcher in the Australia India Education Council. In 2021 he was appointed the inaugural Patron of Diversity Arts Australia and is an academic fellow of the Australia India Institute. Welcome, James.

 

PROF. JAMES ARVANITAKIS:  Thank you so much, Verity. I'm glad that I got the chance to show off my mullet. I made $2,200, so it's all for a good cause, but I can't wait to cut it off, so yeah.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  All right. So what we've decided to do today is we're going to have some short opening statements from each of our panellists, then I'm going to ask a few questions, and then we're going to open up to some questions from the floor.

 

So I'll go first to James. To frame the opening statements, universities, the social sector and government have a long history of contributing to public good and the betterment of society for all. When these sectors work together, their impact and effectiveness is magnified. Together they can gain real traction to understand and resolve complex societal challenges. But to do that, we need to really understand each other and understand where each other are coming from and working genuine ‑ if people saw it before ‑ reciprocal relationships of mutual relationship. So James, what would you like to say in your opening statement?

 

PROF. JAMES ARVANITAKIS:  Thanks, Verity. I too would like to take a moment to acknowledge the land that I'm on and pay my respects to Elders past, present and of course future.

 

I want to start ‑ I thought that that previous session was fantastic and I want to sort of begin by looking a little bit back at that session. There were three things that were really powerful at that session. The first one was a discussion about mutual understanding about talking about knowing that you have to learn from community as much as what community ‑ it can learn from you. I think that's one of the important things.

 

The second thing, back to our welcome to country, was the issue around patience and that real engagement takes time.  And the third thing that we started talking about and didn't really get a chance to unpack was to get it right, you have to be prepared to get it wrong and to get it wrong, to appreciate getting it wrong, you have to be prepared to make mistakes and just admit it and be brave enough ‑ it doesn't matter what your title is or what your institution, you know, the name that you have on your institution, it's about admitting when you don't know something and asking for guidance.

 

So to start with, a little bit about the Fulbright Commission. It is a bilateral exchange between Australia and the United States and it's been running for 75 years. In fact, interestingly enough, given the week we've had, it actually precedes the ANZUS Treaty. It was the first treaty organisation between the two countries. The really interesting thing about it is that we sit on the cusp or between the sectors, you know, the government is here, the private sector, the community sector and the academic sector and that's one of the most powerful things about it.

 

I think bringing those sectors together is when I see the most powerful impact and this is I think why today's discussion is really important because, you know, often we often expect government to have all the answers. In America it's the opposite. It's like government needs to get out of the way because they have none of the answers. You know, what we need to do is accept the fact that we all the different sectors have different expertise, different knowledge and they're all there to learn from each other and I think when you see community engagement at its best, it's this recognition that the community has as much to give as the experts, that there's a role for the private sector, the government and the community sector, but they all can bring different things and we shouldn't all lump them together. We all should acknowledge that they have different things.

 

So I suppose, you know, with successful programs and what I've seen that work really, really well is a number of reoccurring themes, but one is the fact that it is a multi‑way relationship, that you don't turn up with a pre‑existing model and say, "This is what works" "and this is one of the powerful things about Carnegie, I think. We'll hear from Jihad in a moment and the model that Jihad used when he turned that school around, turned his school around, was very different to other models people use. And you can't copy that, you can't replicate that. But what you can do is learn the principles and take those principles with you and those principles are those principles of mutual respect, learning, bringing people together, learning from each other, being patient, willing to admit mistakes, willing to take risks and willing to say "I don't understand" or "I don't know, show me what you mean, show me what's unique about your community, show me what I need to know."

 

I think that brings with it a really important word, and again this is one of the things about the Fulbright that's really powerful, I think, and that word is humility. I think if we approach these engagements with a sense of humility, the sense we have a lot to learn from each other, then I think that we can move a long way to solving some of the challenges.

 

Now, what I've seen in the last few years, as in my previous role, is both incredible progress made in some of these areas. I've seen some really great things happen. I think part of that has been the massification of university and diversity universities have had. I think that's really, really benefited university. I think it's been incredible to see such diversity within the university sector. And the best educators and the best researchers are the ones that actually can understand the power of that diversity and tap into it and take advantage of it.

 

The problem, though, is when we don't appreciate that diversity, we don't appreciate the complexity of what everything has brought. I tell this story ‑ I tell this story and it's probably the ugly side, the arrogant side of academia, the arrogant side of where I think we go wrong.  And I remember being at a presentation once and hearing academics complain about the students, you know, and their abilities and one of the academics ‑ I overheard him turn around and say something, "It makes you wonder who let them in." I think to myself what sort of educator is that person, what sort of researcher can that person be? 

 

Only through processes of mutual respect and those drives, you know, and I'll finish off by saying one of the things we do with Fulbright is when we interview people, we don't only look for excellence in their chosen field. We look for people who are going to build one‑on‑one relationships, who are going to build those long‑term relationships. It's those qualities, you know. 

 

And I just got off ‑ just before joining the conference this morning, we had a presentation from a young man named Trey Carlisle from the US and his research area is ‑ his research area is using dance and art to bring conflicting communities together to rehumanising. Through the press there's so much dehumanising and he talks about rehumanising.

 

I think when you hear Trey speaking, he's all about, you know, wanting to understand people, wanting to understand what makes them click and then once he understands them, then seeking how he can connect to them and I think that understanding first and then, you know, trying to find solutions later is key. I'll leave it at that sort of broad opening and look forward to hearing from Jihad and Cassandra.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Thanks, James. That's a wonderful opening. I'm going to come to you now, Cassandra. What would you like to say?

 

DR CASSANDRA GOLDIE:  Thanks, Verity, and really privileged to follow from you, James. Can I acknowledge that I am on Gadigal land and I'm very delighted that I've been here for quite a long time and I pay respects to Elders past and present and to acknowledge First Nations communities and both of you joining today.

 

I also particularly want to acknowledge the really tough and intensive community pressure in First Nations communities in terms of keeping people safe. People are out there right now working as hard as they can to get people vaccinated and I just really want to acknowledge everybody who's continued to support and advocate for the right approach to protect First Nations communities at this time. It's very, very serious.

 

I also want to acknowledge you, Verity, for bringing us together. It is in times like this that we can become really disconnected because people are under intense pressure to deliver on a whole range of fronts, but I was really delighted to have this chance to reflect with each of you about where we're at with this.

 

I hope Verity will back me in saying this, that I have been a longstanding champion of the collaboration between the community sector and the academic community, but I've not come to it with a sense of the elitism. I've come with a sense because of the power in it that I do think, you know, certainly the collaboration with UTS ‑ we've had a very longstanding collaboration also with the University of New South Wales and with a number of other ‑ today I could list them out in terms of ACOSS's partnerships with a range of different researchers where more than ever we have come to a very strong view that as civil society, knowledge and facts really matter. They really matter.

 

There is a great thirst of understanding and we continue to see that the public institution, the notion, the values behind the public institution being the custodian of knowledge that we can have confidence in, that these are actually ‑ we can call them facts really matters. I wouldn't have predicted saying that 10 years ago the way I feel I need to say it today, but I don't need to talk through where we've been over that last 10 years to know that this is a very serious agenda about grounding our understanding in facts. So more power to the ethics committees, more power to those that are the rigorous ones checking the standards on research because that is something that is going to be increasingly important for us.

 

But I do think the notion of collaboration for us is grounded in us taking the challenge up to academic institutions, who are often perceived as very elitist, who can get, you know, stuck in notions of the expert, James. Community people are probably the best experts in the knowledge and the role of the academic is to unleash that and to bring that to the surface.

 

So this community development approach to knowledge generation has extraordinary power in it and that is something that I think is a values commitment for us to make sure that from the very beginning ‑ as we know, there is a huge amount of bias that gets set up in a research agenda and which questions get asked, you know, funding gets applied to what kinds of knowledge generation really changes people's understanding of what is going on and so I've always wanted us to support collaborations, including with government, that say we start with trying to embed the voice and participation of people who are the subject of the research as the owners of the research. We'll come back to what we need to keep working on because we ain't quite there yet, are we? Let's face it.

 

Then of course that provides platforms for people and voices and experience to be at the front of the release of the knowledge to provide people with the power and the confidence that they can trust the knowledge that is being generated about your own lives and a greater respect of those participants in the research rather than having the professors who sit over here who may, for example, have spent years working on something but actually never spent any significant time with the person who is the subject of that research.

 

So that's where collaboration ‑ nobody gets away with it. You just don't get away with it and nobody wants to get away with it. Every time I've spent time with wonderful academics, that is the last thing they want to do, but relationships are not necessarily there and so that is where the power of, you know, community sector with a lot of different relationships can really make a difference to the way the research that gets done.

 

The third part for me is I just want to acknowledge for all the beautiful students of Australia that money matters and jobs matter and again, I think in the power of collaboration we provide those kinds of relationships, ideas about where I can take my passion and interests, being able to move as seamlessly as possible between the academic, between roles in government and roles in the community sector and to see pathways and to design new roles as well because we are going to need to do things very differently.

 

So I also think that's a really important part, rather than spending a whole life for a period of time when you're getting your certification and you come out with no relationships in place yet and that is again, as we know, a great issue of equity because typically students that come from more affluent areas, from more high‑income areas have a lot more pre‑existing, plugged‑in relationships to where you might get your jobs and, you know, the collaborations amongst us can really change the power dynamics there to where students get control over the relationships they create and pitch themselves for the next great job opportunity for them.

 

The fourth part of it I think is transparency and trust and this is where I want to turn to some of the challenges that we're in right now because I do think that the values that sit in public institutions like university are about trust and transparency, that we are public institutions and therefore the knowledge we generate is owned by the public, but that is not what is happening too often and this is partly also how government has engaged with researchers.

 

In this pandemic, for example, ACOSS has been calling for months for the release of data about who is vaccinated, who is not, what is going on there in those local communities. It took us far too long to even get local government area data Jihad about where we were with vaccination rates. We still today don't have the research about, for example, people on the disability support pension who are vaccinated or not.

 

We're aware that this is ‑ these are examples of where probably contracts have been entered into, research agendas are being generated, but the terms and conditions of the research mean that the academic institution doesn't have control over the release and the transparency of it because the funder is a particular government institution, for example, that has said, "We want to see it first and we'll decide whether it gets released."

 

This is not a new issue. It has been going on for a long time. I know that many academics fight to retain control and the permission to release and publish, but I also know that in this competition with private consultancies, these are hard decisions that academics are having to make and because of where we've got to with the financing of academic institutions, the pressure to take the money on the conditions of the funder and not fight for transparency to keep trust in the public institutions will become seriously at risk. So I'd love us to talk a bit more about how we can prevent that from happening. Thanks, Verity.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  That's wonderful, Cassy. I've scribbled down. There's so many issues you've raised. We'll come back to that in the conversation. Jihad, last but not least, what are your opening remarks?

 

JIHAD DIB:  Thanks, Verity. I reiterate I'm on Wangal lands and acknowledgment to everyone there.

 

It's hard to be the last speaker after listening to such terrific opening remarks from James and Cassandra because I think in some ways we all come at it from a slightly different angle, but the purpose is exactly the same and that rings true for everybody, actually, on this call and I suppose that's the thing. I want to say, Verity, again thanks for bringing us together. If there's one thing we've learned over the past 18 months, it's very easy for people to drift apart, or it's very easy for people to do a tick a box Zoom exercise that doesn't mean anything other than just saying, "Yeah, we met." But we're going to have a discussion and I look forward to that and I look forward to the questions.

 

Cassandra, I'm going to pick up on one of the points there and I'm with you 100%. The transparency, particularly in terms of trying to use it to help people, was not there. I was pulling the very little bit of hair that I had out trying to get the information. Of course, I'm from one of the so‑called 12 LGAs of concern, you know, and we had issues in terms of vaccine hesitancy and vaccine availability and if anybody has seen the work I've done with some of my colleagues, we went to a completely local level, bypassed everything else and said this is what we've got to do, set up local vaccination hubs where people speak languages that are similar, we make it easy, don't put a computer in front of them, say, "Line up, somebody will come out and fill out the paper", what do we do to remove the obstacles. Then I asked for data that would say which suburbs do I need to work harder for, can I contact a local family or local elder and say, "Hey, we need some help there"? 

 

So data can be used for really good things. I think the more you keep things hidden away, the more it opens up for people to be able to say, "What is it that you're not telling us" and only adds to those conspiracy theories, and so forth. So I'm with you there with that.

 

We're all interconnected in so many ways and we all play different roles, but our roles together is actually what makes it a success. Everyone knows the analogy we're only as good as our linkages. Where I really want to pick up on is the importance of linkages and equality of linkages. You know, if you only know somebody when you need something from them, you don't really know them at all. You're not really developing a partnership. You're just developing something based on convenience. I think whether that's in the university sector, the community sector or certainly the sector that I've got into, which is the political sector, there's a lot of people who are very good at knowing your phone number, but not necessarily picking it up just to see how you're going or say, "Hey, I've got an idea." So the linkages there are incredibly important.

 

You know, if we leave it to somebody else, then it doesn't get done and I would imagine ‑ I'm talking to an audience that is not going to disagree with me yet. We're the doers who say there's a problem here, let's fix the problem.  Let's not whinge or complain about the problem, let's fix the problem, find a way to fix it.

 

Just a quick little personal history. So my dad never had a chance to finish school ‑ one of the smartest people I know. I love my dad. He's so good. I love him so much I'm starting to look like him. But he left school when he was 11 years of age because he was 11 and he needed to leave school because his father fell ill. He never had a chance to finish his education and I swear he's one of the most intelligent men that I know or people that I know. So for him education was just the ticket, but he never got the chance to.

 

So I was the first in the family, and there's many people who know the story of first in the family. It's not just about being proud you're the first in the family to make it to university, but it's the way it changes the dynamic of that family. All of a sudden something like university is not seen as this thing that's unattainable and not possible and it just changes.

 

So the idea of first in the family is so critically important, setting goals, which then leads me to something that's a real pet topic of mine, which is aspiration. Everybody talks about aspiration and says you can aim up to here and set your dreams and have all the dreams in the world, and that's good because we want people to dream of a better life, we want people to imagine a better life, but the missing link is the ladder, how do we actually help people get to the bit that they need to?  It's all good and well to say, "You can aspire to become anything you want, you can aspire to live a better life", but our role, all of us, whatever it may be ‑ we're all believers in it ‑ is how do we build that ladder so people can get to the aspirational point?  That's the thing that brings us together.

 

A really good example I'll give goes back to the olden days when I was principal and Verity, I think I was one of your first visits as the Minister. I remember somebody from Verity's office ringing me, you know, and I didn't know Verity at all and said, "The Minister would like to come out and visit" and I said, "Yeah, sure." They said, "Okay, what do you think about 9 o'clock?" I said, "No, we're there at 7.30 at the front gate" and Verity came in and stood at the gate with us and shook hands with the kids and welcomed the kids. As James said, we did things that were different.

 

The reason I segue into that is because I remember early on this one particular kid and this is the stuff that books are written about ‑ this one particular kid who, you know, said to me in the playground under the jacaranda tree, probably the only tree we had in the playground ‑ he said something like, you know, basically "Why did you come here?"  He's got no belief in the place or himself. I said, "Mate, let's try to get to uni." I'll never forget he said, "Sir, people like us don't go to university." That was what he'd been conditioned to believe. There was no use in me giving him aspiration if I couldn't give him the ladder. That for me is something that said this is the purpose of why we choose to do what we do, whether in this sector or this sector or whatever.

 

The wonderful story ‑ this is what I'll tell you ‑ that kid ended up becoming a teacher and he ended up working at Punchbowl Boys' High School. When I was still the principal, I gave him the task ‑ you always give teachers additional tasks. I gave him the task of being the person who mentors other kids who didn't believe in themselves. Now, that would never have happened if I just said to him, "You're going to get to university." We went through tutoring. UTS used to send tutors our way. UWS had a Fast Forward program. That was the ladder of aspiration.

 

That for me is an example of what we can do when we think a little bit outside the box, when we go in with the common purpose and the purpose is always the why, why do we do what we do?  We do it because every single one of us actually believes in making a difference and it's not just something that you write on a card or put on the front of your door, making a difference is like what I just had ‑ almost in tears this morning when turned up to my office and boxes are stacked up. I put out a call earlier this week to support Afghan families. Over the last three days we filled up more than one van's worth of stuff. People have donated, left it out the front. These are people who do it tough themselves.

 

So 100% of the community, 100% people who believe we can work together to achieve some great outcomes. But 100% also to the enablers, you're all the enablers that make this happen. I can do a bit, Cassandra can do a bit, James can do a bit, Verity can do a bit, but every single one of us can do a lot when we're working together.

 

As I said, working together doesn't just mean I have you on an email list that I send out to you once every couple of months. Sincere, genuine relationships that are grounded in wanting to collaborate and to make a difference is what it's all about.

 

To make things happen ‑ I've written down a couple of things and I'll wrap it ‑ I jotted it down when listening to Cassandra. I hadn't done my homework properly. You have to have a desire to change things. That's the first, there's got to be the desire. You have to have the courage to take the risks and say, "We're going to do this" and I know there's going to be maybe a failure somewhere, but that's okay, you learn from mistakes, as James said. You've got to be willing to fail to succeed.

 

You've got to have a commitment to making it happen. Now, that means that whether you've got to beg, borrow, steal, lean on friends, do whatever you need to do to make it happen, because once it starts clicking into gear, it will work.

 

Then you've got to also be creative. You can't just do things the way that everybody else does them or the way that ‑ if something works really well in say, for example, Bankstown, it doesn't mean it's going to work ‑ you can't do the exact same work if you went, say, to Narrabeen. You may have the same ideas, but you've got to go, "What works for this particular group and how do we do it?"  Be creative, think a little differently, bring them on the journey. 

 

And I love what Cassandra said, it's not ‑ the person who's the benefit really has to be a big contributor into how it's done, and we see this a lot. We've seen it through the pandemic where I'll get health officials or the police, and so forth, and say, "That's not the way you do it here, here's the way we do it" and we make great progress.

 

Of course the last one is transparency. I jotted down notes, I've gone completely off script, but I think the point being really clear is that sense of collaboration where everybody does it because if we are there for the greater good and all of us are, then how do we work better together to champion each other's causes so that we actually help people not in a patronising way, but we create that ladder of aspiration so everybody can have the same opportunity regardless of where it is they come from and regardless of their circumstances. So that's the stuff that gets us passionate. That's why we're all here.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Thank you, Jihad. That's really lovely. So listening to all of you, there is clearly a common thread forming, particularly around that concept of equal relationships, right?  Cassandra really put it beautifully when she talked about giving power and agency to the people whose benefit this collaboration is, you know, to the people you're actually generating, you know, generating results for, for want of a better word. She talked about it power and confidence to trust the knowledge that is then generated about their lives. I thought that was really great.

 

What I'm going to ask each of you now is you've all been involved in cross‑sector collaborations, right?  Have these collaborations changed over time, and I suppose that is a bit of an insight into whether you think we're getting better at this or worse. It doesn't necessarily mean we're improving. So just think about have these collaborations changed over time and what's been lost and what have we gained as a result of these changes?  And I might start ‑ I'll start with you, Cass, and then go to you, James, and then with you, Jihad.

 

DR CASSANDRA GOLDIE:  So I think that in the area of particular, you know, interest and significance for, say, the work that ACOSS does, I think over the last period we have succeeded in generating a lot more knowledge and hopefully understanding about the nature and extent of poverty and disadvantage and if I reflect back, you know, over the last, say, decade, there was a point there ‑ I remember it, actually, I was at the Human Rights Commission and I was trying to find the number of women in poverty. I could not find ‑ it took me too long. It took me too long.

 

I went to the ABS and they said, "We'll get back to you in a couple of weeks, see what we can do, this is how much it will cost you." We're not there anymore. There is over the last decade bodies of research and evidence generated in a whole lot of different aspects, both those initiated out of academic environments and also those that are being driven more from NGOs and civil society, often with collaboration but not always.

 

The flip side of course is then people are trying to understand what does it all mean and so there is I think also a real risk for us that as we make knowledge more accessible, people ‑ the ability to understand all the numbers, understand the different ways in which we track change and as people start to connect more through the digital life we have access to more of this, you know, and the media sucks it up, people are trying to understand are things better or worse, what does the unemployment situation look like right now? It depends on who you ask, doesn't it, Jihad?  It depends which side of politics you're talking to, frankly, and who is there in the middle who will actually really tell me?

 

You know, we've seen, for example, in the understanding the nature and extent of this pandemic and what needs to be done, the academic community has been front and centre in all of this, but I tell you what, it's been really hard for the community to understand what ‑ it's almost like we've got dual models going on. We can't trust anything. This professor says something different to this professor.

 

In the closer confines of a more deliberative process, the nuance is understood by those generating the knowledge. It is not necessarily understood in the public and the cultural understanding because people don't own and control this and are seeing it being used very politically. So I think that has accelerated, not got better, that sort of confusion and risk of confusion.

 

Probably fuelling that is this notion that you can't rely on anybody and facts don't exist anymore. So I think that's part of it. And the other part I think is, you know, I highlighted earlier ‑ I think who else has moved in to generate knowledge and to put themselves at the centre of research and, in particular, private consulting groups. If you look at the dollar for dollars, where all the big dollars are going, for example, from the Government consulting firms definitely have secured a lot and have seen that as a growth area for business and, you know, I lose count of the number of times ACOSS gets approached to be involved in these sorts of private consultancies.

 

So I think we're navigating that because I don't think anybody wants to be tribal here. We've just talked about the power of collaboration and so having business involved in collaboration can also be very powerful, but what are the risks there, and I think those are going to only increasingly become hard questions for us because, you know, profit motives can really drive research in a way that's not actually beneficial to people at the heart of the work.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  That's really interesting. James, your thoughts around collaborations changing over time?

 

PROF. JAMES ARVANITAKIS:  Yeah, look, I think, you know, there's a really ‑ I suppose another theme that's sort of emerging here is the issue of trust and I think, you know, one of the big challenges of collaborations is the steady decline in trust in expert and expert systems. Universities are right in the middle of that.

 

I think it was only recently that the trust parameter highlighted that private organisations have become more highly trusted than not for profits and governments and media and the reason is people feel that at least with the private organisation you know what they're doing, they're trying to get money out of you. Whereas with the declining levels of trust in these other organisations, you know, we feel, rightly and wrongly, and sometimes they're right and sometimes wrong, that we've broken the social contract, that we promised to try to make things better and we didn't.

 

A lot of my research in the US and a lot of the work, you know, that I did in the US was about trying to understand this break in the contemporary social contract between expert institutions, universities, governments, policy bodies and people and it was from there that I kind of really began to get really insights into the rise of Trumpism and sort of the really radical populous vote. I think Australia is not there yet. You can see where that is from where we're standing at the moment and I think it's a policy ‑ it's a trend that we really need to arrest.

 

So I think that's been one of the big changes over the last decade, this declining levels of trust in expert systems, sometimes because we've made mistakes and we haven't been willing to admit it and sometimes, as Cassandra indicated, when things are out of our control, you know, beyond our control.

 

But going back to Jihad's point ‑ this is where we can retake control and this is where things happen that are out of control, but we need to be smart in how we take control back. Jihad's point was really important when he saw the vaccine hesitancy, right?  He didn't stand on the megaphone like calling these people idiots or uneducated or heathens or anti‑vaxxers and whatever, but he stood there and sat down and understood where it was, where the issue was. And in America to understand vaccine hesitancy, say ‑ I spoke to some black American, African American institutes because it was a big vaccine hesitancy there. If you look at the history of the medical system in the US, a lot of African Americans were used in experiments, right?  Why would you trust our medical system?  You know, I wouldn't. Again, you look at our First Nations people, you know, Cassandra touched on that. You know, so much of expert systems have for generations betrayed and let people down. So trust doesn't just happen.

 

So one of the things I worked on at Western Sydney University was reframing our engagement strategy into the concept of a trust strategy, what I called the trust project, and what it was about was saying we should aim to be the most trusted organisation for expert advice, strategic advice, employees, you know, that's our graduates, all those things. We should be focused on building trust. That's what it should be about.

 

One of the things about engagement strategies is that often ‑ I challenge the people here who are interested in engagement to think about your engagement strategy. If I deidentified it, would we know it was UTS or Western Sydney or was it, you know, CQU, whatever. We wouldn't. They use the same words. Going back to what Jihad said, it's about being specific to our community, what our community needs from us, what they want from us, what they aspire from us.

 

I think what's changed ‑ and I think we now have more ability. The data we have, the students we have, the connections we have are deeper and so we have the ability in a way to counteract that trust, to counteract that loss of trust in a way we've never had before.

 

But we need to be brave enough to do it and this is my last point. Universities ‑ we need to be also honest. We need to turn around and say ‑ I'm not just talking about universities but, you know, expert institutes, you know, all sides of it, be it public policy institutes, NGOs or whatever ‑ be honest and say, "No, we can't do that" or, "No, we're not going to be able to do that" and not to promise people the world and underdeliver, but more be honest about the way we have and to have uncomfortable conversations.

 

In the work I've been doing lately I've been talking a lot about the concept of brave spaces, you know, educational power of discomfort, how you build relationships, you know. There's these deep relationships that Cassandra and Jihad talk about is also having uncomfortable conversations with people, right, that aren't always assuming we're all going to get along or assuming we're all easily aligned. We're not. We have conflicting interests. We've got to be brave enough to have those.

 

As educators and educators and community leaders, if we're not willing to have those in the classroom with our students and with our colleagues and getting it wrong, how will we have it with the general public?  I think that's really, really important.

 

The thing about engagement ‑ when people come to me, I want to be better engaged. What do I need to do? Be prepared to get your hands dirty, be prepared to get told, "You're an idiot" ‑ pardon my words, that you're a wanker because real community engagement is messy, it's uncomfortable, and I think, you know, the easiest thing to do is to move back into sort of the hallowed halls of university and back into our comfortable, you know, community engagement meetings and feel really good about ourselves, but real community engagement, like you talked about, Jihad and Verity, you talked about standing at that gate at 7.30 in the morning, welcoming people that sometimes don't want to be there, but being prepared to turn up and again tomorrow and the next day and next day.

 

Yeah, I think that's not only how things have changed, but in a positive way as well. We've never been better prepared to have those conversations and we need to have them.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  And Jihad, collaborations changed over time ‑ do you think they have changed, what's been lost, what's been gained?

 

JIHAD DIB:  Look, they definitely have changed. I think we've got ‑ we've understood the importance of collaboration. Whether we've got good at it or not is another question altogether, but the importance of collaboration is really good.

 

You know, like the points were made by Cassandra and James that collaboration is genuine and sincere. So talking about getting your hands dirty, it doesn't mean you send ‑ you might get the idea I'm anti blanket emails. I am. There's nothing personal in an email you receive that looks exactly the same as everybody else received, as opposed to a phone call, as opposed to knocking on someone's door.

 

I know we can't necessarily do that, but when I send out an email to, say, 50 local community groups all exactly the same and I don't have any relationship with them, I wouldn't be surprised if they ‑ especially if I want something from them, they should delete it. If I can't go and meet them in person, someone should go and speak to them. You give them the respect and courtesy because you want something from them and you want that genuine engagement.

 

I love what Cassandra said, she doesn't know how many times she's been asked to be involved in research. You know someone is making money off the back of what it is you're saying and you think to yourself this is not quite right.

 

I do want to just say some of the good collaborations and I'll go back a little and current day. How do we help with the aspiration constantly? The ladder for me was collaboration. How do schools, for example, like my old school or a number of other schools ‑ they're not schools that kids have got no hope. They just need some assistance. How do universities do proper collaboration with them with the end goal of trying to get a student to either go into university or be able to achieve more than they thought they could achieve or believed they could.

 

So I mentioned the UTS program which was about, you know, where students were actually coming and doing free tutoring with kids after school. These were education students. It did a couple of things. Not only did it help in terms of revising the work but, more importantly, it gave the kids a connection to somebody who was at university and they spoke about university and they would talk about what it was because for someone who's never been to university or no‑one in their family has ever been, it's scary, intimidating. It's quite, I don't know, people like us don't go there, so demystifying that a great deal.

 

Then there was the great program ‑ James, you'd know it well ‑ the Fast Forward program, which basically said hey, we're going to give you experience of university that runs over a few years. I remember the first time we went there I took kids that literally couldn't ‑ they couldn't necessarily read, but the confidence and inspiration it gave them made them work a lot harder. Then we said what the ladder to it is, we can do it.

 

So the collaborations that have a positive outcome are really good. The collaborations where ‑ I see a lot more agencies collaborating with one another. I 100% agree with the issue of trust. I think there's been a real question of trust. You know, all of a sudden somebody who says something that 15 years ago we thought would be absolutely ludicrous and ridiculous and I can't believe you're saying that, all of a sudden now starts gaining traction ‑ "Oh, no, but Mr Kelly", for example, "says this, this and this ‑ okay, him and Clive Palmer. I'd be taking my advice from him before I took it from my doctor."

 

And yet the reason that some people will see that is because they've lost trust in other institutions that were once upon a time the ones that gave the info. That's something that we've really got to address why has trust been lost and is it because we haven't communicated the message very clearly, is it because we haven't included people in part of the journey, is it because we spoke down to them when they had hesitancy and made them feel like they're anti‑vaxxers. They weren't, they were just what anybody would be, they were just a bit concerned. That level of trust is so important.

 

But also knowing where you stand. I think collaboration is really good, but if it's always about patting each other on the back and avoiding those difficult conversations and disagreeing with each other, I don't actually think we're really getting anywhere. My experience has been that people respect you more for staying true to what you believe in, for saying, "This is my line in the sand and this is why" and I don't shift it every single day.

 

Have a look at Twitter, as everybody does, and there's some people every day is a different opinion. They just kind of blow with the wind. That's pretty good because it might help them get their likes, or whatever, but in terms of respect, it doesn't earn the respect when you change your opinion all of the time, when you don't actually ‑ you're not vulnerable to criticism, you're not opening yourself up to the possibility somebody might disagree with you. But I think that's really important stuff.

 

You know, the question then for us and all of us ‑ I come from a really interesting perspective because I come from ‑ I still see myself in many ways as a community and a school teacher and obviously I'm a politician, but I get so upset when people say, "Politicians, you're all the same." I go, "no."  So that really bothers, but it gives a unique perspective because we've seen, I suppose, in the last 18 months more than any other time certainly in my history ‑ we've actually seen the importance of trust, the importance of listening to people, the importance of valuing their opinion, the importance of acting on it.

 

But when this whole pandemic is over, and it can't come soon enough, the story that's going to be written is actually about communities, about what communities did to plug all of the gaps that were left that people just left them to their own devices where community actually comes together and the story is going to be written about the people who got in there and didn't just say, "I'm so and so and this is my role and I'm telling you what to do", but those who got their hands dirty, who lived the moment and said, "This is how we can fix it."

 

So collaboration ‑ there's stuff that we've lost that's an element of trust and we've got to win that trust, but we've also gained a lot more in the sense that people have more of a desire, I think, to want to try to get together. I think people want to work towards a solution. What we need is for it to come from trusted institutions, not necessarily somebody who's receiving a massive contract to make it happen. And it comes from within and rather than top down, it actually comes from bottom up and it includes people. That's where I sort of see the collaboration element going and the potential there.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  I think that's a really interesting point about ‑ I think one of the positives of COVID has in fact been that community connection and the efforts that have come from the community and hopefully given community members the confidence to actually drive change in this circumstance. So I think that's a positive.

 

I'm going to quickly ask one more question, Jihad, because I think it was a really interesting point you made about suddenly being a politician and going, "Hey, wait a minute" because I think it's really ‑ when you look at your career, you've moved from being one of the most trusted professions ‑ I would argue teachers have a pretty high trust component in the community ‑ to probably a profession that, along with used car salesmen, is probably the least trusted profession. I remember when I was a politician I found it quite difficult to deal with the lack of trust. And I want ‑ the reason I'm asking the question is I'd like to get a bit of an insight into did you find that your relationships shifted with people when your title shifted and if that was the case, how did you restore trust?  How did you restore that relationship, because that may provide us with insights into how we can better manage relationships across sectors.

 

JIHAD DIB:  Yes. Well, there's so many layers in that question. I will say it was actually a big, big decision for me to go into politics. It wasn't one that ‑ it's funny. You look back now and I remember my wife saying, "Jihad, it was always obvious you'd go into politics."  I said, "I never thought I would, but I did." Then the question, "Why are you in it for?"  It's for the stuff I keep talking about. I've gone from being the profession that's trusted to something that's actually looked down upon.

 

So my thing was really important to say, well, I'm going to be me ‑ I'm going to be the person ‑ like I said, I'm going to be true to my beliefs, true to the purpose of what I'm in there and change people's perspectives of what politics can be and what politics should be and I want to encourage people who have really switched off politics to engage in politics a little more through my own style, so bringing that same sort of idea that I had and that same sense of spirit into I call it my new job and changing things and I have changed things and those of you who follow my political journey know that I don't like the cheap politics. That doesn't mean you back away and let everyone get away with it, but I don't like the cheap politics. I don't think that's what people want. People want you to get in there and do the job about making life better. That's as simple as it can.

 

One of my mates, interestingly, talked about the changes in the way people ‑ the number of people who ‑ people say, "Oh, you haven't changed" to me is the best thing they can say, you haven't changed as a person. I'm wearing a suit right now, but seriously, my most comfortable stuff is not in a suit. My most comfortable stuff is working. If I do volunteering, for example, it's not there for 5 or 10 minutes, get a photo. I'm there to work.

 

But one of my really close mates when I first made the call I want to go into politics and had to do a fundraiser and he said, "Look, I can't come to your fundraiser." I was actually really upset by him. I said, "Mate, we play tennis all the time, we're mates." He goes, "I hate politicians." I said, "But it's me, it's Jihad, I'm not a politician." He goes, "No."  And he was really like ‑ and I was really, really upset. I thought how can he do this?  He knows me as a person. As it turned out, he didn't come. He made a donation but he also said, "I'll help you on the day of the election."

 

I think the really important thing is to keep your roots, to remember who you are and what you are, and I've got friends who are not political friends at all. The friends I had before I went into politics are the same ones I have now. My best friends are not my political friends. My best friend is still a bloke from school. My mates are still from school that I taught at, our family friends. It's really hard to balance the time because there's things you can do, but when with them, I'm with them, I'm not Jihad the MP, I'm just Jihad the same bloke that you knew.

 

The final one and probably going ‑ every year we go on an annual trip the dads ‑ all our kids went to school together, so the dads and the mums, but separate trips, a dad's trip and a mum's trip. It's more manageable that way. But we've been going on it now for 10 years and it's hilarious because it's a real mix of people and there's no airs of grace, we're just who we are. That's been hard. That's been really hard. 

 

And I suppose I get ‑ humility for me is really important and it's not an act, that's what you do. I know better than anybody else I've got a bigger responsibility because I've been entrusted to do the right thing, to do the right thing for people, and so if I always remember that, then I remember there are people who knock on the door here because they need help. They're the reason that I'm there for. I'm not there so I can say I'm an MP so I can sit on a green chair. You've got to remember the why. When you can't do it anymore, you've got to leave it for somebody else.

 

I've always been a bit like that with life ‑ remember who you are, what's the purpose. Don't forget where you come from. I still love shopping for the specials in Punchbowl and people sometimes laugh because they think oh, no, you're a politician. Yes, I do. Like normalise it.

 

I don't know if I've answered that question, but given a bit of an insight into what it's like. But the nicest thing has been the number of people who've come up and just said they're now interested in politics and I say politics isn't being a politician. Politics is everything. It's the community work, it's the helping others. 

 

And the cutest was this little girl ‑ I'll finish with this story. It was just a beautiful young girl, Indonesian background, just outside my office one day. She came up to me and said, "Can I have a photo with you?" She would have been maybe 7 or something, 7 or 8. I said, "Of course, of course." Anyway, I knelt down and she said, "I want to be like you when I grow up." I thought my God, this kid. I straightaway said, "I don't want you to be like me, I want you to be better than me. I want you to use what I've done to make yourself even better. I want you to be the first girl from this community."

 

That's the stuff that inspires you. When the crap stuff happens, you've got to remember what's the purpose because there's a lot of crap stuff but gee there's a lot of good stuff.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Cassandra, I could see you were ‑‑

 

DR CASSANDRA GOLDIE:  Jihad, it's really very generous of you to share those insights into, you know, the challenges for you as you've moved in these different roles and it really reminds me of, you know, about power and privilege. Gee, it's really something, isn't it? You know, what can happen is we are the same person throughout a life, but depending on what position we get into, our power and privilege changes and that perception is ‑ there's a reality to that.

 

I was working in Darwin at the community legal centre together with my community, we would talk almost every day about how there was the highest rates of homelessness in Darwin in the Northern Territory than nationally. Never got cut through. Over at UNSW for two days kind of thing ‑ I popped up as director of the homelessness thing at UNSW and said exactly the same thing and it made it on to the front page ABC story, went off and I just said "what the" because it was a university that said it, not the community, yeah?

 

So one of the things that's the real power of this collaboration is if we actually hold ‑ remember all that ‑ our who we are and knowing what it was like to be in those different parts of life, using privilege that comes from different positions to then give access to others. We're in a position to open a door and go you go in. I bet you do it all the time, that thing rather than I'm going to take that spot, I'll let you take that spot now.

 

JIHAD DIB:  I'm going ‑ sorry, Verity, I was going to give a really great example of opportunity and opening the door and I think that's the important thing. You don't open the door and close it. You open the door and go, "Here's my hand". Be creative, a bit crazy. I love being a little different.

 

And Verity knows, you know, you can do parliamentary visits. I do the tour myself. I'm going to be a travel guide once this is all over because I love it. I'm going to work as a clerk.

 

But I decided to do ‑ I worked with Wiley Park Public, one of my local schools. I visited them. There was a number of people from subcontinent, Bangladesh in particular, recently arrived and they were in a community program. The principal there is fantastic. I said, "Hey, why don't we do something crazy?"  She said, "What is it?"  "Why don't we organise a parents' excursion to Parliament House?" They had never been to Parliament House before.

 

We organised it and went out of our way to make sure ‑ I spoke to security at parliament so they let them park a bus inside. I said, "Bring your kids, bring whatever." There was all these women and you can imagine ‑ I think there was one man, but mostly mums and the beautiful ‑ with the colours of Bangladesh and all these different shawls. It was just gorgeous ‑ and these prams, they had their prams. I took them everywhere through the parliament, it was a parliamentary day, and I was just proud and, you know, I organised morning tea for them. And I remember some of the ladies taking photos of the crest on the saucer because it was like oh, wow, this is Parliament House, you know. That was the thing that got them.

 

Then the last one ‑ I won't mention which parliamentary colleague it was ‑ I wanted to take them up to my office. I didn't know how I was going to get 30 mums into my office.  I don't care, I was going to do it. I got them all waiting for the lift and I said, "Okay, got to get to level 10." Then a certain member of parliament came in with a, "Oh, I'm in a rush", you know. I said, "Look, sorry, let's get them all up." It was completely up yourself. If I could have been more violent, I would have.

 

Anyway, what I did was a smart arse, excuse the language, I said, "Sorry, no problem, you get in." I got all the mums in as well and I went in with some of the ones I could fit and pressed every single button on the way up, made a point of he was being a pain in the neck. I thought I don't care who you are. You are no better than these people. That's opening the door. But those mums then went back and would have told their kids you can dream because they've seen it now, they've experienced it. Sorry, I just jumped in. It was a lovely story.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Closing the door on a politician ‑‑

 

JIHAD DIB:  It was such a classic smart alec thing for me. He thought I was going to let him go through and I pressed every button to be a pain in the backside. I made a point.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  James, I'm going to cross to you. I remind people we've got about eight minutes left and I want to ask one of the audience questions. James, I can see you want to say something.

 

PROF. JAMES ARVANITAKIS:  Just picking up on Western Sydney's Fast Forward program, that's a program where it's about really building those aspirations and I know there's a couple of colleagues from Western Sydney, a couple of my ex‑colleagues from Western Sydney, who are involved in that program. It's exactly what Jihad said, it's about bringing students and their parents on campus, right, and walking around and seeing what it's like. It's amazing and talking to students and their parents when they come on campus for the first time and making time to sit with them and show them around. It changes everything, right?  It changes everything.

 

But one of the things I'm most proud of ‑ again, we talked about deep collaboration ‑ was, you know, I've written a textbook which is an academic best‑seller, which means I've sold 100 copies, but you know, in reality is a really well received textbook. The background of that textbook was to get students to write me stories about their experiences, like real‑life stories. I didn't sit there and say, "Here's a story about this is what gender is and I'm going to spend 50 minutes of my one‑hour lecture with you telling you theoretical and then give you a case study." I literally said ‑ one of the examples I talk about was I said to one of my classes, I put up a sign and said, "Okay, I want you to write me a story to all the guys here, I want you to write me a story of when you had to prove you were a real man", right?  I did a similar thing with the girls.

 

This young guy wrote me a story about playing a game of Rugby League with a broken arm. He'd broken his arm during the game and played on because he wanted to prove to his dad he wasn't a sissy boy. He said afterwards to me, he wrote down the bottom of the story, "I will never be like that as a parent or as a football coach", "I never want to repeat those things." That leads the textbook. That's one of the first stories in the textbook, that leads.

 

That's talking about collaboration, I sat in the room with those students and I want to ensure they know they've got as much to add to the discussions as what I do with my PhD with their life experiences, be they 17, 18 or mature‑age students at 55, you know, mature age mums who come back, trying to come back into the workforce, that they've got something to add. That's that equality of knowledge, right?  Similar to Jihad, that's how you smash those boundaries, right, that's how you smash those boundaries. I'll leave it at that.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  So having said how much we agree about collaboration and equality, I think we need to ask one of the audience questions and there is a question from Sonal which is really about widening participation strategies and how do we actually do better in this space as universities, but that has been touched upon a bit, so I'm going to ask Nerissa's question, which is around data. I thought this was an interesting one. I might put it first to Cassandra, actually, because you were talking about transparency of data, Cassandra. Nerissa says, "All data ‑ example research results ‑ is a tool that can be used or viewed both ways. With the availability of data to the public, it can also cause discrimination of a sector or a community ‑ ie, abuse, discrimination towards the community because of their low vaccination rate", and this was the exact issue we had when we were thinking about making school performance data transparent, right?  "In your view, how can that be prevented prior to the data being made available?" Cassandra?

 

DR CASSANDRA GOLDIE:  Yes, it's ‑ I come back to the point earlier about ownership and control and agency and the comment I think Jihad, when you talked about communities want to know and if you ground the research work in that environment, you will also know how to deal with that because the people directly affected are driving the sharing of the knowledge.

 

I've got to say each time I've been involved in testing and checking that, the view very strongly comes through from communities that they want to know and as long as they have control over it, it gives them an opportunity to confront that stigma and not be talked about but to talk, to challenge, because often what you're doing is you're unearthing pre‑existing stereotypes and notions of discrimination.

 

So, you know, when we were saying earlier the story of this pandemic that's so incredible is the power of community leadership and great communities have gone out of our way, we're going to look after our people and that is the dominating theme. So in fact yes, there will be some nasty stuff on Twitter, the racism and everything, and we know that and it's real and when you're the target of it, it's terrible and we have to have strategies to try to confront that, but as I say, each time I've been involved in those discussions, people say, "This is about us". People with disability are saying today, "Tell us how many of our communities are vaccinated and where they're not and we want to get control so we can go there and be where we need to be."  Similarly, First Nations communities are doing the same thing, as, you know, communities from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds have made that call and said, "We want to know so that we" ‑ because, you know ‑ I think that's a great example and we're right in the thick of it right now.

 

In fact, I'm writing a letter to national cabinet, Jihad, again about it, as soon as I get off this event, right?  So please ‑ you know, I think they can be used as an excuse. I don't underestimate how serious it can be. We know that with, for example, the Northern Territory intervention, the Howard Government when that really powerful work was done, that deep and wide investigation into the Northern Territory, controlled by Aboriginal leaders led to one of the nastiest acts of vilification with the legacy that lives on today, right, where we've still got communities in the Northern Territory that are treated with rules that are deeply offensive and that has never left those communities. So I understand the resistance or the careful debates that must happen about how you do it when you go out and having a strategy so that you make sure that data is not used as an excuse to go in and often do things that governments have wanted to do anyway. I don't dismiss it, it's important.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  It's complicated. It's interesting because when we were making the school performance data publicly available, there were all of those similar concerns around residualising schools and everything, but I always tell the good news story about it, which was in our local area there were two schools, a very middle class school and a school that serviced the estate, and the school that serviced the public housing area was already residualised, very, very small numbers and all the middle class went to the other school.

 

When the first publication of the data came out, it was revealed that the school that was servicing the estate was doing extremely well in its literacy and numeracy results ‑ in fact, doing better on raw results than the middle class school up the road ‑ and it was a wonderful example of where data can be used to actually deconstruct what was actually just a community prejudice based on chat, chat, chat about the performance of a school that was actually performing very well and it really was just a class‑ and raced‑based prejudice really what was happening. So that was a good story about data.

 

James, I'm mindful of the time, but I do want to ask a question that Franziska Trede has put into the chat, I thought this would be good for you: "Any ideas how universities can be better accessible for external partners?  There are so many opportunities for collaborations, but how do we invite external partners in?"

 

PROF. JAMES ARVANITAKIS:  One of the things about universities is they are so big and complex, right, and it's one of the things that's really hard is often the success you have is about who you get to meet there and that's always a bit of a challenge. I wish that every university had an organisation ‑ you know, someone you could just call or a group of people you could call, like a community engagement group you could just call, but unfortunately the complexities of universities, even when you have a centralised group like that, they don't know, they don't know all the details and, you know, it's a bit hard.

 

I think one of the things to understand about ‑ I'm not sure if you're asking this as a community member wanting to collaborate with university or university wanting to be better at setting something like this up, but if you're a community member wanting to collaborate with a university ‑‑

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Franziska is asking it from the point of view of the university.

 

PROF. JAMES ARVANITAKIS:  Then I think definitely setting up ‑ making sure that there are ways for the university to be connected to be able to ‑ people from the community sector to be able to reach in and making sure that academics are rewarded for engaging with the community. You need to incentivise this. If someone goes out and gets a million dollar contract or a $5 million contract with the feds, they'll be lauded at university. If someone says, "I've worked with this community to help break down", you know, "vaccine hesitancy", you know, "and it's helped 10 people get vaccinated", people will go, "Oh, yeah, that's okay, whatever", that's not going to get you a promotion. But that is just as important as the $5 million contract, right, when it comes to universities.

 

So I think universities really ‑ there's communication channels in, but there's also a really important thing for leaders of universities to make sure that they incentivise and reward deep community engagement that doesn't necessarily relate into dollars, right?  I think that's really important, that's something that we need to do.

 

One of the things that Jihad and Cassandra also did which I thought was really important when they said you open the door and you let other people in ‑ it's not about opening the door and closing it behind people, but you open the door and help people in. One of the things I think that's really important for us to be able to do is ensure that the community members feel that they feel empowered to engage with us in a really positive way and that we take a long‑term relationship with that. But we need to make sure that we reward academics and researchers and educators who engage with the community and don't necessarily bring in finances for the ‑ only about being the bottom line. That's really, really important.

 

This goes back to one final pet hate that I have, if I may mention, right, and that is where ‑ I'm not being partisan here in any way, but I think ‑ because I think both sides of politics have been a bit guilty of it. We talk about industry, right, about industry funding. Industry funding takes a different relationship to community funding.

 

Going back to Cassandra being asked to be part of these relationships, a very, very different thing. So NPILF should be NPILFC, or something like that.  NPILF, which is funding universities to train students to be job ready to work with the industry, should be about ‑ it's a real pet hate of mine. It's not about industry, it's about being ready to be good citizens. Industry has changed. Being a good citizen doesn't. And being a good citizen is just as much about engaging with industry as it is engaging with your community and working with your community sector.

 

So I just think that there's ways for us to also ensure that our student body within the curriculum, within the way that we teach also is ‑ we become much more focused on what we mean about community learning and rewarding students for doing that.

 

JIHAD DIB:  Can I just add ‑ I know we're running short of time, but I want to super quick ‑ there's a couple of possible ideas. They've been great. We're talking about collaboration. One of the best things universities can do is to actually help particularly some of the really small community organisations that are really grassroots, help them become better. In other words, maybe a student who can earn a credit point, for example, by going to work with one particular group to help them set up something like better governance, maybe to help them through their marketing, help do some data research.

 

Being able to actually have ‑ rather than someone there as a prac student, there's actually a real partnership and then the university is using its expertise and the students need to learn some more and actually helping particularly the really small community groups that literally run on the smell of an oily rag in donations. Those sorts of things I think are really great and it comes down to the engagement officers to be able to reach out and make some of those changes. Maybe credit points or maybe some sort of a recognition.

 

PROF. JAMES ARVANITAKIS:  Credit points ‑ you know what else we're talking about, not just credit points. This sounds boring, but structures. I remember when we had ‑ I tried to get students into some community organisations and the university said you can only ‑ "but they need to start on the 1st of March because our insurance only starts when semester starts" and the sector is like, you know, "Then they need to finish by this day in April because that's when the semester finishes and when our insurance ends". I'm like, "You can't shove a community into our semester." It's just not how it works, right? 

 

So they're the kind of structural ‑ it sounds really boring and mundane, but those structural changes limit our ability to be able to do that and so I really, really think that's important ‑ to lift Jihad's point, it's really important, but we also need to be willing to smash some of those structures that sort of control what we do.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  I love that. It's the flipping, isn't it?  It's not all about what works for the university. It's actually about what works for our community partner.

 

I'm going to have to wrap it up there. I'm going to get one of our people from the centre to put a link in to the Shopfront program at UTS, Jihad, which is exactly what you described. It is basically a program where there is partnerships between small to medium for‑purpose enterprises or not‑for‑profit providers and they come to UTS and they work with students in a credit‑based, academically supervised program, but the project comes from the community partner. So I'm going to get someone to put that in the link ‑‑

 

JIHAD DIB:  Love it. Flick it to me.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  ‑ and flick it to you because you can send people our way. So I want to thank the panellists enormously. I really enjoyed that conversation. It was just really useful, interesting, insightful, pulled out themes, intelligent, engaged. You were all perfect.

NAREEN YOUNG:  Good morning, everyone. I'm delighted to be taking over as the facilitator for this next session, which looks at some examples of engagement approaches.

 

Firstly, I'd like to acknowledge that wherever we are in Australia, we're on the traditional lands of First Nations peoples and sovereignty has never been ceded. I acknowledge ‑ my name is Nareen Young and I acknowledge my Eora, Swedish and Scottish ancestors. I acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, upon whose ancestral lands the UTS City Campus now stands and where I am sitting at my home in Erskineville in Sydney this morning. And I have to warn you that because we're all working from home, sometimes my dogs bark when people walk past the house and I will mute myself when they do that. But they're little and crazy, so I'm sorry about that.

 

I pay respect to Elders past and present, acknowledging them as the First Nation owners and their ongoing connection to this land, waterways and culture. I particularly want to acknowledge the Gadigal as the custodians of knowledge for the lands on which UTS and my home stands and to thank them for their extraordinary custodianship of this land for so long that we are all now sharing. I further acknowledge the traditional owners of country where you are joining us from and pay respect to their Elders.

 

As I said earlier, my name is Nareen Young. I'm the Industry Professor for Indigenous policy at the UTS Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, where I lead the Indigenous People and Work Research and Practice Hub. We have two case studies for you today and are joined by a group of distinguished guests: Michael Christie and Michaela Spencer, from the Northern Institute at Charles Darwin University; Margaret Malone and Scott Abbott, from UTS; and Laura Nkula‑Wenz, from University of Cape Town, who prerecorded her presentation for today because of the unfortunate time difference.

 

I'd firstly like to welcome Michael Christie and Michaela Spencer to talk about their work, GroundUp. Michael Christie is a Professor of Education and heads up the Contemporary Indigenous Governance and Knowledge Systems research theme at the Northern Institute, Charles Darwin University.

 

Professor Christie worked in Yolnu communities as a teacher linguist in the 1970s and 80s and started the Yolnu Studies program at Northern Territory University, now CDU, in 1994. After working within the Faculty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and the School of Education, he moved to the Northern Institute in 2010. Michael's current research interests cover a range of collaborative transdisciplinary projects in Indigenous contexts which involve careful investigation into diverse knowledge practices and methods. Michael is a Research Fellow with the Northern Institute at Charles Darwin University.

 

Michaela's current research involves working from the 'GroundUP' with Indigenous knowledge authorities, and differing traditions of knowledge and governance. This involves collaborative research for policy development, and engaging with government, service providers, university staff and Indigenous people in remote communities. So far this research has been focused around issues such as disaster resilience, emergency management, governance and leadership, remote engagement and coordination, volunteering and women's health and wellbeing.

 

Michaela also facilitates the CDU Indigenous Community‑based Researcher Micro‑credential programs and Diploma of Indigenous Research. Welcome, Michael and Michaela.

 

MICHAEL CHRISTIE:  Thank you. Can you hear us?

 

NAREEN YOUNG:  I can, yes.

 

MICHAEL CHRISTIE:  Can everybody else wave if they can hear?  Great. Okay, thank you very much, Nareen. That was a lovely welcome.

 

I would like to acknowledge the Larrakia people, where we are in Darwin at Charles Darwin university. We're on the traditional lands of the Larrakia people and we work often with Larrakia people and alongside them and the rest of our work is often to do with other First Nations groups in other areas of the Northern Territory in the desert and in Arnhem Land and many other places.

 

I'm going to give a little bit of information. Have we got the slide show?  Can you see the slides?  That's the end one. Okay, so basically our work ‑ we call it GroundUp because of the ways in which we have learnt to address problems and questions under the authority of Aboriginal elders on country and we have their web address where you can have a look at a whole range of different projects that we have been working on and we will tell you about a couple of them and tell you a little bit about the background of our work.

 

So if you can move on to the next slide, please. Okay. The origins of the GroundUp method is we heard from Nareen in the introduction, I was working in Arnhem Land as a linguist in the 1970s and the 1980s. There was a time when Aboriginal people were being well educated in both their own ways of knowing and learning and western ways through the Batchelor Institute and the program and that developed an idea of curriculum which took seriously Aboriginal knowledge and western knowledge under the particular authority of the people and places where the knowledge and agreements were being made so that there was quite a firm development of a very unique curriculum and different versions of it all over the Northern Territory, but the bottom line was that knowledge is something which is produced in place collaboratively and the different knowledge traditions can work together to address the particular problems that we're working on at the time.

 

When in 1994 Northern Territory University started its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander faculty, I was invited with a Yolnu group to come and start the Yolnu languages program and it's still going after many years and is a vibrant Aboriginal Yolnu language and culture program. It's still being taught under the authority of particular elders and there were particular rules that were there instituted at the teaching program about who was allowed to speak ‑ what stories you can tell, making sure you have the right authority, so there was a lot of epistemic work that was going on over the governance of knowledge.

 

What happened as a result of the growing program is that we were asked to do some consultancy work with Yolnu elders and we developed this group called the Yolnu Aboriginal Consultancy Initiative, and there is the website there, and you can see there's a screen shot from the website that talks about that and it talks about a whole lot of different projects that we were invited by government and non‑government organisations to work with Aboriginal elders over things like water management, health, communication, education and housing, gambling, homelessness ‑ a huge range of things ‑ and that eventually turned into the GroundUp practices, and I'll tell you a little bit now, if you move to the next slide, about some of the key aspects of the approach that we use.

 

One of them is every time we're asked to involve our researchers in a particular issue that we have been asked to work on, we begin by working with the elders of each community and saying to them, "How do we go about this, who do we talk to, what are the key concepts, what are the issues that you think need to be done?" So we acknowledge both the sovereignty of these people who are the first authorities in our work, but also we acknowledge the fundamental ïncommensurability of Aboriginal governance and knowledge practices and the ones that are brought by the academy and by governments.

 

And alongside there is that very powerful phenomenon of how western governance and western ways of doing business and counting people and categorising people actually invisiblises or renders impotent Aboriginal ways of doing traditional governance through their networks of kin and country and their responsibilities that are still ongoing and which they believe is absolutely critical to the health of their new generations and to the health of the places where they belong.

 

There's an error there. Beginning with the concepts and practices of the first nation authorities ‑ that means basically a lot of the work that's done is done by local researchers who are fluent in English and in their own languages and a lot of the work involves collecting and transcribing and translating and analysing key texts that are produced by the elders that let us know how to understand issues like what is governance, what is leadership, what is monitoring, what is evaluation, what is education, what is knowledge, what is a person, so a whole lot of key concepts that get teased out in the context of those particular projects that we're asked to work on.

 

I guess the last point there that's important is that because of the incommensurability of the two practices, we're not trying to find ways of joining them together, we're not looking for a grand theory, we are just looking for particular solutions to particular problems of the moment as they arrive and working out good ways of respectfully going on together as the world unfolds under Aboriginal authority and in relation to western or settler governance systems, particularly the Northern Territory Government, but other non‑government organisations as well. So very briefly I'm going to give you one example and then Michaela is going to give you a couple of examples. If we can move on to the next slide.

 

This is an example, I think it's interesting. The Red Cross, the International Red Cross, was deciding that it was becoming clear that the way in which they needed to work with Indigenous people in their own communities is actually quite different from the ways that they may be working in other areas of their work and so they wanted a good understanding of how volunteering actually works in a remote Aboriginal community and we did some work at Galiwin'ku, on the Tiwi Islands, where we were asking elders to help the Red Cross understand what volunteering is and what it could be in these remote communities and immediately they started talking about a recent cyclone that had come through and devastated the community and talking about what does volunteering mean in the context of that sort of community tragedy and emergency.

 

A lot of things came out of this report and you can find the report on the website, but the point that I'd like to just bring to your attention at the moment which I thought was very interesting was the way in which the Yolnu and Tiwi people said that volunteering is something that we always do, we always have done, it's part of our kin responsibility, but it's always within the networks of kinship and responsibility and it's only when a tragedy like the cyclone comes along that we actually have to transcend those accountabilities, those networks of responsibility and kin, and actually move beyond them and start building what then could become a community.

 

So it was the notion that the community doesn't actually preexist Aboriginal people being on land, but that the community is actually emergent and the point that a healthy community emerges if the Red Cross is able to take seriously the authority and sovereignty of the traditional owners and the elders in the community. So the advice to Red Cross was yes, what you're doing is good, it's good insofar as it's done in consultation with the elders and they are the ones that direct the ways in which people should be linked together and people should be held accountable. If we do that under the authority of the elders, we will build a healthy community. If we ignore the authority of the elders, then in a sense it produces an unhealthy community where the western‑style practices of administration and education, health, governance and things like that actually work to undermine the authority and the connections between people and their places.

 

So that's just one example of how GroundUp research produced particular insights into the nature of society, into the nature of the relations between Aboriginal people and outside organisations in a way that took seriously the Aboriginal authority and produced new and workable solutions.

 

All right, that's me. I'm going to hand over now to Michaela. She will tell you about another example and some of the other work that's sort of parallel to this and then we can take a couple of questions.

 

MICHAELA SPENCER:  Thanks, Michael. Michael has obviously been doing this for many years and I'm a more recent addition to the GroundUp team, but what we've actually found happening in recent years is quite a few monitoring and evaluation projects that have come our way. This is a bit of a surprise because this isn't as we started as monitors and evaluators, but it does sort of feel right in a sense that a lot of the work that we do is a kind of intervention in how ‑ an intervention supporting better understanding and connections and alignments in situations where government and non‑government organisations are working with Aboriginal people on their own lands.

 

So this project here, it was initiated by the Northern Territory Land Council and they invited us to carry out some monitoring and evaluation of their community planning and development program, which we've been doing in several sites, working with traditional owners as well as local researchers.

 

But there was something quite pleasantly straightforward about this project that was a bit different to some of the others we work on in that we didn't actually have to start with the community as an assumed unit where everything begins. We could actually start with networks of elders and traditional owners through their kinship relations and really follow the scholarship and conceptual guidance that they offered to us.

 

So you can see on the project report there there's research facilitation credited to Nyomba Gandanu and Emmanuel Yunupinu. Nyomba was senior normal traditional owner involved in the community development work in her community and she also joined us as a kind of research leader. She right away from the start insisted that monitoring and evaluation is something that already happens within Yolnu collective life. It's something that happens at home, in the workplace, in ceremonies, and she talked about how elder people are always watching young children and supporting and guiding them so they grow up knowing who and where they are and how to behave in relation to others and she was contrasting this with a more standard version, mainstream version of monitoring and evaluation which she says lots of things written down, so the paper piles up and up and up and also often assumes certain categories.

 

So if you're looking at a child, often if they're sniffing petrol, they might be considered at risk or vulnerable, so it's a particular categorisation of that child that happens in monitoring and evaluation when you're trying to measure better or worse outcomes. She sort of steered us away from that and redirected us in a direction which was to do with aligning the practices of ourselves and the Northern Land Council with ways in which Yolnu elders supported children to grow up strong and carefully and well.

 

The other community where we worked with Emmanuel, he was a co‑researcher that came on board as a young, so he didn't have the senior cultural authority of Nyomba, so he worked very closely with his elders, his grandfathers in particular, in helping us with monitoring and evaluation work. So right at the start, he took me and we sat together with his grandfathers to talk to them about ways of checking in on the community development work that they were doing with the Northern Land Council and those senior men immediately started talking about the creation of the place we were working.

 

They insisted that young people like Emmanuel needed to grow up knowing the story of the place, how it details who owns what and how it guides the way people should live, work and prosper together. And so we were actually able just to continue working with these conceptualisations, if you like, developing processes of monitoring and evaluation that embedded these means of going forward and helping other organisations to align themselves with these processes.

 

And Nyomba gave an example of a mat ‑ I don't know if you know the image of woven mats from Arnhem Land with tassels around the sides. Yolnu governance is in the middle, threads joining together, and it's stakeholders that kind of hang off the edges and need to be aligned in appropriate ways to the sovereign governance work happening on the ground.

 

Then if we just go to the last slide, the second‑last slide. The other bit to add, other piece of the puzzle of a lot of the project work that we do is to do with recognition and professionalisation of First Nations researchers that we work with. It's been a long‑term request of these researchers that they be more justly recognised and remunerated for their work with communities ‑ sorry, with universities, and we do always pay researchers and there's particular systems that have emerged over a long period of time by which we do that.

 

But in collaboration with many of our co‑researchers, we've also developed an Indigenous researchers initiative, where researchers have their own profiles up online and can show who they are, where they are and how they like to work and they can also keep a record of the projects and publications that they've been involved in and display videos, photos, all kinds of things they might be interested to showing others in their family as well as to universities, government and non‑government organisations.

 

Then you can also see that there are three badges there. These are researcher micro‑credentials that we've also had an opportunity to develop together with our collaborators. We did actually start off with two of these, a senior credential and then a kind of mid‑level credential, recognising the skills and expertise that people bring to our work from their situations and contexts in their home environments.

 

Very quickly, we were told in no uncertain terms we can't just have two, we need to have three, because we also need to recognise the young people who might not be leading the research, but might just be sitting beside making the cups of tea or working with the iPad and acknowledge them as an important part of any research team that we're working with and as a means to also acknowledge the importance of passing down elder knowledge to younger generations in the process of working with universities and other organisations.

 

So that's why we've ended up with that set of three credentials that are signed off by the university as well as by appropriate local Indigenous authorities whenever a researcher receives that qualification and they do transition into a Diploma of Indigenous research if people are interested in taking that route, and indeed that's what Nyomba has done, the researcher that's helped us with monitoring and evaluation, deciding that even though she's qualified in her own ways, she'd like to also receive a university qualification that recognises the same thing.

So there's a set of supports and arrangements there that are designed specifically to work on the ground as well as supporting recognition in the university that are very important to how we always work.

 

I think I'll stop there and maybe we can just sort of pull other things out in the question time and conversation.

 

NAREEN YOUNG:  Thanks lots, Michaela and Michael. That was incredibly informative. Thank you very much.

 

Before we get to some questions from the audience, I have a few of my own for you, if that's all right. In your collaborations with First Nations partner communities, what is the role of reciprocity in these partnerships and what have been the enablers?

 

MICHAEL CHRISTIE:  I have a bit of a problem with the notion of reciprocity. I think sovereignty is the thing that tells you that we owe Aboriginal elders something that they don't owe us. One of the ways in which we ensure that their authority is properly central to the negotiations about ways forward is that a large part of the budget is put aside to pay them so that all elders that are involved get paid very well, indeed even if some of them actually don't have a lot to say but they are sitting there listening under the tree and listening and telling us who are the young people that we ought to be working with and why we ought to be working with.

 

So I think the notion of reciprocity to me sounds a little bit transactional and we need to try to get away from that notion and look at our particular accountabilities. In the Yolnu world, you have particular people that you have a responsibility ‑ that are responsible to manage their business and other people are responsible to manage yours, so there's not really a lot of reciprocity at work there either. It's more like chains and networks of accountability through place and through kinship.

 

NAREEN YOUNG:  Loved that answer and I'll be taking that into my own dealings with the notion of sovereignty and our capacity as people to own our knowledge. I will be taking that into my own approaches to research. I appreciate that very much.

 

What is your approach to research and knowledge generation ‑ I think you've already answered this, but let's re‑emphasise it ‑ and how does that take into account Indigenous sovereignty within knowledge and research?

 

MICHAELA SPENCER:  Sure, yeah. I think emergence is a very key element in all of the work that we do. So what I find often in my sort of work on the ground is always that there are going to be things that come up and directions that you're taken in that you weren't expecting, so as many people would imagine, but there is a means by which even when you're told something that seems completely opposite to the question that was asked, finding a way to see how that's meaningful in the context of the work you're doing together is often a starting point.

 

So there's a reconfiguration usually of the assumed concepts and questions from the beginning and then a commitment to supporting the practice of the research to go forward in those directions and that's how we can know ‑ I mean, we never know, but we can work collaboratively together to produce outcomes which are likely to be meaningful on the ground amidst the people with whom we're working as well as have some legibility with the funding organisations with whom we work.

 

So there's always this kind of working multiplicity I would say. So it's knowledge generation through working multiplicity, whereas Michael said there aren't direct transactions but there are kind of partial connections happening across academic institutions, if you like, and within our embodied work together and actually produce interesting, viable and workable insights for policy and for organisational practice, which is the context in which we work, yeah.

 

NAREEN YOUNG:  Thank you. Fantastic. What has been the impact for you and the community from working this way?  Have there been both successes and failures?

 

MICHAEL CHRISTIE:  Well, I think one of the impacts for the university is that ‑ one of the impacts has been that the university has had to change a lot of its understandings about how to accommodate Aboriginal authority and knowledge into the academy and how to recognise Aboriginal knowledge traditions as being viable and significant and that can work alongside academic traditions but can never actually be measured against them or to be mapped on to each other.  And I think the fact that we keep getting invited back and the elders keep saying, "You're the only ones that actually come down and sit down and listen to us and talk to us" means that in fact the governments and the non‑government organisations are actually having a much better relationship with the communities and with their elders as a result of the sorts of programs and practices that we have negotiated together.

 

MICHAELA SPENCER:  Yes, I do think there is a reorientation ‑ it's sort of like an opportunity to step outside the deficit model when working sort of co‑designing and enacting programs within communities because it can be a default mode and it can be the way that a lot of sort of organisations imagine their funding models to work, you know. We need to produce improvements in these ways and so is an expansion of the means by which improvements change can be registered, I think.

 

That kind of cashes out in different formats on the ground and it ‑ what we found in one of our government engagement projects was that often the elders said, "Look, what good engagement is young people seeing us be respected by government or other organisations when we work together". So there's actually a role in working from the non‑Indigenous side to recognise the systems of authority which are present on the ground and actually help support them, support their strengthening so that the practice of local authority is being also observed by all the other organisations that are involved in that place and it actually helps young people to grow up more aware and respectful of their Elders, which has all kinds of effects.

 

NAREEN YOUNG:  I'm just so loving the notion of traditional knowledge systems being recognised in concert with the western academic traditions. That's just so valuable ‑‑

 

MICHAEL CHRISTIE:  Yeah, and there are other branches of the Charles Darwin University that have programs for professionalising Aboriginal researchers, but they are more like oriented towards teaching them how to be academic researchers, whereas we're very keen on the idea of allowing these people to learn the practices of working, both Aboriginal knowledge and governance and academic or governmental knowledge together in a respectful and careful way, and that's why we utterly depend on those well‑educated Aboriginal people in remote communities, many of whom actually were teachers in the both ways education programs and who learnt very well to do classroom teaching which respected both Aboriginal knowledge and western knowledge. And so there's something unique about those micro‑credentials in that they are ‑ the ones that we work with, you need to have sort of a credentialising authority within the community and another one within the academy and they're both working together to look at this particular sort of knowledge work.

 

NAREEN YOUNG:  Fabulous. One last question before we go on to audience questions. What are your wishes for the future of this space?  What do we need to do more of to better enable university communities/partnerships such as yours?

 

MICHAELA SPENCER:  My take ‑ Michael's might be a little bit different ‑ is, as Michael was saying before, flexibility within the university institution is crucial to any of this work being able to happen, so having the time, the space, the ability to go out for long periods of time, the ability to be able to change the systems of ‑ all kinds of systems within the university so as to be better meshed with those that we're working with I think is crucial and it's hard, you know. It's a neoliberal academy, everything is pushing towards certain kinds of outputs and products and squeezes productivity out in all kinds of ways and it just doesn't work. You're constantly having to make that difference in that space between those pressures within the institution and the work that you're trying to do. So some acknowledgment of the value of the collaborative work and its needs I think would be incredibly beneficial ‑‑

 

MICHAEL CHRISTIE:  Yes, and one of the good things we can celebrate is that powers that be in our organisation definitely value the prioritisation of the appointment of Indigenous lecturers and researchers. So we now have maybe half a dozen people that are actively involved from their own communities and teaching Yolnu languages and culture so that one of the ways in which to turn around university work in such a way that it actually addresses the issues as they are seen by the sovereign Aboriginal people in remote places is to just increase the possibilities for all that language work to be done and for those sorts of methods to be publicised in such a way that people realise how productive they can be and commit themselves to them.

 

MICHAELA SPENCER: Very quickly, getting over that hurdle of literacy always being barrier. This is high‑level conceptual work that these lecturers are involved in and so finding ways in which that is then able to be valued and seen without this constantly barricading people because of the literacy levels aren't the same as those within the university.

 

MICHAEL CHRISTIE:  And if you go to the Yuki website, Yolnu consultive website, you can see a whole page there on Yolnu philosophical statements in language about what is a baby, how does a baby grow, what is water, where does water come from, how does a child grow, what does land teach us. So there are a lot of philosophical works that have been done by these people that are very relevant to the work that we are doing as researchers.

 

NAREEN YOUNG:  Fantastic. Thank you so much. We've got a question here from Dianne: "Have community and community researchers themselves identified projects and brought them to the university for collaboration?"

 

MICHAELA SPENCER:  Yes and no I think. It seems to me that there's a range of different ways in which the research work is initiated and the majority would still be brought to us by various organisations and with the hope of it's then sort of transmuted into the process of actually doing the work, but at the same time there is other work, so particularly around language, which Michael might talk about, that elders come to us wanting basically the resources and the opportunity to be able to do language work that makes sense to them and leading that as a project that, yeah ‑‑

 

MICHAEL CHRISTIE:  The answer is really no because all our work has to be funded and it's funded from outside. However, in the example that Michaela was talking about at Gapuwiyak, where we were there to evaluate the community development program for the Northern Land Council and we sat down with the old man and he said ‑ the question was what are the criteria that we can use to evaluate the success of the Northern Land Council's community development program and he said the criteria is the extent to which young people know and understand and respect the origin stories of our community so that in fact what ‑ we had a bit of trouble trying to persuade the Land Council we needed to put all our resources into allowing this person to find all the different ways he can, to find all the agreement within the community, the people to understand who really owns the land and where it comes from. So that in a sense the research agendas are often changed by the elders and they are changed in such a way that we need to work very carefully with the funding body, so make sure that we actually let them know that they've actually got a better answer than what they were imagining in the first place.

 

Another example is housing stuff. You talk to people about housing and they think they'll be talking about bedrooms and things, but they're talking about how is a house, what are the ancestral imperatives of a house, why do we give our houses names, what sorts of configurations of people in authority need to be at work in an extended family and how are they enabled by particular structures of housing. So the agendas get turned around once we start the work.

 

NAREEN YOUNG:  Great. Does anyone else have any questions ‑ I've just seen a new one in the chat. Oh, no, that was thanks. Does anyone else have any other questions that you want to put in the chat?  No?  Thank you so much, Michaela and Michael. I've learnt lots from your presentation. That is really appreciated and, as I said, I'll ‑ oh, hang on, there's one more question: "Do you think there is a possibility for the research work to be a groundbreaking template to be transmuted to creating a 'branch' of academics organisation that will be able to acknowledge" ‑ it's a long one ‑ "and recognise the community development and Aboriginal researcher that may now become legitimised for funding?" What an interesting question.

 

MICHAELA SPENCER:  I hope so. I think what we're starting to talk about is dual academy work ‑ so different to dual sector, but dual academy ‑ and what it would mean to appropriately do dual academy work in different places would be different. It might not be a template, but it might be a sensibility or a sensitivity to how do we do that sort of partially connecting work together so dual academy research can be recognised, funded and supported, yeah.

 

The replicative ‑ yeah, scaling up or the replicability of it is ‑ yeah, it would always need to be redone and renegotiated in practice in different places would be our experience, but the intent within it I think definitely would love to, yeah, think it's the future.

 

NAREEN YOUNG:  I think you're leading the way in that context and I've really appreciated hearing from you. Thank you very much.

 

MICHAEL CHRISTIE:  Thank you for inviting us. You can see the emails there if you've got questions or you want to explore the websites further. They're full of reports and ideas, so please contact us if you need some more information.

Disseminating engaged scholarship and practice via peerreviewed academic journals is vitally important. It demonstrates the value and legitimacy of participatory and collaborative research and shares diverse knowledges and practices. Yet academic publishing comes with its own challenges, be it the highly conventionalised research article, restrictive pay walls or predominance of voices from the Global North.

 

Drawing on their different but overlapping experiences with academic communication and dissemination, our next presenters will discuss how innovative, inclusive and deliberate efforts can and are critically striving for more equitable participation in this evolving social and technical space.

 

Our first presenter is Margaret Malone. Margaret is the highly experienced Managing Editor of Gateways:  International Journal of Community Research and Engagement, a leading international, open access, peer‑reviewed scholarly journal, since its founding in 2008. Along with the editorial committee, Margaret is responsible for the strategic direction of the journal as well as overseeing all stages of the publication process.

 

As part of Gateway's mission to widen participation in the dissemination of engaged research, Margaret has mentored emerging academics and those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. She's currently completing a PhD on participation in research writing and is the recipient of a UTS Research Excellence Scholarship. Welcome, Margaret.

 

MARGARET MALONE:  Thank you, I'm really pleased to be here today. Thank you also, Michael and Michaela. That was just fascinating.

 

So today I want to talk to you a little bit about the research article and its potential and challenges to engage scholars. Can I have the next slide, actually, please?  Thank you. Yes, as Nareen noted in the introduction, I've been the Managing Editor of Gateways Journal since its founding in 2008 and for those of you who are unfamiliar with the journal, I'll just tell you a little bit about it.

 

So Gateways is a peer‑reviewed, online open access scholarly journal. Its co‑sponsored by the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion here at UTS and Albion College in the USA and published here by UTS.

 

Gateway's focus is on community university engaged scholarship and practice and by engaged, I mean research and learning that is community driven, participatory and change orientated. Further, it understands engagement to be founded on principles of mutually beneficial collaboration, respectful exchange, the diverse ways of knowing and being, and a commitment to contribute towards sustainable, equitable and just social change. So Gateway's mission, therefore, is to publish high‑quality research and practice in this broad field.

 

As you can see from some of these statistics, over the last 13‑odd years Gateway has developed a really large international profile among both readers and authors and articles are not only downloaded, and downloaded in really good numbers, but they're cited, they're read and they're used. In addition, over the past decade, we've seen an increasing number of submissions, co‑authored by community and university‑based partners. So that's a really welcome development.

 

However, and this is true across the scholarly literature, there's a persistent absence in the scholarly literature of significant contributions by non‑academic partners as either the lead author or the sole author. A couple of years ago I was really struck by this absence and my immediate question was why not?  So as I have developed my own research, building off this original question, it's led me to focus my specific research on the research article itself. I now ask what is it about the research article that might enable participation, but also constrain it?  So my research in effect is an effort to make the research article strange, as it were, to shift how we think about it away from something that just is, instead to something that has evolved over time, shaped by particular social and political and commercial and institutional factors and, importantly, it's continuing to evolve. Next slide, please. Thank you.

 

Today I want to share the results from the first step in my research. In focusing on the research article, I've become very interested in those dominant genre conventions that have come to define the research article and which make it so instantly and globally recognisable and undoubtedly powerful. And in order to better understand how these conventions might enable or limit participation in community university collaborative research, I needed to first demonstrate that they do actually play a role. So to do that, I examined the peer reviews of submissions that were eventually either declined or archived by the journal.

 

So looking at ‑ there were 35 evidence‑based research manuscripts which had been submitted to Gateways over the past decade or so. They came from a range of countries and they all were peer reviewed, double blind peer reviewed. None of them were eventually published by Gateways. This gave me a pool of 71 key reviews and each of those reviews had their own referee, so no referee did more than one review. There were nearly equal numbers of male and female referees, again from a range of countries. And I undertook ‑ I used genre analysis to analyse these reviews. There was not quite 43,000 words and I drew particularly on the work of people like John Swars. Next slide, please. Thank you.

 

You can see the analysis demonstrated quite clearly not only the importance of genre, expectations and the referee's assessment of the submissions, but that the reviews themselves adhered to these conventions in the way that they were written. And this slide shows you the structure that emerged. Of particular importance to me, or of particular interest to me, were the first two steps that nearly every single review followed. The first was the introduction, in which the referee attempted to model back to the authors how they understood the central purpose of the submission, the gap or question it sought to answer, and its importance to the wider field and that was quite a familiar three‑step move for a research article introduction.

 

Then the second step, which followed immediately after, was a sort of whole of text assessment of the submission as a piece of research writing and what I was really struck by this analysis was that it showed that knowledge, particularly the understanding of evidence‑based knowledge and the writing of that knowledge, are indivisible. They each shape the other. Effectively this is an effort at what educator Charles Bazerman has called shaping written knowledge.

 

This kind of deep interconnectedness points to the importance of genre conventions for the research article. So these conventions, such as the organisation, the use of subheadings, citations, graphs and tables ‑ these are all a central part of what makes a piece of writing recognisable as a research article.

 

So these conventions ‑ they absolutely lighten the load of authors as they attempt to shape their own individual written knowledge contribution, but equally these privileged conventions direct those efforts at communication down particular well‑trod paths and as the persistent absence of contributions by non‑academics shows, we can think that these paths are not necessarily welcoming to all, nor are they necessarily wanted by all. Next slide, please.

 

So I want to finish by offering just some thoughts on the idea of clarity and what clarity might mean for the writing of engaged scholarship. So across the peer reviews there were 305 instances of not something ‑ not embedded, not specific, not actually researched, not co‑creation, not unique, et cetera ‑ but there was only one phrase that was repeated more than a few times and that was "not clear".

But as I studied the reviews, it was obvious that there is such complexity wrapped up in this one small phrase, "not clear", and reflecting on the authors' submissions and their efforts to share their diverse worlds through writing in English, you know, it really made me wonder that anything got published at all.

 

But as we can see from Gateways Journal, submissions do get published, they also get read and cited in large numbers. And after more than a decade reading and thinking about these submissions and reviews, I don't think that ‑ my strong impression is that these diverse efforts don't happen unthinkingly or ungenerously. James Gee discourse analysis says we need not be dupes of discourses, but at the same time, there's more that we could be doing.

 

So the main point today that I want to make is that genre conventions, those steeped in particular social and political and ideological and historical contexts, certainly they're resources. They're not fixed categories to be blindly followed. They have evolved over time and they are evolving still.

 

And the more we approach genre conventions as resources, the more we can utilise, adapt, modify, expand and even reject these conventions in our scholarly writing and, perhaps most crucially, we can consider how to make room for other ways of shaping knowledge, ways which aren't necessarily written perhaps, and we certainly have the technological means to do so in online publishing.

 

So the next stage of my research this time will focus on published, peer‑reviewed, co‑authored, community‑researched articles and once again, through systematic analysis, I'll seek to examine how these published authors have shaped their written knowledge contributions to achieve the sort of clarity that they think best supports participatory, community‑based and action‑orientated research. Thank you.

 

NAREEN YOUNG:  Okay. Thanks so much, Margaret. Next we have Scott Abbott, who is responsible for managing the UTS Library's Office of Scholarly Communication ‑ I hope I've got that right, Scott. The team works hard to maximise the global reach and impact of UTS research by making it open access wherever possible. How cool is that?  The Office of Scholarly Communication is also home to the UTS open access PRESS, the Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Data Archive, the University Copyright Officer, the University Data Archivist and is the UTS base for three Australian Research Data Commons colleagues. Welcome, Scott, and thank you for your presentation.

 

SCOTT ABBOTT:  Thanks, Nareen. Thank you. I'll just share my screen. Can you all see that okay?  Yes, great. Thank you. Well, good afternoon. Thank you to the organisers for the invitation to come along and speak. As this is only a 10‑minute presentation, I'd like to do a quick bit of scene setting, ask a few rhetorical questions to get you thinking about this topic, and then give a couple of examples of what I see as evidence of green shoots in developing a global knowledge democracy.

 

The concept of knowledge democracy I borrowed from a wonderful 2017 article by Budd Hall and Rajesh Tandon. To me it means multiple knowledge systems being drawn upon by the scholarly communications system that is, as I see it, currently a little bit Eurocentric or, at the very least, top heavy in favouring the knowledge systems and economic systems of the Global North. Not a panacea for all the world's ills, the open access to knowledge movement is a wonderful step in the right direction where not only everyone can freely read and reuse their own taxpayer‑funded research, but they imperitively can also contribute to the global conversation.

 

Here in the Open Science UNESCO recommendation from Open Science echos Hall and Tandon's sentiments, saying "open science should embrace a diversity of knowledge, practices, work flows, languages, research outputs and research topics that support the needs and epistemic pluralism of the scientific community as a whole, diverse research communities and scholars, as well as the wider public and knowledge holders beyond the traditional scientific community, including Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and social actors from different countries and regions, as appropriate."

 

So the green shoot example 1 ‑ sorry, I've missed a slide. Many would know the name of one of the most cited physicists and philosophers of science of the 20th century, Thomas Kuhn, and his work or sketching his words "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". Crudely put, Kuhn is seeing the constant changes in the history of science since Aristotle concluded that normal science went through major paradigm shifts when too many anomalies were popping up and no longer could be pushed aside or ignored. "With our current world in the state it's in with the serious erosion of democracy, emergent climate change tipping points and the rampant effects of exponential tech that is only beginning to speed up, to name a few, can we not conclude that the current dominant paradigm for many in the sciences that feeds our understanding of the world we live in ‑ ie, scientific materialism ‑ could be tempered by hearing from other more sustainable knowledge traditions from around the world"?

 

For the past millennium, Tibetan society was unique in its single‑pointed focus on fathoming the mind and its potentials. For many centuries, Tibet had an average of 6,000 monasteries and monastic universities for a national population of 6 million people. Their entire education system prioritised eudaimonia over hedonia ‑ eudaimonia meaning wellbeing, or inner wellbeing, over hedonia, which obviously comes from the world of the senses and the understanding of the inner world of the mind over the outer world of matter. This comes from the Center for Contemplative Research, which I'll talk more about now.

 

As a massive Tibetan monastic university system of the entire second millennia described in the previous slide was directly inspired by the ancient Indian university system, especially Nalanda University, Nalanda existed from the 5th to 13th century in what's now in Northern India. Here contemplative inner knowledge informed all the other subfields of knowledge that are described here.

 

Here is a photo and poignant description of the rulings and history of the Buddhist university. Nalanda is located in the Indian state of Bihar, about 55 miles south‑east of Patna, and was Buddhist centre of learning from the 5th or 6th century to 12th century. Ransacked and destroyed by Turkic invaders, the great library, and this is interesting to me as a librarian, was so vast, it was reported to have burned for three months after the invaders set fire to it, ransacked and destroyed the monasteries and drove the monks from the site. Interestingly, Nalanda echos our current university objectives in many ways and Nalanda means that we could move toward and Nalanda means insatiable in giving.

 

So why the history lesson?  B Alan Wallace PhD is a leading author and translator of Tibetan Buddhist thought and practice to the west. He has established the Center for Contemplative Research in Colorado, US and is building sister contemporary research facilities in Italy and New Zealand.

 

What makes this an especially intriguing example of a green shoot of knowledge democracy in my mind is that Wallace merges deep contemplative practice at scale with the advice of quite serious names in the research world, including Nobel Laureate and the Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. CCR's aim is to expand the scope of science no less.

 

"In order to expand the scope of science beyond the objective world of atoms, cells, planets, and stars to include the subjective world of consciousness, emotions, wisdom, and well‑being, the CCR is reshaping the burgeoning field of contemplative science by focusing on the development of contemplative technology: rigorous, replicable methods of first‑person, introspective inquiry, designed to yield insights into the nature and potentials of consciousness that can be intersubjectively corroborated among expert mediators." 

 

So far Wallace's work has helped produce at least 15 peer‑reviewed research articles by others in areas including cognitive neuroscience, psychology, brain mapping, emotion studies, consciousness studies, psychology of consciousness, and others. Dr Wallace himself has written at least 22 books on Buddhism and mind since 1998 and co‑written at least 17 peer‑reviewed research papers.

 

This brings us to green shoot example 2. The Ubiquity Partner Network and UTS ‑ shared open access publishing infrastructures for diverse voices. UTS ePRESS, the open access press of the University of Technology, Sydney is a member of the Ubiquity Partner Network and yesterday proudly published the work 'Gender and Learning in Rwanda', the 45th book that we have produced. Proudly coedited by UTS academics and other leaders in the field, GLR shows how the role of women as leaders in Rwanda was elevated and supported through Rwandan higher education and an innovative and culture shifting approach to leading and managing cultural change in Rwanda.

 

Essentially a work on healing through hearing from others, especially the women scholars themselves and critically in their own words. On the right‑hand side of this slide you can see some of the other diverse members of the Ubiquity Partner Network who also provide platforms for others to speak at the table of international scholarly communication. So some of them you can see the diversity with Bangladesh Journals Online, Cardiff University Press, Central American Journals Online, University of California Press, London School of Economics, and so on.

 

So a quick plug for our wonderful latest publication 'Gender and Learning in Rwanda', available free to read and reuse with attribution by anyone in the world with an internet connection and/or print on demand to anywhere in the world. Please come to the site, download and read and share.

 

In conclusion, these two dream shoot examples of knowledge democracy in action provide hope for what can be achieved. The Ubiquity Partner Network provides a good example of a network scholarly communications infrastructure approach to scaling a global knowledge democracy and the work of the Center for Contemplative Research that seeks to partner Indigenous, Tibetan and Indian thought with leading western science in order to expand the scope of western science itself is bold indeed. To include the nature of human consciousness into our deliberations, theories and research practices may just temper the ravaging effects of scientific materialism left unbound.

 

This dominant but not sole scientific paradigm with its roots in the European enlightenment may be good in explaining much of the outer world and producing external material‑based technologies, but it does not get far at all in explaining our inner thoughts, feelings and motivations that drive all our actions, including the resulting use of exponential technology that has effectively made us all gods for good or for ill. Thank you. I will stop share.

 

NAREEN YOUNG:  Thank you so much, Scott. That was so good and it's great to hear that UTS is involved in such endeavours. That just makes me happy to work here. I really appreciate that and we really appreciate your presentation. So thank you very much.

 

SCOTT ABBOTT:  Thank you.

 

NAREEN YOUNG:  Now, the next presentation is from Laura Nkula‑Wenz, who is a lecturer and coordinator in Critical Urbanisms. Based at the African Centre for cities and in Urban Studies at the University of Basel, Laura is an urban geographer with a keen interest in post‑colonial urban theory, African urbanism, and public culture. Her research focuses on the transformation of urban governance and the construction of local political agency, on questions of urban experimentation and knowledge networks, as well as the nexus of cultural production and urban change.

 

Due to time differences, Laura has recorded her presentation, so unfortunately won't be able to answer your questions during the Q&A we'll have shortly. Fiona is going to screen share and run a recording ‑ sorry, I've just had a question come in. Oh, it's for Margaret. Margaret, Nerissa asks, "Thank you, Margaret, for the effort of finishing that research and the results you've shared. Can you kindly reiterate the next research you're going to undertake?" Thanks, would you mind doing that, Margaret?

 

MARGARET MALONE:  Sure. Absolutely. And thank you, Nerissa, for the question. I'm quite pleased you ask. Because it's a 10‑minute presentation, I wasn't able to go into my next research as much as I would like to, so that's just the question I was hoping for.

 

So the next stages of my research are twofold: one, as I kind of quickly mentioned, to have a look at published, co‑authored collaborative research, peer reviewed and how they use genre conventions in their writing; but then I'm also kind of stepping into another field in a way for the last section to see how other disciplines handle these sorts of questions. So the last section of my research is an interview base and it's a much more exploratory stage of the research where I'm doing some interviews with two people who were involved in the Songlines exhibition at the National Museum of Australia, which was a really innovative exhibition that made room for First Nations ways of knowing and being and a more scientific, western science understanding and that ‑ the actual exhibition I found fascinating because they used the idea of bodies moving through the landscape as the way they actually organise the exhibition. So it wasn't linear, it wasn't beginning middle end, anything like that.

 

So in my interviews with them, rather than ‑ I'm not asking them to explain what they did, but I'm asking them to think if they had to write that exhibition, how would they do it, and it's just going to be a sort of exploratory would it be possible, could we do it, what sort of methodology for a written exhibition would we need?  And we'll see. That might produce more questions than answers, but that's the next stage.

 

NAREEN YOUNG:  Thanks lots, Margaret. We've got a question to everyone, which is "What pointers do you have for co‑publishing with community" and it's got "for later", so we might discuss that later. We're going to go to Laura's presentation now. Fiona is going to screen share and run the recording of Laura's presentation and then we'll go to questions from the audience.

 

LAURA NKULA‑WENZ: My name is Laura Nkula‑Wenz. I'm coming to you today from Cape Town, South Africa and I want to thank Margaret and Scott for having me on this panel and share a few thoughts on knowledge co‑production from the south. 

 

The premise of my presentation is the proliferation of global challenges requires coordinated responses from across different geographies and different spheres of knowledge. This puts the need for different modes of co‑production squarely on the agenda. Today I want to chat through a few practical experiments we've been conducting here at the African Centre for Cities with producing and publishing interest beyond the university.

 

A bit of background, 95% of urban growth between now and 2050 will actually take place in Africa and Asia and given the magnitude of both the challenges and opportunities this creates, knowledge practices must be rooted in concrete local experiments to figure out just how to imagine and enact as well as institutionalise novel ways of city making and living together in a city.

 

This also means that we cannot pigeonhole African cities and treat them as reservoirs or simply sites of data collection. Instead, we need to take them seriously as places of engaged theory making and this is the premise of our work at the African Centre for Cities, which is an interdisciplinary research hub at the University of Cape Town that seeks to nurture coproduction of knowledge between academia and other social sectors and also design a variety of knowledge products with multiple publics in mind, and today I want to touch on two examples that I think illustrate this way of working. One is the CityLabs and Knowledge Transfer Programme we've initiated with City of Cape Town and the other one is the African Urban Research Initiative, and both I think reflect, or help me to reflect, on the need for supporting different types of knowledge creation and pursue different dissemination strategies.

 

So the CityLabs and the Knowledge Transfer Programme was funded by Urban Futures and focused on fostering experimentation and knowledge coproduction between local government and academia. It comprised two components. One was the City Officials Exchange Programme, which included city practitioners spending up to two months on a writing sabbatical where they co‑authored publications on pressing policies with ACC academics, and the other direction we had the Embedded Researcher program, which positioned four academic researchers in different departments of the City of Cape Town where they worked alongside practitioners on specific urban policies such as transport, adaptation, et cetera. They spent seven months at a time over a three‑year period in the city and most of them also pursued their PhDs through this program.

 

The goal, but obviously also the challenge, the greatest challenge, was developing a shared understanding. While academics tended to focus on issues with more global relevance and reference, practitioners were focused on the local context and that kind of led to both coming with different working cases and time lengths. So, in turn, the process of actually jointly authoring a piece between officials and academics provided the focal point through which to convene these different understandings and navigate these different knowledges. So in turn, academics were grounded through the non‑academic voices and viewpoints at the centre for urgency while city officials were able to think through specific challenges from a broader conceptual vantage point.

 

For many officials, the CityLabs and the Knowledge Transfer Programme also provided opportunities to get out of their day‑to‑day functional environments, allowing different spaces in which to reflect and also be creative. At the same time, working on joint publications also brought with it some challenges around responsibilities of authorship and the ownership of the work and here I want to give an example. In South Africa, any publication in a peer‑reviewed journal carries a direct monetary rebate from the national Department of Higher Education to the specific department at the university. Hence it is a major incentive for academics to engage in the rather lengthy process of publishing an academic journal article.

 

On the other hand, practitioners were very keen to get their research fundings out there as quickly as possible and they did not necessarily have the time and resources to commit to pursuing this very long‑winded academic journal publication process, and this tension I think speaks to the necessity of pursuing multi‑pronged publication strategies, including self‑publishing working papers and policy briefs alongside more academic outputs.

 

The second issue I'd like to touch on in my presentation today is the need for bringing and centring African voices and voices of African researchers much more ‑ or bringing them much more to the fore and centring our work on these voices. Currently the situation is as follows and this is what we often experience. Outside of countries with relatively large economies and well‑established university systems such as, for example, South Africa, a sizeable portion of the published work on the continent are outcomes international research projects that are often driven by northern research partners. Academic publications are often collaboratively written and involve one or two African authors amongst a team of foreign authors.

 

While this type of co‑authorship certainly has its merits, we also need to recognise that the set‑up can unwittingly reinforce traditional power imbalances between north and south, with southern authors and institutions relegated to the role of perpetual junior partners. To address this conundrum and grow our urban research capacity across the continent, AAC actually initiated the African Urban Research Initiative, or AURI for short.

 

AURI, secretariat based at ACC, currently consists of 21 interdisciplinary Applied Urban Research centres, including those university‑based, also thinktanks and civil society organisations. The core objective here is to develop a collaborative African network that relies upon and actually nurtures African expertise. In order to realise this goal, we regularly hold workshops on topics such as fundraising, research design, but also academic writing with a special eye on developing co‑authored pieces that also transgress, traverse, so to speak, the continental language barriers between (inaudible) parts of the continent.

 

The latest combination of this work is this publication 'Reframing the Urban Challenge in Africa: Knowledge Co‑production from the South', edited by my colleagues Ntombini Marrengane and Syliva Croese. It's itself a result of several rounds of writing workshops where different academics from these research centres were asked to co‑author pieces on infrastructural inequality, affordable housing, et cetera.

 

So to conclude, I think these traces illustrate that co‑production lies at the heart of our quest to address the challenge of African urbanisation, be it either through the co‑production with local officials around governments and policy issues or strengthening the capacity to launch comparative transdisciplinary research projects between different African research entities that they can champion and drive themselves. At the same time, there's also the need to carefully consider the politics of co‑authorship to avoid reproducing common divides between academic and practitioner and north and south.

 

And at ACC we are trying to address this issue through a multi‑publication strategy and that is one that still values the academic article, but also recognises the experience of putting our research and that of our partners in government and civil society out there to influence urban policy and practice and we do that, for example, through working papers, our YouTube channel, our popular Cityscapes Magazine, and also our latest podcast 'The City Shelf' and, as I said, this is an offering designed with different publics in mind and also a youthful public in mind, which is particularly pertinent on the African continent, which has the highest growth of youth population in the world.

 

And this leads me into my final point, which is the launch of a special issue we are now conceiving at Gateways. It is entitled 'Urban Youth: Engaging Young People and their Futures in African Cities', and we invite proposals that are looking at showcasing and interrogating different ways of engaging realities and concerns as well as aspirations of African urban youth and we're looking for abstracts until the 22nd of November. For more information, you're more than welcome to visit the Gateways website using the following link and my co‑editors, Rike Sitas, Mercy Brown‑Luthango and me, we are looking forward to receiving contributions and would also be very grateful if some of you would share this call widely.

 

That is it from me. I thank you very much for your attention and I hope you have a successful further conference. Thank you very much.

 

NAREEN YOUNG:  Okay. Well, that was great. We can't thank Laura in person, but I'm sure Verity and team will send her an email to say thank you. That was fantastic. So we have that earlier question. Then we've got one more from Dianne Moy: "What pointers do you have for co‑publishing with community?" And this is to all of the presenters.

 

MARGARET MALONE:  I can go first if you like. I can only talk about Gateways and the sorts of things we're putting in place to encourage this and to kind of give guidelines or signposts, I guess, of how you might do this. And just building off the call for papers that we've just released that Laura mentioned, what we've implemented in this call is there's going to be some writers' workshops. So after abstracts get submitted, the people who are accepted to submit a full manuscript, the guest editors and those authors will meet once or twice to workshop together their writing and their ideas so that by the time they actually submit the manuscript to the journal, they've had that support, they've had some feedback, they've met some people and that is carried on throughout the process.

 

I don't know, Scott, do you ‑ I mean, there are certainly ‑ I'm not quite sure if the question is from a writing point of view or a kind of understanding the process of academic scholarship and the peer review and the policy ‑ you know, that sort of formal process of submitting a manuscript to a journal.

 

SCOTT ABBOTT:  Yeah, exactly. Well, from a publisher's point of view, in order to ‑ I realise I missed a slide because I wasn't able to get numbers on to my slide and I missed a slide, an important one at that. It was more of an explanation of what the Ubiquity Partner Network does and I listed out a few of the names that they're part of or that are part of their network.

 

But it basically said, "This is an example of ethical businesses sharing and scaling scholarly communication infrastructure and thereby increasing the effect of knowledge democracy. Specifically it highlights the work done by open access publisher and infrastructure provider Ubiquity Press, leading for profit open access press in its own right sprung out of University College London. Ubiquity also provides affordable infrastructure to a large and growing number of mission‑driven open access university and other presses from around the world, north and south, to have their own voices heard."

 

The reason I read that out is because at the infrastructure and publisher level there are more and more opportunities. How you find who is able to publish with community at the local level will depend on your local networks but, you know, at UTS ePRESS we're more than happy to put people in touch with other presses who might be more relevant to publishing research from particular communities.

 

NAREEN YOUNG:  Sorry, go on, Margaret.

 

MARGARET MALONE:  I'll say one last thing. Something else Gateways has always done, which was to try to facilitate a range of types of submissions and authors, is that we have three sections. So there's the peer‑reviewed research article, there's also practice‑based, and there are snapshots and each one has different expectations and different parameters but also different word lengths. Someone could certainly write a couple of thousand words on a personal reflection of an experience of participating in research as a snapshot. So we have tried to encourage and demonstrate through what we publish that we value a whole range of perspectives, experiences and knowledges.

 

SCOTT ABBOTT:  I would add for a practical tip, the Directory of Open Access Journals, you can search through DOAJ ‑ I'll put the link in the chat in a minute, but you can search over ‑ I think at last count it was over 13,000 open access journals from the heavy hitters all the way down to the smaller journals and you can search by particular discipline, category, community engagement, those kinds of things. So that could be a good resource for people to search across the whole publishing ‑ open access publishing system at least.

 

NAREEN YOUNG:  Thank you, Scott and Margaret. They're really great answers. So we've got one more question from Mitra: "Building on Dianne's question, also what needs to shift at the system level in the Australian context?  What role can system players, the publishers, universities, et cetera, take in supporting co‑writing/co‑publishing?"

 

SCOTT ABBOTT:  Are you able to go with that one first, Margaret? 

 

MARGARET MALONE:  Sure. I mean, I guess some of those points that we've just been mentioning kind of respond to that sort of system level and Gateways ‑ you know, I guess one of the reasons why we've instituted these theme volumes was to really try to target and support the sort of stuff that we would like to see, the sort of stuff that really supports engaged scholarship at the point of publication. So at the same time, we've maintained the open volume where anyone can submit throughout the year and it's just a rolling thing.

 

So I actually think there's quite a lot happening, but I do ‑ I mean, the fact that we're still not seeing submissions by non‑academic partners, even though they're obviously central to the research, I think the journals kind of need to step forward and meet them probably more than halfway ‑ you know, not just be here but actually meet them where they are.

 

So, you know, I think that's something that Gateways and I'm hoping obviously my research will contribute to just how do we do that, yes, so that we see the things we want to see by the people we want to be contributing, yes.

 

NAREEN YOUNG:  Okay. Well, we've run out of time, which is perfect because there are no more questions. Scott has put the link in the chat if you want to quickly go to it before and get it before we close up.

 

Thank you so much, everyone, for your presentations. It's been a fantastic session. Thank you, Verity, for asking me to facilitate it. I've really enjoyed it and learnt heaps and lots of challenging thought in terms of Indigenous research in our own context at Jumbunna, which has been really great.