Dr Tyson Yunkaporta
As the founder of the IKS Lab at Deakin, Tyson is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who belongs to the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He looks at global systems from an Indigenous perspective, asking how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently? Tyson also carves traditional tools and weapons.
Dr John Davis
John Davis is a proud Murri Ambae man. He is a Traditional Owner of the western sides of Bunya Bunya Mountains,Country we call Boobagarrn Ngumminge. “My people are Cobble Cobble kinnected to Warra and Dalby. We have links directly to the Barunggam and Wakka Wakka people”. John completed his PhD in Indigenous Community Models of Education – Community Durithunga, with the Queensland University of Technology. Other research interests include Indigenous languages as LOTE, embedding Indigenous Knowledges and Indigenous ways to multimodal literacy.
John is passionate about our people, our languages and culture and working and moving our ways forward as best practice in education and community development.
Dr Chels Marshall
Chels’s work focuses on the role and efficacy of Indigenous approaches to marine environment resource. She looks at management and sustainable resource use in the era of human-induced climate change, and the relationship of these diverse forms of knowledge, to each other and to global Western scientific approaches, either in partnered co-management or distinctively.
Professor Gabrielle Fletcher
Gabrielle is a Gundungurra woman from the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. She is the Director of the National Indigenous Knowledges Education Research Innovation (NIKERI) Institute, within which the IKS Lab
sits at Deakin. Her work examines Indigenous authenticity in post-colonial spaces, mobilising ficto-criticism and creative non-fiction as strategies of encounter. She is increasingly interested in post-humanism and narrativity. Gabrielle is grounded by her experience in Indigenous community
and the responsibilities of remembering
Jack Manning Bancroft – Honorary Fellow
Jack Manning Bancroft is the CEO and Founder of AIME, an award-winning social movement that uses mentoring and imagination to unlock the potential of marginalised youth to create a fairer world. AIME is an imaginative educational program and a volunteer mentoring movement – a social network for good. Jack, a proud Indigenous Australian from the Bundjalung nation, founded AIME in 2005 at the age of 19 to find a solution to Indigenous inequality in Australia. Driven by imagination and audacious kindness, he re-engineered the concept of mentoring. He developed a cost-effective and scalable model that brings university students together as volunteers to mentor marginalised and minority high school kids so that they complete high school successfully, go on to university and ultimately, into fulfilling careers. Jack has received a string of awards and recognition for his work, his philosophy and his vision for a fairer world. He was MJ Bale’s Man of Character in 2014 and won Australia’s Happy Harold Education Award in 2013. In 2010, five years after founding AIME, he received the Australian Human Rights Medal, GQ Man of Inspiration, New South Wales Young Australian of the Year and the University of Sydney Young Alumni of the Year awards. Jack holds a BA in Media and Communications from the University of Sydney. He was awarded the Stanford Australia Foundation Dyson Bequest Scholarship in 2013 to attend Stanford University’s flagship Executive Program. In 2016 he received an Honorary Fellowship from Western Sydney University, and in the same year, he became the youngest person in Australian history to receive an Honorary Doctorate from the University of South Australia.
Jack is also a published children’s author with The Eagle Inside and has written The Mentor and Mentoring – The Key to a Fairer World.
Joshua Waters – Associate
Joshua Waters is a proud K/Gamilaroi man currently working in the Australian higher education sector and studying at the Masters level. His research examines the key convergences between Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) and natural systems combined with Western scientific domains by using land-based pedagogical approaches to inform methodology, theory development and solution-finding to global complex challenges and socio-political problems.
