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Language, culture, country and community are globally understood as contributors to identity. The value that is placed on each of these varies from culture to culture, and from community to community. In a climate of a normalised white Australian culture and society anybody/culture that sits outside this framework is ‘othered’. Within the Indigenous studies major program this course exists to unpack notions of culture, examines the development and function of language in relation to country, and provides students with a theoretical understanding of community.

This is no anthropological gaze at First Nations culture but rather an analysis of systems and structures and the development of these concepts in Western academia and societies and how these developments have impacted on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities. Words and their meanings will be unpacked alongside modernity's rejection of culture, imagined communities and communities of movement will be looked at against the emergence of communities/cultures of resistance. The dynamic relationship of belonging to and from a place will be explored.