Taking seriously other ways that languages can be understood is of significance for both practical and political reasons. If language revival or other applied projects need practical theories of language, they need to be drawn from concerned communities rather than imported from elsewhere. For many Indigenous people, language is deeply connected to land, or what is commonly known as Country in Australia, which can include not only earth, dwellings and place but also water, animals, wind and other beings. Language within these ways of thinking is not connected primarily to people but to land or Country. It is because these ways of thinking about language are so different from a consideration of language as structure, as object, as separate from people and the world, that many language revival projects have struggled. As long as Indigenous languages are thought of in terms of non-Indigenous ontologies, there will always be at best misunderstanding. On these grounds, Indigenous language activists have called for local control of language reclamation projects and the need to decolonize what is meant by language.

Momentum is building for epidemiological research undertaken with, for, and by Indigenous peoples. This work often follows a strength-based approach, emphasising the inherent assets and resilience of Indigenous communities and the role of culture as the foundation of our individual, social, ecological, and spiritual health and well-being. This chapter provides an overview of current discourses around centring Indigenous ontologies (ways of being), epistemologies (ways of knowing), and axiologies (ways of doing), also known as Indigenous ‘lifeworlds’, in epidemiology with a particular focus on Indigenous Australian (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) perspectives. Mayi Kuwayu: The National Study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Wellbeing is used as a key example illustrating how epidemiological research may be led, owned, and governed by Indigenous peoples to produce rigorous and meaningful data that reflect Indigenous lifeworlds, known as ‘good data’. Applying an Indigenous lens to epidemiological research generates valuable lessons for the development of the DOHaD lifecourse framework and future studies that seek to address holistic determinants of intergenerational health and well-being.

The DOHaD field provides critical evidence for investment in early life, linking environmental exposures during preconception, pregnancy, and infancy with later non-communicable disease risk. Despite the potential of this evidence to positively impact some of our most vulnerable communities, instances where communities are engaged in participatory DOHaD research and knowledge translation processes are limited. This chapter explores the benefits of community-based participatory research approaches and outlines current examples within the DOHaD field. In particular, it focuses on ongoing work within the Cook Islands where DOHaD has informed community-partnered research, scientific and health literacy programmes in schools, and the development of early-life nutrition resources for mothers and families.

This chapter illuminates how camp conceives reading in affective terms. Camp diminishes the intensity of strong affects, such as shame, anxiety, and rage, to make room for relief, laughter, and even sexual interest. In this way, camp protects queer eroticism from being snuffed out by a wide range of phobic discourses. While scholars often oppose camp to sexual desire, I trace different orientations to eroticism that arise in in lesbian, queer of color, and trans camp. As examples, I turn to three camp touchstones, Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack (1928), Tommy Pico’s Junk (2018), and Torrey Peters’ “CisWorld (2019), which each seduce readers into scenes of pleasure. For these writers, campiness does not deflate queer and trans desires but makes them narratable and available for readers. In doing so, these texts demonstrate how camp dreams of a queerer social order, and it shields these fantasies from the suffocating forces of white supremacy and cis-heteronormativity. Making affective scenes for queer fantasy, I conclude, is a powerful if still under-appreciated force of camp’s poetics and politics.

Throughout the history of European colonization of the American continent, which continues today, European visitors and settlers have produced records of their encounters with Indigenous Peoples they regarded as nonheteronormative or queer. Native people have decried the ways such documentation lends itself to cultural misrepresentation and appropriation. In 1990, a group of LGBTIQ+ identified Native American and First Nations people coined the autonym Two-Spirit to insist on Indigenous Peoples’ sovereign rights of self-determination, self-definition, and self-naming. Contemporary Native communities use Two-Spirit as an umbrella term that references gender-expansive Indigenous traditions and identities that exceed colonial logics. This chapter focuses on Two-Spirit/queer Native authors who create literature by and for Two-Spirit people, thus representing the past, present, and imagined future of queer Indigeneity. Proposing that decolonization movements to reclaim queer(ed) Indigenous “gender” traditions and revitalize Indigenous languages are interrelated, this essay reads works by Two-Spirit authors who incorporate Indigenous languages into their writing.

Writing about Oceanic sexualities involves vast travel in space and time to appreciate the striking diversities in Indigenous sexualities across Oceania and to witness how these have transformed over centuries in relation to and resistance against global influences, especially those originating in Euro-American imperialism. Focusing on three different places in the Pacific – Hawai’i, Papua New Guinea and Samoa – this chapter critically considers how Indigenous sexualities have been represented by both foreign and Indigenous scholars and how far contemporary sexualities are seen as a rupture or a persistence from the past. It explores the pervasive conversion to Christianity as part of imperial processes of dispossession and depopulation. It analyses how the valorization of a patriarchal gendered binary and monogamous heterosexuality challenged and transformed prior gender and sexual configurations. It observes the impact of sexually transmitted diseases, from the ‘venereal’, spread by early European explorers, to the twentieth century epidemic of HIV. It critiques the role of foreign observers and anthropologists like Malinowski and Mead in the ‘othering’ of Oceanic sexualities and discusses how Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists have resisted such representations and offered alternative, anti-imperial perspectives.

Drawing on an online ethnographic case study of a young Australian Aboriginal artist, ‘Kambarni’, this study explores how translanguaging can be understood through the negotiation of both playfulness and precarity. When this artist is online in his public social media Instagram account, he constructs his cultural identity artistically and multimodally, often in playful ways, represented through his art - reflecting his personal, social and political lived experiences; his strong alignment to his traditional culture; and his ability to walk with confidence in non-Aboriginal ‘youth’ society. Yet the monolingual ideological precarity is apparent as he rarely uses anything but Standard Australian English (SAE) on his public Instagram account, despite the fact that his Instagram account targets both an Indigenous and non-Aboriginal audience. When he is offline interacting ‘inside’ his own peer group, on the other hand, he employs translanguaging playfully and creatively, using varied resources such as SAE, Aboriginal English and traditional language lexicon. The authors, therefore, argue that translanguaging should be understood from its playfulness aspects within in-group communication, while it might lose its playfulness when it moves beyond its boundary and clashes with other ideological precarities such as judgements, stereotypes and racism against the Aboriginal people.

This chapter begins by addressing settler colonialism and how it has affected and influenced educational practices in the United States. The authors discuss how they define decolonization and ask themselves and their readers if it is truly possible to decolonize schooling in the United States. They offer the concept of a critical settler consciousness to push back against settler colonization, and give multiple examples of communities and schools that are decolonizing their curriculums. The authors emphasize that decolonizing the curriculum is not easy; it is complicated, convoluted, and often unclear. They conclude that there is hope in the communities, parents, and students employing decolonizing practices to educate their young people.

Moralist, libertarian and relativist ethical positions concerning suicide and its prevention are presented in order to clarify premises upon which ethical issues in suicide research may be resolved. Ethical concerns are differentiated from legal considerations and the implications of the vulnerability of suicidology research participants are discussed. Specific issues arise in design, choice of participants, interpretation, diffusion of results and evaluative research. These include: experimental methodologies, obtaining informed consent, deception and disclosure, studying innovative and unproven interventions, special considerations for research with indigenous participants, unknown consequences of participation, rescue criteria, disclosure of information to third parties, research with prisoners and other special populations, risks in publicising results and measuring the value of human life. Digital technologies and artificial intelligence pose new challenges in risk prediction and assuring equity. When specific legal obligations are lacking, ethical premises concerning the acceptability of suicide and obligations to intervene may influence research protocols.

This book is the result of a collective effort by a group of scholars from Latin America, Europe, and the USA, who together wished to write a legal history that would center on the common experiences of Latin American societies over a long period, which began before Europeans invaded the continent and continue to date. The aim was to identify a narrative that would observe common trends, manifest the dramatic shifts that had occurred throughout this period, and insert these findings into a wider perspective. This in turn would reveal that debates taking place in Latin America were often linked to discussions transpiring elsewhere, to which they both contributed and from which they received input and inspiration. Our first aim, therefore, is to craft a pan-Latin American narrative and insert it into a global perspective. Our second aim is to propose a new methodology that places at the center questions rather than answers, processes rather than results, and contexts rather than descriptions of solutions. We also want to demonstrate the multiple levels on which law operates and how deeply it is embedded in social, political, cultural, and economic processes.

This chapter offers the account of an underexplored subgenre of Indigenous writing, namely, the Native American essay. Historically, these essays bore witness to individual and collective loss and injustice and told the history of murder, dispossession, forced reeducation, exploitation, and mistreatment that characterizes the encounter with European colonizers. In their essays, Indigenous people have proclaimed their existence and continuance and argued for sovereignty. Many of these essays appear embedded in the forms of stories, sermons, appeals, ethnographies, autobiographies, journals, and periodicals, as well as in scholarship. Their style and subject matter are wide ranging, with reflections on the natural world, identity, tradition, self-governance, and spirituality. The contributions of important Indigenous essayists like Samson Occom, E. Pauline Johnson, N. Scott Momaday, Charles Eastman, Winona LaDuke, and Leslie Marmon Silko show the breadth, depth, and beauty of Indigenous writing from the eighteenth century to today.

In earnest efforts to disrupt the racialized space of Anthropocene conversations, Indigenous epistemological alternatives have emerged as exceptional antidotes to ecological despair with privileged access to nonhuman and interspecies lifeworlds. While many Indigenous approaches do offer beneficent alternatives, their broadscale characterization tends to deposit fresh essentialisms in the wake of the old, and battles over intellectual privacy and appropriation frustrate coalitional urgency. Thus, the very incommensurability that these new approaches seek to demolish – those nourished by the imperial practices we aim to counter – are rejuvenated. Simultaneously, Indigenous critical thought continues to herald its singular capacities for reclamation, and at the same time to police its appropriation, at once demanding and rejecting inclusion in serious academic and scientific conversations. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s concept of the “weird” as a way of conceptualizing human embeddedness in a vast biosphere of nonhuman others that both contains and erases us, this chapter argues that a politics of action based on exceptional epistemologies and myths of alterity cannot succeed. We are tangled in a structural universe where fictions of difference – not just between humans and nonhumans, but among humans themselves – emerge from the very systems we seek to explode.

It is habitual among scholars to suggest that European nations were formed during, and to some degree because of, the colonial expansion.1 Many argue that this expansion, which placed colonizers in opposition to the natives they sought to control, to other Europeans with whom they competed, and to the large African population that they enslaved, led to the emergence of new identities. In the Spanish case, it enabled the move from multiple local distinctions to a unitary national designation, allowing individuals originating from the different Iberian kingdoms (Castile, Navarre, Aragón, and so forth) to assume a single identity as Spaniards. While some scholars pointed to the formation of nations (or proto-nations), others concluded that the colonial experience led Europeans to think of themselves as participants in a community, members of which belonged to a particular race. Imagining themselves to be distinct from both natives and Africans, these Europeans refashioned themselves as “white.”2