Indigenous Education and Research Centre Study with IERC at JCU Undergraduate Indigenous Studies

Undergraduate Indigenous Studies

IERC's Indigenous Studies

Indigenous Studies orients students to engage Indigenous ideas in a rapidly changing world. Our coursework will prepare you to use academic and intellectual processes to evaluate and analyse complex knowledge intersections.

Across eight subjects, students explore Indigenous People of Place, People of Knowledge, and People of Science. Through these themes you will learn about the everyday realities, experiences and knowledges that shape and are shaped by Indigenous people, communities and ideas. Our students graduate ready for a rapidly changing world or work and a disposition to always be a learner of the living world.

You can take Indigenous Studies as a major or minor in the Bachelor of Arts, or enrol in individual subjects as electives in any course.

This subject focuses on the continuity of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, knowledge and traditions across time and place and explores Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' traditional understanding of their place in the world.

Find out more: IA1011 subject information

This subject focuses on the continuity of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' presence in North Queensland and introduces students to the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in our region, their traditional relationships to country and to each other.

Find out more: IA1012 subject information

This subject examines how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were re-constituted as colonial subjects and introduces the thinking that underpinned colonial rationales. It will critically review a range of discourses, contexts, historical events, and government policies that have shaped the experiences and reconstituted the identities of Indigenous Australians over time and across the continent.

Find out more: IA2022 subject information

This subject explores Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's history of adaptation to change and resistance to oppressive colonial forces. Significant Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander defensive actions, letters, petitions, protests, labour strikes, Aboriginal societies, legal challenges, other principled actions, and political activism provide a context for investigating Indigenous agency and political standpoints from early contact to the contemporary era.

Find out more: IA2023 subject information

This subject focuses on the similarities and differences in Indigenous peoples' experiences of colonisation in selected countries and the resultant impact. It introduces the different historical and contemporary circumstances of Indigenous people in other colonial contexts and various instruments and terms of political inclusion for Indigenous peoples' agendas for change and pursuit of restorative justice.

Find out more: IA2030 subject information

This subject engages in deeper analysis of the complexity of the contemporary Indigenous position through examination of the goals and conceptual basis of some major narratives of the post-1967 era. The selected narratives represent Indigenous contestation with the continuing terms and conditions of the Australian nation-state and efforts to redress the ongoing legacy of colonial injustice.

Find out more: IA3024 subject information

This subject examines the complex entanglements of Indigenous and Western systems of thought, knowledge, and standpoints engaged in scholarly efforts to understand Indigenous people's contemporary position and policy and practical efforts to bring about change in Indigenous Australians lives.

Find out more: IA3025 subject information

As the Capstone Subject for the Indigenous Studies major, this subject is designed to consolidate and bring together students' learning from previous subjects. The Capstone aims to build on students' appreciation of the implications of Indigenous knowledge continuities, ruptures and convergences in relation to their disciplines and future professional practice.

Find out more: IA3030 subject information

IERC field trip to Cape Pallarenda and Turtle Rock