Beyond ‘Structured Inattention’

Australian scholarly knowledge of Indigenous politics is predominantly conducted on settler–colonial terms that elide Indigenous sociopolitical order and shape Indigenous agency. This manifests in an evolving form of ‘structured inattention’ that implicitly or explicitly accepts the bounds of settler rule and operates across apparently divergent policy phases regardless of party-political differences. Exceptions to this pattern have tended to have relatively less influence on public policy, but have persisted from the 1980s. Critical approaches are currently burgeoning, apparently in response to unresolved questions about how colonial domination shapes politics and governing, and how these phenomena are known and studied.