{"title":"Everyone and everything is a boundary object – an empirical account from a modest human boundary object","authors":"Yasunori Hayashi","doi":"10.18793/lcj2020.26.09","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"In 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—Yolŋu 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 Yolŋu kinship system, as modest kin to the Yolŋu Aboriginal landscape of land and people. As a witness to the ways in which Yolŋu family live and care for their environment with the absence of centrality, I extend the notion of boundary object to the central understandings of Yolŋu kinship practice, where everyone and everything is a boundary object.","PeriodicalId":43860,"journal":{"name":"Learning Communities-International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5000,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Learning Communities-International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.18793/lcj2020.26.09","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
In 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—Yolŋu 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 Yolŋu kinship system, as modest kin to the Yolŋu Aboriginal landscape of land and people. As a witness to the ways in which Yolŋu family live and care for their environment with the absence of centrality, I extend the notion of boundary object to the central understandings of Yolŋu kinship practice, where everyone and everything is a boundary object.