Tess Lea

ABSTRACT: In my quest to answer a simple question about Australian settler social policy as it applies to Indigenous issues—namely, can it be ‘good’—I first had to confront the negative task of confronting how policy is conventionally approached. In the place of a focus on policy decisions and ramifications, I proposed approaching policy as a wilder configuration, one where every effort needed to be deployed to resist its claims to superior rationality and coherency. I tried to experiment with the writing, and to some extents, succeeded in a monograph called Wild Policy (Stanford, 2020). Since its publication, others wanting to apply an ecological approach to policy ethnography have asked for guidance. Being petitioned for advice on ‘how’ to apply the concepts, I told myself I needed to write a simpler paper explaining what policy ecology means to me, how it can be approached, and what techniques could be handy. But instead of this being an easy task, I stalled for at least two years. This paper relates my journey to explain policy ecology by eventually resorting to policy’s coherency tricks, defying my original desire to write against its deceptions.

BIOGRAPHY: Tess Lea is an anthropologist who specializes in trying to understand late liberal policy formations as they ramify through different lives, with particular emphasis on Indigenous policy unfurlings in Australia. She is Dean of Social Sciences at Macquarie University, following a period as Head of Community, Culture and Global Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan.

Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Lea’s talk.