Projects

Education and Truth-Telling

My current major project is titled ‘Can schools reckon with historical injustice? An international, comparative study of education and truth commissions’ – and it examines how school communities in Australia and the Nordic states are negotiating expectations for truth-telling about their colonial pasts. The project is linked with an international comparative partners across the Arctic region exploring how schools and education stakeholders are navigating truth-telling expectations and processes.

Dr Mati Keynes providing expert testimony on First Peoples Education at the Yoorrook Justice Commission

The School Exclusion Project

The School Exclusion Project Research Report documents some of the ways in which that government schools across the Australian continent, from the nineteenth-century to the present, have excluded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This report has been written through an analyses of archival records, historiography, legislation, and policies. Together, the state and territory timelines in this report provide the first comprehensive historical overview of the exclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from schools.

Dr Mati Keynes describes The School Exclusion research project

Pedagogies of Truth: Deep Listening

In 2024, I am the Humanities Research Centre Fellow in Australian Studies at the Australian National University.

My research project Deep listening: Regenerative history pedagogies for a future world will explore the pedagogical possibilities of Everywhen—the fusion of time and place across scale and space—for teaching and learning in History.

Drawing on Indigenous studies, history, and educational philosophy and theory, I will explore how philosophies, practices, and pedagogies of ‘deep listening’ offer vital insights into how to teach and learn history in times of unprecedented change and in the era of truth-telling.