Challenging Colonial Copaganda

Brisbane Free University Webinar w. Professor Chelsea Watego, Ronnie Gorrie, Dr. Amy McQuire & A/Professor Amanda Porter

Dear friends,

I hope that the fires of your convictions are keeping you toasty warm amid this cold snap. Hopefully the cold weather is giving you plenty of opportunities to snuggle up at home and catch up on our current podcast series, the Justice for Palestine Magan-djin podcast. For the past five months, we’ve been slowly releasing our audio archive from the frontlines of the struggle here in so-called brisbane, and we have a few more episodes yet to be released.

For now, we’re very excited to invite you all to a webinar that we’re hosting alongside the Brisbane Free University next Thursday 25th July from 12.30pm - 2pm. The webinar is tackling the question of how we can challenge colonial copaganda - that is, the propoganda that is produced and circulated in the colony in order to justify and legitimise systems of policing, incarceration, surveillance, and restraint. This propoganda takes many forms: from police PR departments, to colonial media representations, pop culture, political discourse, and historical writing. And it serves a crucial function in normalising and justifying systems of policing and incarceration, even (and perhaps especially) when the violence of those systems is being exposed.

As we enter another election cycle in so-called queensland dominated by manufactured moral panics about “youth crime” and monthly announcements by the major political parties promising “tough on crime” approaches in the lead up to the October election, it is crucial that we find ways to intervene in and challenge colonial copaganda wherever we find it.

To that end, we’ve brought together a panel of four incredible scholars, writers, and community workers who have dedicated their intellectual and political work to understanding, critiquing, and upending the sustaining fictions of settler colonialism: Mununjahli and South Sea Islander academic and writer Professor Chelsea Watego, Gurnai/Kurnai writer and theorist Ronnie Gorrie, Yuin academic and criminologist A/Professor Amanda Porter and Darumbal and South Sea Islander academic and journalist Dr. Amy McQuire. Dr. Amy McQuire’s debut non-fiction collection Black Witness was released earlier this month, while Ronnie Gorrie’s second non-fiction book, When Cops Are Criminals, is out at the end of July.

You can register for this webinar by heading to this link: https://uqz.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUscO-hpzkrHdYcPQfSZqpesb5TEy2jAK5e

You’ll be sent details about how to login once you’ve registered. We will also use this list to send out recordings of the webinar and any additional materials that we produce after the event. Make sure you also sign up to our substack so that you hear about any upcoming discussions!

If you have any questions, or would like to send through questions in advance, please get in touch with us directly, and we’ll look forward to seeing you all online on Thursday 25th July at 12.30pm!

Yours in solidarity,

Anna (Radio Reversal Collective)