Let's talk about texts: The teaching of race politics across ethnic divides

This article engages with visual media texts to complicate the ways audiences interpret race politics in the light of competing discourses on cultural difference. I adopt a case study approach to examining how value can be ascribed to ethnic cultural knowledge in ways that productively contribute to shaping public engagement with race politics in a contemporary context. How might visual texts work to mediate the invisible dimensions of the socio-political in the teaching of the histories of race? I will offer reflections on this question through two paintings that highlight Aboriginal notions of self in relation to the migrant other in an Australian museum. My aim is to explore some of the pedagogical implications around cross-cultural learning by disrupting orthodox readings of place and race informed by dominant discourses.