Research Seminar: Suspended futures? Australia’s school-prison nexus and Indigenous justice

The topic for Thomas’s presentation will be:
Suspended futures? Australia’s school-prison nexus and Indigenous justice

The school-prison nexus describes how students who are excluded from school face an array of broader systemic harms and injustices, including, but not only, criminalisation. In this seminar, Thomas will share: Findings from the first national Australian historical investigation of Indigenous school exclusion from colonisation to today; findings from an intersectional policy analysis reviewing available data on school exclusion and its impacts; and lastly, findings from a comparative policy study of strategies for reducing school exclusion in other settler colonial contexts. 

Thomas suggests that these findings, taken together, show clear continuities in racial dynamics of exclusion and its effects since Australian colonisation, and the potential for community-led solutions to achieve justice for Indigenous students and reduce the harms of criminalisation.

Archie Thomas is a non-Indigenous scholar and transgender man who has published widely on diversity, discrimination, and inclusion in media and education. He is the lead author of Does the media fail Aboriginal political aspirations? 45 years of news media reporting of key political moments (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2020), co-editor of Educational Agitations (Routledge, 2026), and the forthcoming Yipirinya: the true school of Mparntwe (ANU Press, 2027). He is the recipient of the 2025 Australian Academy of the Social Sciences Paul Bourke Award for early career achievement in the social sciences.

Feel free to forward the invitation to others you think might have an interest in learning about Thomas’s important research.

The event is hosted by the group Narrating the Postcolonial North.  

Welcome!

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