Decolonising Criminology

This week’s thought leadership is an excerpt from an interview transcript on Indigenous Research Methods with Sam Alderton-Johnson as part of a resource for students considering honours by research. It's been edited to fit more for this style of our weekly thought leadership reflections.

Please enjoy!

Tell us about yourself, your project and your motivation

I guess I grew up in a community, a very strong Aboriginal community, but a community that, you know, an urban Aboriginal community that experienced a lot of impacts of intergenerational trauma and social disadvantage, and so, you know, there were a lot of issues that I experienced in my community that were interconnected with justice. And so I was really passionate when I went on my honours journey around trying to understand that more, more at a grassroots level in terms of the voices of people from my community. 

So, one thing in my degree that I started to question a lot was a lot of people talking about Blackfullas and talking about Aboriginal people and our communities as problems, but I found little work and research that actually gave voice to the very people in which they were talking about. And so my motivation for my honours thesis was to at least try and do that, and that was to try and give a voice to young people from my community around what their experiences were with youth justice, with a specific focus around the Young Offenders Act, which looks at, you know, cautions, warnings and youth justice conferencing.

So yeah, we took a real deep dive into trying to understand Aboriginal young people from the Glebe community's experience in youth justice. All of our participants had spent time in juvenile justice as young people, and we really tried to understand the experience in terms of restorative justice but from a critical Indigenous perspective. So, I guess that's a bit of a broad overview of the motivation and, yeah, a bit of a broad understanding of what we tried to tackle.

How would you define decolonising criminology and justice?

Yeah, well, I think it's not as complex as what we think in many ways, so what I really believe is that we don't have an Aboriginal justice problem. We've got a problem with the impacts of state violence, the impacts of our colonial history, and what that has done in terms of the detriment to our communities and what we're still navigating today.

So what I really believe is that what we actually have is we actually really have an opportunity to look at Aboriginal communities for the strength and for the solutions and knowledge that our communities have in terms of how we understand justice across the system more broadly. And not thinking about pathologising our communities as problems that need to be solved, but actually seeking out the wisdom that exists that we have found in our communities in terms of how we understand and navigate some of the even broader systemic justice problems we're experiencing today.

And you know, there's plenty of examples of that happening in isolation. I've mentioned we're working at Impact Policy on the evaluation of the Walama list; you know, that is an example of very trauma-informed sorts of approaches to understanding people's connection with justice. But that's a design that is not unique to Blackfullas. You look at, you know, the demographics of people in prison today, and for the most part, it's not what the media leads us to believe in terms of, you know, it's not full of Ivan Milats; it's full of people that have experienced, you know, the most complex of trauma or navigating, you know. Dual diagnosis and complex needs, and so, you know, we have so much wisdom in our communities in terms of how we understand and respond to that sort of stuff more broadly.

So, that's a long answer, but one that I really hope students and practitioners that are listening to can really start to sit and think about their motivation for pursuing, you know, research or careers or work in the Indigenous justice space. And to start thinking about Indigenous justice in terms of Indigenous solutions and Indigenous knowledge in terms of how we think about justice more broadly, and not in terms of how the state responds to Blackfullas.

You talk a lot about Narrative and Storytelling in terms of method. What do you think this brings to research projects in terms of knowledge production? 

Yeah, definitely. Well, look, I think, you know, we do a lot of work in the research space through impact policy and outside of my own honours journey with the project that I talked about that we went on there; it's such a critical part of the method that we used, we used in that journey. What we still use today is storytelling and yarning as a critical Indigenous research method. 

When I first started, that came really naturally to me when I went on that journey as an honours student, because as a black fulla doing research in my own community, it would make sense that our, you know, knowledge that we are co-creating together is based on connection, and it's based on, yeah, what that means in terms of connection to community, to culture, and our shared experience and lived experiences in community.

And when I talked with some other friends and stuff on that journey at that moment, what I started to notice was, I used to think, I, I thought at the start that storytelling and yarning were less than the sort of mainstream research methods in terms of, like, people peers would respond, 'Oh, like you're just yarning. Like, what is that? Like, you're just talking about anything,' and I'm like, 'Well, not really, because if you think about storytelling and you think about yarning as a method in our communities, it comes back to something that we talked about earlier in terms of holding space, holding space and building strong connections, and it's through those that you really get a deeper, more robust, and more thoughtful feedback or participation by people that have been a part of your research journey, so much more than if you came in, you know, a standard 1 to 1 interview with pre-approved, you know, questions that were ticking off on the list because so much of.'

You have to remember as well for our communities, our communities have been so disempowered by, you know, research, and it's often been based in the deficits like we've talked to, and our communities haven't had agency, and they haven't had a voice, and they haven't seen their voices and faces and spaces amplified through their participation in this sort of stuff. So if you really wanted to get it, and also, in my experience, in my research project, I was interviewing young people. So there needed to be a space held that could also create a level of safety to fully participate. Um, some of those young people I knew personally, some of them I knew as family members of people that I knew well; there was a connection there as community members and Blackfullas, but still with young people as well, regardless of where you are or whatever community you're working with, you need to create the conditions for people to feel safe and have agency to participate.

And such a big part of that for us as mob comes with storytelling. It comes with understanding, you know; you need to qualify me first. You need to understand who I am, where I'm from, and what my purpose here is. Is it proper? Am I gonna be someone who's gonna just extract or take advantage of you, or am I someone that, you know, has helped you feel safe and that you trust is gonna, you know, add value and strength to the knowledge that you share with me and what I go on and do? 

And so, Storytelling is critical because so much of the knowledge and wisdom that we get back is often deep-rooted in that journey of connection. So if there's been so many experiences where I've sat down with somebody and I've started to have a yarn with them about, you know, the research purpose. After, after a period, and then the topic goes to family connections and you know, community experiences or it might go to a community like an event that we you know, share a connection to and, you know, 20 minutes might pass, and in the back of my head I'm like, 'Oh, we've we've crept a long way away from, you know, understanding the experience of youth justice here,' but almost time and time again it will then come back through to the core purpose of why we were there. And it will either come back more deeper, or the participation of feedback that we get is more, more, I guess. I'm not gonna say genuine, but it's people feel more. Supported to fully participate because they feel comfortable that space is being held to do that sort of stuff.

Storytelling and yarning as well. It also gives yourself as a researcher, if you do it well and you practise deep listening, it gives you the ability to understand what I am hearing and how this further qualify what I'm trying to understand. So if I'm here trying to understand youth justice journeys, and I, I have, you know, 5 questions that talk about A to D. But someone starts to talk about, you know, a lived experience of trauma as a young person, and that's separate to what I was there to talk about, but I start to connect and understand that I feel like that is probably a really significant factor around how they've gone on this trajectory of offending. It gives you the ability to then start to understand and ask a little bit more deeper around the conditions, you know, that existed there and how that connects to the purpose around what you're talking about today.

And that doesn't exist if you don't go on a storytelling journey; if you don't build connection, if you don't, you're not relational. Um, you know, as Blackfullas, we can, we can, we can do that well from a cultural context, but also non-Aboriginal researchers can come into that space and implement those same methods and implement, you know, storytelling and yarning as a way to deliver research, um, build connections and relationships and still get great outcomes as well, so yeah.

Hope you enjoyed this reflection and sharing around critical Indigenous research methods and thoughts and insights into how to strengthen your own practice more broadly. My next piece will explore trauma-informed and lived experience in methods and how we design research to create the conditions for safety, access and participation.

Authored by Sam Alderton-Johnson for Impact Policy