Peta Jeffries

Dr Peta Jeffries

Ethnographic historian

Indigenous Australian Studies

Biography

Peta's teaching and research intersects critical Indigenous studies; environmental studies; visual arts; education; history and eco-social work. With qualifications and research experience in each of these discipline areas, her approaches include arts-based and practice led; community-led; co-design, participatory; and action research. Peta does not identify as Indigenous, however, she does acknowledge her own colonising and colonised family histories. These complex histories guide Peta's ethnographic and arts practice as research, and her teaching, which aims to address systemic and environmental racism by increasing cultural safety, humility and responsiveness. Peta has experience in remote and arid/semi-arid ecological field surveying; Indigenous-led research - for example, "Traditional Ecological Knowledge" (TEK) and capacity or nation rebuilding; oral and social history; ethnography; Indigenous land and water rights; practice led and arts-based approaches; human rights; ethics, and critical pedagogies.

Research
  • Arts-based and practice led research
  • Environmental (eco) social work
  • Ethnographic history
  • Co-production of social and ecological knowledges
  • Critical Indigenous studies
Publications
Full publications list on CRO

Recent publications

  • Jeffries, P. (2023). Indigenist Standpoint Pedagogy: Re-envisioning Australian history with once silenced voices and women’s knowledge. In Gender, Feminist and Queer Studies: Power, Privilege and Inequality in a Time of Neoliberal Conservatism Routledge.
  • Jeffries, P. (Accepted/In press). The art of colonisation and decolonisation: the possibilities of Indigenist Standpoint Pedagogy and intersectionality to dismantle rural settler futurities through art practice as research. Sociologia Ruralis.
  • Cochrane, T., Jeffries, P., & McManus, S. (2022). Action for more ethical data science in regional policy when working in Indigenous Country or with Indigenous data. 12. Abstract from Australia and New Zealand Regional Science Association International 45th Annual Conference 2022, Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Australia.
  • Gersbach, K., Jeffries, P., Whitaker, L., Short, M., Duncombe, R., & Rush, E. (2022). Activities for democracy and kindness in tertiary learning: An interactive webinar. Paper presented at Social Sciences Week 2022.
  • Jeffries, P. (2021). Decolonising Ecologies: Yindyamarra Winhanganha, Indigenous Data Sovereignty, and Indigenist Standpoint Pedagogy. Paper presented at Social Sciences Week 2021.