About
The Kin and Country Framework was created by Dr Lauren Tynan and Dr Michelle Bishop – two Aboriginal women, two scholars, a kin-pair.
They came to the Framework from different disciplines – one from geography, one from education.
Their doctoral research kept raising the same questions. How do you do research that honours Indigenous ways of knowing? How do you analyse data without re-colonising it? They were asking the same things from different directions, and eventually they stopped working in parallel and started working together.
The Framework began as a critical thinking tool – a way of helping students analyse problems through more-than-human perspectives.
Eagle and Ant came first. Then, as Lauren and Michelle were thinking about how to help students reimagine the future, Grandmother and Granddaughter joined them.
Emerging from big stories
The ideas inside the Framework didn’t begin with Lauren and Michelle. They emerge from big stories – teachings shared with them by Elders and knowledge holders from across the continent and surrounding islands now known as Australia. Lauren and Michelle don’t talk about those stories – instead, they talk from them.
The Framework has grown from there: into a pedagogical tool for educators, a methodology for researchers, a data analysis process, a way of holding knowledge in relation. It travels. It adapts. It keeps growing.
The knowledge holders
The voices and teachings of many Indigenous knowledge holders live inside this framework. Some of them are featured on this website.
The Team
Kin and Country - Artwork by Andrew Mansall
This work is grounded in the understanding that knowledge is held in relationship, between people, place, time, and the more-than-human world. It is a visual articulation of the Kin and Country Framework, a system that asks us to think beyond the individual and hold multiple perspectives together as one.
The form is a coolamon, a vessel for carrying. Here, it carries ways of seeing and being, anchored by two questions: Who are you? and Where are you? Kin and Country.
Collaborators
Thank you to the wonderful businesses and people who supported the development of the website.
