University of Sydney Business School, Australia

The Bundian Way: An Indigenous-led cross-sector partnership in place through time

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ABSTRACT

Our paper explores the complex place-based relations of cross-sector partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners. We draw on a longitudinal in-depth case study of the Bundian Way, an Indigenous-led cross-sector partnership of over 40 organisations. Through practices of listening to history and walking ‘on Country’, the non-Indigenous partners and our team came to appreciate the indivisibility of place and time and bear witness to the intergenerational trauma of colonially imposed divisions. By combining a 45-day place-based ethnography with a 36-month participant observation and repeated interviews with the Advisory Committee members, we explain how non-Indigenous members of the cross-sector partnership came to realize, and reverse, these place-time divisions. We contribute to an ethics of custodianship by first contrasting, and then combining, Indigenous and Western ways of knowing place through time.

BIOGRAPHY

Maegan is a PhD candidate in the discipline of Strategy, Innovation at the University of Sydney Business School.  Maegan’s research considers the interplay of different perspectives in cross-sector partnerships, with a focus on emotion and temporal work.  She has a particular interest in Indigenous-led initiatives that refocus dominant ways of knowing and being towards the potential for innovation through engagement and collaboration.

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