Karen Hughes

Karen Hughes is Senior Lecturer in Indigenous Studies at Swinburne University of Technology. She has also taught at Monash University and the University of South Australia, and in 2011 was a Visiting Fellow at University Paris 13. Her research focuses on intimate and gendered histories of the contact zone in New World settler-colonial societies, incorporating transnational perspectives. She is currently involved in a cross-cultural collaborative project with Indigenous communities in southern Australia and the United States, as well as an intergenerational study with the Ngukurr community of South East Arnhem Land. Her research pursues de-colonising methodologies through a partnership approach to ethnography.

Ngapartji Ngapartji »

In turn, in turn: Ego-histoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia

Publication date: November 2014
In this innovative collection, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars from Australia and Europe reflect on how their life histories have impacted on their research in Indigenous Australian Studies. Drawing on Pierre Nora’s concept of ego-histoire as an analytical tool to ask historians to apply their methods to themselves, contributors lay open their paths, personal commitments and passion involved in their research. Why are we researching in Indigenous Studies, what has driven our motivations? How have our biographical experiences influenced our research? And how has our research influenced us in our political and individual understanding as scholars and human beings? This collection tries to answer many of these complex questions, seeing them not as merely personal issues but highly relevant to the practice of Indigenous Studies. I think this rich collection will become a landmark text and a favourite within Australian scholarship. I am keen to see it published so that I can recommend it to others — Professor Emerita Margaret Allen, Gender Studies and Social Analysis, University of Adelaide The idea was to explain the link between the history you have made and the history that has made you  — Pierre Nora