Vanessa Castejon
Vanessa Castejon is an Associate Professor at University Paris 13. Her work explores Aboriginal political claims, self-determination and sovereignty, and the image of Aboriginal people in France/Europe. Her recent publications include an article on her ego-histoire, ‘Identity and Identification: Aboriginality from the Spanish Civil War to the French Ghettos’ in Passionate Histories: Myth, memory and Indigenous Australia, (Aboriginal History/ANU E Press, 2010), edited by Frances Peters-Little, Ann Curthoys and John Docker. Her book, Les Aborigènes et l'apartheid politique australien, was published by Harmattan in 2005.
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In turn, in turn: Ego-histoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia
In this innovative collection, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars from Australia and Europe reflect on how their life histories have impacted on their research in Indigenous Australian Studies. Drawing on Pierre Nora’s concept of ego-histoire as an analytical tool to ask historians to apply their methods to themselves, contributors lay open their paths, personal commitments and passion involved in their research. Why are we researching in Indigenous Studies, what has driven our motivations? How have our biographical experiences influenced our research? And how has our research influenced us in our political and individual understanding as scholars and human beings? This collection tries to answer many of these complex questions, seeing them not as merely personal issues but highly relevant to the practice of Indigenous Studies.
I think this rich collection will become a landmark text and a favourite within Australian scholarship. I am keen to see it published so that I can recommend it to others
— Professor Emerita Margaret Allen, Gender Studies and Social Analysis, University of Adelaide
The idea was to explain the link between the history you have made and the history that has made you
— Pierre Nora