Barangaroo and the Four Thousand Fish

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos
Two people walk along the foreshore. In the background, other groups gather at the pier taking photos and looking around, while others are near a giant vessel. The sun shines brightly as it sets over the water

My Weekends With A Sociologist series is going to start coming to you more frequently and completely out of sequence. I will share with you my visual sociology adventures from different places, at different points in time, showing you what has captivated my sociological imagination most recently, through to what has lingered with me over time. The purpose of this series is to showcase what it is to see the world through a sociological lens. (For visually impaired readers, descriptions in the alt.) So let’s get started!

What better way to restart our journey, than with the enduring legacy of a strong Aboriginal woman, Barangaroo.

Beginning in the first week of January, Sydney annually hosts the Sydney Festival, with various sites around town housing performances, public art and sculptures, including many interactive installations. The best this year was the artwork, Four Thousand Fish, curated by Emily McDaniel, artist from the Kalari Clan of the Wiradjuri nation in Central New South Wales. The artwork blends sea song, visual story telling, sound, lighting, sculptures, landscape photography, music and of course, a beautiful nawi (bark canoe).

Held at the Cutaway in Barangaroo, every weekend this past January, the site was transformed into a public art sculpture that was set ablaze nightly at dusk. I attended an event hosted by the beloved street photographer, Legojacker (formerly from Melbourne, they had moved to Canberra in recent months).

Barangarro is named after the mighty Cammeraygal woman of the Eora nation, who defied colonialism in Gadigal, her homeland (also known as Sydney).

Continue reading Barangaroo and the Four Thousand Fish

Interview: Making New Worlds

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos
Close up of astronaut's reflection on their helmet, as they work in space

I’m featured in the first episode of Making New Worlds, a podcast inviting experts from different fields to discuss the ethics of colonising other planets.

The issue we discuss is not about scientific space exploration (collecting data about other planets), but whether it is ethical for humans to settle in Mars or other planets. My responses represent sociological considerations about the inequality that is inherent in colonialism. The quotes below are excerpts from me; listen to the entire podcast in the link.

Picture of terrain on Mars, showing an aerial view of what appears to be sea, land and clouds. A quote from me is overlaid over the top, from the article, “And there is something profoundly unethical ... on our own planet.”
Ethics of colonising other planets

Continue reading Interview: Making New Worlds

#SOSBlakAustralia: Colonialism of Indigenous Australians in 2015

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos
Genetics research shows Aboriginal Australians are descendants of the first people to leave Africa. They represent the oldest continuous culture. #SosBlakAustralia
#SosBlakAustralia

The Australian Government is actively sustaining cultural violence against Indigenous Australians. The Abbott Government is trying to force 150 Aboriginal Australian communities off their lands in Western Australia. This would displace up to 12,000 Aboriginal Australians, effectively making them refugees in their own ancestral lands. This comes after months of ongoing campaigns to address:

  • The removal of 15,000 Indigenous children: The Grandmothers Against Removals group have been fighting for the return of Aboriginal children who live in so-called “out of home care,” away from their families. This practice goes back to early colonialism, where Indigenous children were removed from their communities and forced to give up their culture.
  • The denial of basic services to remote Indigenous communities: as shown in the Utopia Homelands in the Northern Territory, an Indigenous community that lived without clean water for two months in late 2014.

Continue reading #SOSBlakAustralia: Colonialism of Indigenous Australians in 2015

Rethinking the Narrative of Mars Colonisation

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

Rethinking the Narrative of Mars ColonisationBiologist Dr D. N. Lee has been doing an amazing job educating on how enthusiastic narratives of “colonising” Mars are problematic. On her Twitter, Lee notes that the dominant ways of talking about colonisation add to the marginalisation of under-represented minorities in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). If we want to make science more inclusive, we need to better understand how the stories we tell about STEM may exclude and damage under-represented groups we are trying to support.

Continue reading Rethinking the Narrative of Mars Colonisation

Transgender Indigenous Australians

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

The term “Brother Boy” describes an Indigenous transgender man and “Sister Girl” describes transgender women. In this short interview with The Wire, brother boy Kai Clancey talks about his social identity being a “double edged sword.” He experiences racism within the transgender community as well as confusion and exclusion from some members of his Indigenous community.

Clancey talks about his experience in terms of postcolonialism. Transphobia and homophobia are part of European settler culture, which also launched a campaign of genocide against the First Australians. Clancey says he is in the process of resisting colonial mindset, revising his cultural outlook and decolonising his mind and body.

Via Gay News Network.

Teaching Against Racism

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

Minneapolis Community and Technical College lecturer Shannon Gibney (who is African America) was formally reprimanded by her university after three White male students complained that they were being made to study structural racism. One student interrupted Gibney during her  Mass Communications class and asked: “Why do we have to talk about this?” Continue reading Teaching Against Racism

Sexual Racism and Fetishisation

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

The above chart summarises a survey using data from the dating app Are You Interested. The survey includes 2.4 million responses from heterosexual people. The data show that most men are looking to date outside their group. Most heterosexual women are drawn to heterosexual White men (with the notable exception of Black women), while most heterosexual men gravitate towards Asian women. Also noteworthy is that Black people are less likely to receive responses than the other groups.

The data suggest that sexual fetishes are facilitated by technology, because people can sort through physical descriptors, thus practising sexual exclusion through their potential partner choices. Continue reading Sexual Racism and Fetishisation

Colonisation: 99 Year Township Lease

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

This is another invasion; this is another colonisation, another approach of taking over everything. You know you cannot sell land for something, the land is so precious you cannot do that.

– Reverend Gondarra, respected Arnhem Land elder.

Gondarra is fighting the Government’s push to take control of Indigenous communities through a “99 year township lease.” Gondarra evokes a critique of Australia’s colonial laws, which dispossessed the traditional landowners for much of Australia’s history (and which continues in various ways to this day). Continue reading Colonisation: 99 Year Township Lease

Representing Colonial Violence as Progress

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

Gun, Germs & Steel remains an impactful text authored by Jared Diamond, whether we agree or disagree with him. Diamond argues that civilisations rise and fall on their ability to overcome the environmental constraints of the landscapes where groups settle.  The problem is that this argument and his subsequent work has not addressed its colonial framework, which defines human progress in narrow ways that elevate Western civilisations.

The popularity of Diamond’s work has been profound, and his influence extends into social and political discourses. In 2012 Diamond critiqued American politician Mitt Romney’s interpretation of his research. This is a good example of how social science can be effectively hijacked by political agendas outside of the researcher’s intention. In Diamond’s case, his accessible writing has captured the imagination of politicians who use his book to support both progressive and damaging environmental policies.

Diamond’s next book, Collapse, was widely criticised for being overly sympathetic to Chevron’s oil policies, rather than examining how Indigenous groups and other social protests led to changes in corporate environmental practises. Continue reading Representing Colonial Violence as Progress

Subverting Colonialism in Peru

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

Peru’s Señor de Choquekillca Festival is held in Ollantaytambo, near Cuzco (the ancient Incan city of Machu Picchu). The festival commemorates a local saint and it also represents the Inca’s mocking of the conquistadors who invaded and almost obliterated the Indigenous Quechua culture.

Writing for the Huffpost, Andrew Burmon muses that the festival comes across as a “strange” multicultural event that doesn’t match Western ideas of multiculturalism. The festival simultaneously represents an embrace of certain elements of Catholicism which are blended with Indigenous spirituality, as well as a rejection of Spanish colonialism.

In Western nations, multiculturalism takes on many contested forms, but it is usually about tolerance of cultural and religious difference as a means of social integration of minority groups. This festival in Ollantaytambo subverts this notion by recreating the history of colonialism as an act of cultural and religious rebellion. The town honours its tradition by staging people drinking outside a church as well as by having a cross procession.

The people dress up in beautifully ornate costumes as well as grotesque masks in a celebration, condemnation and reconciliation of the past.

Senor de Choquekillca is a strange sort of festival. A religious celebration in honor of a small town boy made saint that has morphed into an occasion for trans-generational venting, Choquekillca provides the citizens of the small town of Ollantaytambo with an occasion to dress up in white face and mock the conquistadors who destroyed the Inca civilization flourishing in this part of the Peruvian Andes…

That is what is great about the party: Like history itself, it doesn’t really make sense.

Peru’s Christian faith is a spoil of war, but no less genuine for being coerced. Likewise, the Incan culture is mourned despite being obviously extant. Unlike westerners, who more often than not see multiculturalism as the amalgamation of different peoples, the people of the Sacred Valley – inundated though they are by Machu Picchu-bound travelers – are multicultural on the inside, contradictions be damned.

It is hard not to love a people not only capable of holding contradictory ideas in their heads, but willing to celebrate them in concert. 

Photos via: Huffington Post.