In this chapter we identify some aspects of Indigenous epistemologies (ways of knowing) and ontologies (ways of being) and apply them to the re-imagining of social work, grounded in contributions, experiences and knowledges shared by Indigenous scholars in the field. Social work has too often been part of the colonial project rather than the decolonising project, though in the twenty-first century the decolonisation of social work has emerged as a more important agenda. This chapter is concerned with Indigenous ways of knowing and being as representing important alternatives to Western modernity. We argue that to achieve re-imagining of social work requires social workers to adopt an epistemological shift that centres and values Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies as core, consciously and intentionally removing them from the margins that they have occupied in social work education and practice. We start the chapter with some notes on its authorship. We then briefly describe colonialism’s stifling of Indigenous epistemologies, after which we explore Indigenous ways of knowing and being and how they inform the re-imagining of social work.

This collection of essays is one in a series of books on urban planning and sustainable development in Africa, bringing together scholarship from different disciplines in urban studies, planning and social sciences across different regions of the continent. It is aimed at readers from urban specialisms in spatial planning, human geography, environmental law and other social sciences, and professionals and policymakers concerned with urban development, land use planning and informality governance. Urban planning has emerged over the past half a century in Africa through colonisation, influencing urban policies, practices, discourses and institutions in the continent’s cities. Today, it remains the bedrock for realising sustainable development ideals across the continent’s growing cities, yet current practices indicate otherwise. A narrative is presented on why urban planning needs to be reimagined in Africa and its association with sustainable urban development, involving complex policy developments during colonial and post-colonial times. The case of African cities is discussed, having acquired importance because of their particular history of colonisation and growth in urbanisation and population as well as experiences of climate change. The chapter contributions in this book are then outlined together with how they contribute to evolving ideas on urban planning and sustainable development in Africa.

Urban planning in Africa is linked to elements of colonisation, production of informal spaces and socio-spatial segregation. Discussing it often provokes considerable emotions. How do urban planning histories fit into current planning practice? What constitutes reimagined urban planning in African cities? And how do current urban planning practices promote or limit urban planning reimagination and sustainable urban development? This chapter addresses these questions by highlighting the importance of planning histories in framing current planning theory and the production of urban spaces in Africa as well as their implication for sustainable urban development. The chapter shows how pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial planning narratives continue to dominate and frame twenty-first-century planning practice across African cities. Drawing from published literature, policy documents and international reports, the chapter advocates for a participatory narrative in deconstructing planning,and promoting inclusiveness and spatial integration toward a reimagination of urban planning in Africa.

Colonisation and colonialism have denied legitimacy to the Indigenous world views and ways of knowing and being described in Chapter 4. In this chapter, we turn our gaze on the coloniser and consider the influence of colonial cultures and the ways in which they need to change so that other ways of knowing and being can flourish. We start our discussion with an example of the unacknowledged nature of colonialism in modern Australian society. We then argue that decolonisation is essential, not only for social work with Indigenous or culturally diverse populations but for all social work practice.

This chapter examines eighteenth-century textual records about the Australian colonies, from the early British press reports of the establishment of the penal colony at Port Jackson to the accounts of religious personnel such as the first colonial chaplain Richard Johnson. It reveals how convicts and Indigenous people were represented in texts designed for metropolitan audiences. The isolated voices of evangelical reformers provided rich accounts of the problems and failures of the penal colony. They questioned the morality of the military governance of the penal colony and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Evangelical accounts from New South Wales became part of a global knowledge economy and a thriving print culture; they provided evidence that thickened, and at times contradicted, official accounts that circulated in the British media.

Australian novelist George Turner’s 1987 novel The Sea and Summer is one of the world’s first climate fiction novels, although James Edmond’s 1911 story, ‘The Fool and His Inheritance’, is a precursor to the genre. The early emergence of Australian climate fiction is not surprising given the country’s vulnerability to anthropogenic climate change. This chapter investigates the 35-year history of Australian climate fiction through an analysis of six novels, contemplating how environment, history and culture shape the use of genre, form and theme. It examines slow violence and flooding in The Sea and Summer; the intertwining of colonisation, environmental destruction and dispossession in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013); the use of the uncanny to explore the impact of ‘settlement’ in Jennifer Mills’s Dyschronia (2018); the effect of a changing climate on generations in James Bradley’s Clade (2015); and the psychological ramifications of the 2019–20 bushfires, evident through motifs of missing bodies and an invisible menace in Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) and Inga Simpson’s The Last Woman in the World (2021). These novels, which are shaped by their production in a country with a fragile environment and a history of colonisation, offer varying visions of hope and despair.

The chapter focusses on post-1721 developments, analysing the Dano-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede’s struggle to fit the new observations he made in Greenland into the framework of established ideas promoted in the texts he had read prior to his arrival. The transition from reading about Greenland in books to observing the land in situ led to a crisis of representation as the archive of knowledge that had been stored up over the centuries became difficult to reconcile with experience. The most significant error perpetuated in several texts was the idea that the Eastern Settlement was located on the east coast. Rather than dismiss the many expeditions that sought to reach this fabled settlement as irrelevant to the colonial project that eventually developed on the west coast, the chapter proposes that the search for the settlers and their resource-rich lands is significant for understanding Denmark’s political, religious, and commercial ambitions in Greenland. Attention is also paid to the maps Egede drew of Greenland as they are visual records of how traditional perceptions were allowed to coexist with new empirical data.

Countries in the Minority World that have made the most substantial contributions to the climate emergency must accept that they should also make the most significant contributions to its solutions. It is reasonable and right that governments in the Minority World should assume responsibility for their actions and make amends. Indeed, it is only fair and decent that they do so after centuries of robbing the Majority World.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

By 1837 the British government had been sending convicts, soldiers, and livestock entrepreneurs to Australia for almost fifty years. A committee of its own House of Commons, inspired by humanitarian principles, now reported the devastating effects on the indigenous inhabitants. Evidence of ‘extermination’ and ‘extirpation’ meant that the best minds of the Colonial Office were already exercised by the devastation of indigenous peoples inflicted by settlers who might have no clear aim of damaging them. When British government was extended to New Zealand, it was soon evident that Māori, for centuries sharing a largely common language and history, had a more effective capacity to resist than Aboriginal Australians, for millennia divided into hundreds of separate peoples and languages. In all Australian colonies and New Zealand, the determination of immigrants to ‘make productive’ land they knew belonged to others created disaster. Within twenty years of settlement, the Aboriginal population of Victoria declined by eighty percent. As the British spread over the whole continent, countless nations were extinguished. Across the Tasman the indigenous population was halved and the ‘passing of the Māori’ was still openly discussed even as adaptation, intermarriage and parliamentary representation saved it from genocide.

In this chapter, the authors explore the sociopolitical and cultural issues surrounding the uses of place names in society. Place names are social constructs that show people’s attachment to the land they live in; they help communities to navigate and orientate, pass down oral traditions, and demonstrate the changes to the landscape. Such functions of place names are more keenly felt by Indigenous communities, who share a close connection with place names, their lands, and cultural heritage. Given that toponyms have symbolic, cultural, and historical significance, they are unsurprisingly used by groups to assert control – be it a more powerful linguistic group subduing minority groups and their languages, or, in settler colonies, the colonial powers using place names to show power differentials between the coloniser and the colonised. However, natives also exercise agency, as they seek to rename and decolonise colonial names, although they are not always successful. This chapter relates to the cultural politics of naming, i.e., how people seek to control, negotiate, and contest the naming process as they engage in wider struggles for legitimacy and visibility. The chapter also deals with a gamma of different toponymic changes and with the notion of ‘toponymic nickname’, providing a comprehensive list of examples from around the world.

This chapter is a companion to the previous one and extends many of its themes, but this time in relation to territorial frontiers. ‘Frontiers’, as understand here, are simultaneously geographically peripheral to existing centres of political and economic power, objects of outward expansion and colonisation, and home to both abundant resources and local populations who are routinely marginalised, excluded and sometimes expelled in the name of development. The chapter explores such frontier dynamics in relation to ‘water frontiers’ within Sudan, the Palestinian territories, the Lake Chad region and north-eastern Syria. It shows that frontiers are sites of extreme levels and forms of appropriation, inequality, degradation, conflict and insecurity, as well as resilience and resistance, both in general and in relation to water specifically. And the chapter closes, in line with previous ones, by turning to climate change, noting that frontiers are widely misunderstood within climate crisis discourse – and by reflecting on how they are actually likely to fare as the planet warms.

The legal structure of the first half century of colonial New South Wales had a military appearance. The first judges had the military title of Judge Advocate and the criminal court’s jury consisted of military officers. The colony’s initial constitution was autocratic, most of its powers being in the hands of the governors. Despite these restrictions, the colony’s courts applied civilian rather than military law. They were also the location for resistance to autocracy. English law arrived with the First Fleet in 1788, but it met new conditions. Most of the population were convicts who should have had limited legal rights, land holding had a different social function in the colony, and the invasion of indigenous interests could not be ignored entirely. After the military coup against Governor Bligh in 1808, the British government strengthened its controls, but only with a small reduction in autocratic government. The early amateur period was replaced by a professional judiciary, and in 1824 a new legislature began to limit the law-making powers of the governors. Despite these changes, English law continued to be altered to meet local circumstances.

Public health aims to limit avoidable disease, injury, disability, and death in populations through preventative strategies (PHAA, 2018). But the development of strategies cannot occur until the nature and extent of any issue is first identified and analysed, and research is carried out to identify causes. If a public health framework is used, this involves trying to assess the roles that a range of non-health factors, labelled social determinants may be playing. In this chapter the preventable and very similar health issues faced by indigenous people throughout the world, will therefore be identified before some of the underlying determinants that make the causes of these issues extremely complex are described and discussed. While this may seem to be a ‘deficit approach’, an approach frequently criticised by indigenous people, these initial steps are necessary because they will provide a basis for a better understanding of what needs to be addressed, and what strategies work and why, providing context for those successful programs identified in the final section. As we progress through the chapter it should be apparent that indigenous people are best placed to find solutions and are gradually

In 1532 a motley band of 168 Spanish soldiers arrived on the outskirts of Cajamarca, the capital of the mighty Incan empire in present-day Peru. Already on his third expedition to the New World, Francisco Pizarro had one aim: to find gold and claim it for the Spanish king. He first sent his trusted captain, Hernando de Soto, to meet with the In can emperor – Atahualpa – and invite him to a meeting. De Soto rode out on his horse. It was the first time Atahualpa had ever seen such an animal. Impressed with his strange visitor, he agreed to meet Pizarro the next day.

Pizarro, however, had different plans. He prepared an ambush and, when Atahualpa arrived with 6,000 unarmed men, he attacked with 106 soldiers on foot and 62 on horses. The Incas were completely caught off guard; about 2,000 Inca died in the volleys of gunfire that ensued.

On the east coast of Tanzania, south of Dar es Salaam, lies the tiny island of Kilwa Kisiwani. From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries the port city of Kilwa was the centre of trade for the entire Swahili coast, integrated in a trading network that stretched as far as Arabia, India and even China. The inhabitants of this beautiful city were ethnically mixed – including Persians, Arabs and Bantu-speaking Africans – and, over time, they developed a distinctive East African culture and language – Swahili, which literally means ‘coast dwellers’. This cultural influence stretched all along the East African coast, from Inhambane and Sofala in the south (modern-day Mozambique) to Mombasa and Malindi (Kenya) and Mogadishu (Somalia) in the north.

The trade network along the East African coast had ancient roots. Some Chinese records suggest trade connections between Africans and Chinese as far back as the Han dynasty in China (206 BCE–220 CE). But much of our evidence come from archaeologists who have excavated and analysed glass beads in East Africa