Maria Raciti

This paper reframes Indigenous student success beyond sector metrics to focus on quality of life while enrolled, which is operationalised as students’ capacity to be, become, and belong. Drawing on mixed-methods data from two universities, the research reveals that peer classroom cultures function as pedagogical infrastructure, significantly impacting Indigenous students’ wellbeing independent of lecturer intent. Culturally ignorant peers substantially harm quality of life, while knowledgeable peers support it. Where cultural safety is compromised, Indigenous-Indigenous connection becomes essential for sustaining wellbeing. This work challenges staff-centric approaches and positions peer cultural competence as foundational to equitable learning environments. The presentation will solicit feedback on cultivating non-Indigenous peer capability without instrumentalising Indigenous students.

This paper reframes Indigenous students’ university experience through the concept of resonance, examining how students navigate institutional alignment through strategic identity positioning and how Indigenous Centres support this navigation in ways that exceed service utilisation metrics. Resonance refers to Indigenous students’ experience of institutional attunement, recognition, and responsiveness. Resonance is Indigenous students’ capacity to find themselves reflected and affirmed within university structures and relations. Drawing on mixed-methods data from two universities, the study first reveals that many Indigenous students strategically foreground professional identity over cultural identity in everyday university contexts. This pattern reflects adaptive navigation seeking resonance with dominant institutional norms. The second key finding challenges conventional assumptions: Indigenous Centres are highly valued by low-use Indigenous students. Thus, Indigenous Centres provide ambient institutional resonance, signalling recognition and responsiveness even without active service engagement by some Indigenous students. These findings reframe understandings of the Indigenous student experience in Australian universities.

Students enter university with expectations shaped by media narratives, social networks and institutional marketing about what university life will be like. These representations often form simplified ‘gist-based’ understandings that shape expectations of the university experience (Reyna, 2021). During the transition to university, students’ lived experiences may diverge from these expectations, creating expectation-experience mismatch. Insights from a national study of over 400 first-year, first-time university students indicate mismatches are common and that students often attempt to reconcile these discrepancies through autonomous self-management, either through action or inaction. These coping responses influence students’ confidence, perceived control and overall satisfaction with the university experience. This paper proposes an emerging initiative that highlights the importance of supporting constructive, action-based coping responses when expectation-experience mismatch occurs.

Indigenous economic sovereignty in Australia remains constrained by colonial labour systems that position Indigenous peoples in extractive relationships. While industrial relations scholarship has examined European settler interaction with Indigenous peoples, the relationships between non-European migrants and Indigenous Australians remain under-examined. Hence, this paper proposes a transcultural employment framework that supports Indigenous economic sovereignty. 

Historical, sociological and policy literatures reveal precedents for Indigenous–non‑European migrant collaboration, including longstanding patterns of reciprocity and solidarity that were later obscured by protectionist and assimilationist regimes. The increasing participation of non-European migrants from post-colonial contexts in Australia’s workforce and entrepreneurial sectors enables the reactivation of these relational legacies.

Three conceptual pillars comprise the framework:

• Pillar #1 Recognising intersecting yet distinct colonial histories as the foundation for solidarity and relational repair;
• Pillar #2 Relational economic justice promotes reciprocal partnerships that deliver mutual benefit, respect Indigenous sovereignty and resist extractive logics; and
• Pillar #3 Transformative policy co-governance positions Indigenous and non-European migrant communities as co-designers of economic participation policy. 

Reframing employment relations through these pillars encourages a shift from deficit-based approaches toward collaborative, culturally responsive models that enhance the agency of both Indigenous and non-European migrant peoples. This aligns with Australia’s Closing the Gap Priority Reforms and the Indigenous Economic Empowerment agenda. Conceptually, the paper extends industrial relations and business scholarship by highlighting transcultural collaboration as a neglected site of innovation and social impact, inviting stakeholders to reimagine industrial relations in an increasingly plural and post-colonial world of work.

As the world faces considerable political, social, cultural and technological uncertainty, it is crucial that we take seriously the need to investigate how we achieve knowledge justice in graduate research for Indigenous and transcultural doctoral candidates in Australia and globally. In particular, we need fresh ways of shaping graduate research that incorporates Indigenous knowledge approaches. This involves transforming how we imagine the agency of Country, the power of Story and iterative, intergenerational and intercultural knowledge creation in doctoral education and supervision (Manathunga et al., 2022). Drawing upon postcolonial/ decolonial theories (Chakrabarty, 2007; Williams et al., 2017), this research paper presents the findings of a large qualitative research project that explored implementing Indigenous knowledge approaches in Australian doctoral education. With the support of an ARC Discovery grant, this nonIndigenous led, First Nations and transcultural project team conducted life history interviews and time mapping with over 100 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and transcultural (migrant, culturally diverse and international) doctoral candidates and their supervisors across 2022-2023. In this 55-minute presentation, the research team will present the f indings of their research which was designed to explore new ways of creating spaces within doctoral education and thesis creation for the histories, geographies, languages and cultural knowledges of First Nations and transcultural communities. The presentation will summarise the findings from the comparative policy analysis of Aotearoa New Zealand, South African and Australian doctoral education policies for Indigenous and black majority doctoral candidates that was conducted as the first phase of the project. It will then present and justify its innovative combination of life history methodologies (Dhunpath & Samuel, 2009) and time mapping before providing information on the overall demographic profile of its participant doctoral candidates and supervisors. 66 Using postcolonial/decolonial thematic analysis approaches, the presentation will illustrate its analysis of how Country, Story and iterative, intergenerational and intercultural knowledge creation strategies are present in the life stories and time maps of selection of First Nations, transcultural and non-Indigenous participants. The paper will conclude with an introduction to the project website, which contains practical resources on how to use life histories in doctoral supervision and how to create time maps that illustrate how candidates’ cultural knowledges, histories, languages and geographies impact upon their research. The website also showcases the brief life histories and time maps of a selection of participants. It is anticipated that this research project and the practical resources it provides will help to foreground relational and respectful approaches to the supervision of First Nations and transcultural doctoral candidates. These transformations have the potential to achieve greater knowledge justice in doctoral education that is likely to help us navigate the changing graduate research landscapes of the future.

Transformative services have the power to shape lives, often with the goal of enhancing wellbeing. However, their potential to unintentionally generate illbeing remains underexplored. This study investigates life regrets as a negative unintended consequence of transformative service engagement. Life regrets are enduring harms such as psychological, social, or material harms that emerge during or after such experiences. Drawing on 30 semi-structured, convergent interviews, participants reflected on a transformative service that resulted in regret. Thematic analysis revealed a spectrum of illbeing, with contributing factors including organisational practices such as time pressure, siloed decision-making, partial information disclosure, and gaslighting consumers by overpromising outcomes. These findings challenge the prevailing assumption that transformative services are inherently beneficial. Given that consumers typically engage these services during periods of vulnerability and life transition, greater attention is needed to their potential to inflict harm. This research calls for a more balanced understanding of transformative services, being one that accounts for both positive and negative outcomes. Doing so will better equip providers to anticipate and address risks, ensuring that services intended to support do not inadvertently harm. Recognising and mitigating life regret can enhance the ethical and practical integrity of transformative service design.

In these disruptive, post-truth times, critical social marketing operates within an ecology of ignorance that both shapes and reflects our practice. This keynote calls for critical social marketing to confront its complicity in environments where misinformation, disrupted attention, and competing narratives undermine change efforts. Drawing on Indigenous relationality and agnotology, this keynote argues that critical thinking is not the intellectual antidote to ignorance we think it is and calls for a reorientation toward resonance. The keynote presents the provocation: Is the most pressing behaviour change we need to make our own?