2. Thursday January 19, 2023, 2:30 pm (NY): "Decolonising and feminising a politics of homeplace and/as freedom against and beyond the settler-colonial city"
I write from the unceded sovereign lands of the Worimi and Awabakal nations, in the urban Indigenous/settler city of Mulumbimba-Newcastle, so called Australia. I write as a founding member of an inter-cultural and inter-generational kin-in-relation collective who recognise and in differential ways live the ongoing logics and (Ir)rationalities of onto-epistemological dispossession and enslavement of First Nations custodians, Black and Brown bodies and other other(ed) folks from collective self-determination and homeplace through which the modern/colonial ‘smart ‘city is (re)produced. We refuse to be tamed and misnamed by the logics of hypervisibility/invisibility in which we are deemed lacking and agentless and in need of help and guidance so we might become propitious settler-citizens, intervened upon with individualising rationalities of biopolitical governmentality and carceral logics. We are emergent from such negation as survivance despite and/as refusal of the hetero-patriarchal capitalist-colonial logics of possessive individualism/law/governance as/and the underpinnings of this modern-colonial city. Our journey is one of weaving into being the infrastructures of care and ecologies of intimacy with which to co-create a survivor-led sanctuary homeplace in, against and beyond settler colonial law and governance and embedded through other registers of Indigenising-decolonising and feminising pluridiverse kinship, love, intimacy, and care relationships with human, more than human and non-human kin. In this contribution I will share some of the stories of enfleshing other registers of (political-epistemological) voice and visibility in our collective politics of homeplace against and beyond the settler-coloniality city and/as a decolonising and feminising project of sovereign territories as life.