Everyone and everything is a boundary object – an empirical account from a modest human boundary object

Details

Publication TypeJournal articleAbstractIn this paper, I grapple with the application of a boundary object, in its position at the centre of a cross-cultural project in Indigenous northern Australia involving discrete knowledge communities—Yol?u Indigenous landowners and hydrogeologists engaging in the hope of developing a community-led water management plan. Although I was officially assigned as a community engagement officer and a language translator, I found myself becoming a boundary object, comparable to a three-dimensional map of Aboriginal land. My positionality was considerably unsettling at times due to a culmination of disconcertments surfacing from my figure as a knower adopted into Yol?u kinship system, as modest kin to the Yol?u Aboriginal landscape of land and people. As a witness to the ways in which Yol?u family live and care for their environment with the absence of centrality, I extend the notion of boundary object to the central understandings of Yol?u kinship practice, where everyone and everything is a boundary object.AuthorHayashi, Y.Date2020Publication CollectionNorthern Institute - Learning Communities: International Journal of Learning in Social ContextsVolume26/ 2020Page Number58-63CopyrightThis work is licensed under CC BY-SASuggested CitationHayashi, Y. (2020). Everyone and everything is a boundary object – an empirical account from a modest human boundary object. Learning Communities: International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts [Special Issue: Collaborative knowledge work in northern Australia], 26, 58-63. https://doi.org/10.18793/lcj2020.26.09ISSNISSN 1329-1440 (online)ISSN 2202-7904 (print)PublisherCollege of Indigenous Futures, Arts & Society
CHARLES DARWIN UNIVERSITY Place of PublicationDarwin