Doctoral education is a critical site for the creation of new knowledge. Recently, more systematic attempts to support the success of Australian First Nations doctoral candidates have been introduced. An increasing number of Australian transcultural migrant and culturally diverse candidates have been completing their doctorates and international candidates are slowly [re]commencing their doctoral journeys. In Aotearoa New Zealand broad education policy recognises Maori students and Pacific students as ‘key learners’ but does not insist on how doctoral funding might best directly support these groups to succeed. There is significant concern in Aotearoa New Zealand about the direction of the new conservative coalition government.
In South Africa, doctoral education has gone through phases of transformation policy interpretation and implementation post 1994, reiterated calls for decolonization, and the recent innovations in programme design and delivery. South African doctoral pedagogy needs to include a consideration of an African worldview and context in the research design and in the development of the doctoral candidate. Without expanding the range of ‘ways of knowing’, we risk missing a key opportunity to decolonise and transform knowledge creation and creators at this highest level of education qualification (Fataar, 2018).
This Keynote Panel discussion considers how doctoral education has the potential to become a key site for epistemic justice and the full inclusion, appreciation and extension of Indigenous and transcultural knowledges and identities (Santos, 2018). Bringing together presenters from Australia, Aotearoa NZ and South Africa, this Keynote Panel applies the Australian First Nations epistemic principles of agency on Country, the power of stories and iterative, intergenerational and intercultural knowledge creation to doctoral education. This transnational team of First Nations Aboriginal, Māori, African, transcultural and non-Indigenous researchers and doctoral candidates has been drawing upon post/decolonial theories about epistemic justice and First Nations Australian theories about Indigenous knowledges global decolonisation praxis frameworks (Williams et al., 2018) to foreground paradigms, voice, truth and place in doctoral education.
In this Keynote Panel discussion, these researchers explore how we might create spaces within doctoral education and thesis creation for the histories, geographies, languages and cultural knowledges of First Nations and transcultural communities. We outline how we have used the twin methodologies of life histories and time mapping to privilege the voices, truths and spatial and metaphorical locations of First Nations, African and transcultural doctoral candidates and their supervisors. We demonstrate how First Nations knowledge approaches have the potential to transform doctoral education policy and practice.