Colonial anxiety and the virtuous work of the Humanities and Social Sciences
Smith, Bryan (2025) Colonial anxiety and the virtuous work of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Critical Studies in Education. (In Press)
|
PDF (Accepted Publisher Version)
- Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (801kB) | Preview |
Abstract
Curriculum, as a policy of the settler-state, is essential in carefully safeguarding learners and educators from encounters with the colonial project’s inherent violence. In Australia, the effort to create an acceptable engagement with the past via curriculum is particularly important given the need to reproduce liberal views and discourses of inclusion that define the politics of the contemporary settler state. At its core, curriculum thus works to placate colonial anxiety and furnish learners with ideas about the nation-state that are intrinsically geared toward colonial legitimacy and preservation. In this article, I take up this condition, highlighting how the Australian Curriculum represents the context of Australia in such a way that minimises any potentially productive anxious encounters with the violence of colonisation. Drawing on Lisa Slater’s idea of virtuous anxiety, I analyse and explore how the Australian Curriculum’s humanities and social sciences learning area represents the place and history of Australia as one that is fraught with violence all the while learners and educators are afforded space to learn about colonisation from a safe emotional and political distance.
| Item ID: | 86038 |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 1750-8495 |
| Keywords: | curriculum, decolonisation, humanities and social sciences |
| Related URLs: | |
| Copyright Information: | © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| Date Deposited: | 07 Jul 2025 22:15 |
| More Statistics |
Actions (Repository Staff Only)
 |
Item Control Page |