Francisca Borquez
Francisca graduated from ANU Master of Social Research in 2010. Francisca has been involved in various research related work for the last 11 years in both academia and industry, with a focus on Social Network Analysis (SNA), computational social science as well as quantitative and qualitative methods. As part of the VOSON Lab, she has assisted in diverse research projects and has collaborated with open-source software developed at the lab. Her research interests are online social and organisational networks, online behaviour, computational methods and experimental social research.
Session
Available field-based research (Smith 2011; Hunt et al 2008) has characterised Indigenous governance as inter-connected relationships, rules and ways of behaving between people, places and things (past, present and future). The nodes in this networked system are people and groups of people (families, clans, leaders, nations, communities and organisations), places (country, sacred sites, camping places, personal sites), events (ceremony, ritual, births and death), and objects (structures, natural resources, species). The connecting ties include kinship (descent and marriage), membership of demographic categories (age, gender and generation), and other affiliations (historical, ceremonial, geographic and economic). The great advantage of such networked systems is that they can scale in a flexible manner: small local groups can link horizontally to groups in other geographic areas and scale-up vertically to form larger polities and alliances of networks. This recursive pattern of expanding connections and pathways is a familiar one depicted in Indigenous kinship, ceremony, songs, dreaming, paintings and so on.
Although there is extensive anthropological research through kinship studies, genealogical methods and cultural mapping, these approaches do not fully capture the reproduction and agency of Indigenous governance networks. Our project draws on anthropology and network methods to develop a novel approach for researching indigenous governance. Indigenous governance networks can be conceived of as multimodal (different types of actors) and multiplex (different types of ties) networks. A network conceptualisation allows us to use Social Network Analysis (SNA), for example: can we identify “structural holes” (gaps in the social structure of communication) (Burt, 1995) in Indigenous governance networks, and if so, what are their properties and what benefits do they confer? We also explore the use of Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 2005), which provides theory and methods to study networks of human and non-human actants and as such, is well-suited for capturing the complexity of Indigenous Australian networks.
Recording link: https://acspri-org-au.zoom.us/rec/share/jG2oPYAxGbCXdVm76fy6IhAi4brxwMoxOeP2QCK3nrPdeQ5j9wU0fMRuutuGsktE.GGS6vN76zGxbrfPv?startTime=1669184529000