Joel Keen

Joel Keen is a Gomeroi scholar and educator. With a particular focus on political sociology and the sociology of knowledge, his Honours thesis established current conceptualisations of racial equality as paradoxical; self-contradictory and unachievable in the current colonised societal super-structure. He has published on the necessity of amplifying Indigenous voices and the unrivalled validity of place-based knowledge. As a member of the National Centre for Indigenous Genomics [NCIG] team, he continues the active pursuit of protecting and promoting the integrity of Indigenous Knowledges; and the value of understanding things as they actually are, not as they are imagined to be.

Thesis Title: “It Will Take a Mental Revolution to Spark Societal Evolution”

An interrogation of the Westernised relationship with knowledge. Considering the normative and axiomatic notion of Western epistemic supremacy as the underpinning value and catalyst for a dissonant and dysfunctional contemporary reality. Utilising a critical Aboriginal-Australian standpoint to consolidate a range of social theory, the concept of the ‘sociological imagination’ will be expanded and enhanced to promote the unique strengths of a genuinely indigenous perspective. This refined lens enables the holistic examination of a discursive formation that includes the implausibility of accepted westernised historical narratives; the settler-colonial ontology; the hermeneutics of knowledge distribution; and societal decision-making, as a manifestation of the hegemonic relationship with knowledge. Alongside the comprehension of constructed Western epistemic supremacy as destructive in ubiquity throughout Australian society; and dispelling the imagined applicability of biological evolution theory within Westernised cultural, societal and epistemic contexts, this project emphasises the validity of pre-colonised worldviews and provides a blueprint for decolonised thinking.