During the last two decades, a body of significant research has emerged relating to universities’ education of Indigenous and transcultural doctoral candidates. Australian universities, however, have been very slow to create recognition and accreditation programs for First Nations and transcultural (migrant, refugee and international candidates’) knowledge systems, histories, geographies, languages and cultural practices in doctoral education unlike Aotearoa/New Zealand and South Africa.
This paper will report on the first phase of an ARC project that aims to address this gap by putting forward research-based strategies to harness the power of the multiple Indigenous and transcultural cultures in Australia in order to create the conditions for what de Sousa Santos (2014) calls ‘epistemic or cognitive justice’ in Australian doctoral education. Cognitive justice (our theoretical framework) involves the full and equal recognition of all of the worlds knowledge systems, languages and cultural practices, not only Northern science.