Challenging colonialism: Australians who helped us embrace human equality. This project aims to investigate how ten influential Australian thinkers, writers and activists helped the nation to embrace

Description

Challenging colonialism: Australians who helped us embrace human equality. This project aims to investigate how ten influential Australian thinkers, writers and activists helped the nation to embrace human equality in the mid-twentieth century, by tracing how challenges to colonialism and racial inequality circulated. It expects to produce new knowledge about decolonisation in a settler-state and is methodologically innovative in using group biography to follow how ideas spread outwards via networks. Expected outcomes include developed understanding of how activists and groups successfully explained human rights and equality to mainstream Australia. Benefits should include new insight into how ideas of equality eroded cultural acceptance of White Australia and Australians reconceptualised their society as diverse.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4303 - Historical Studies. Lead: Prof Angela Woollacott