Name: What Can Philosophers Do to Support Victims of Gendered Violence & Racialization? Inquiries into Doura Truth-Telling Indigenous Feminism & Moral Revolution in Australasian Philosophy
Start: 2026-07-06T16:30:00+1200
End: 2026-07-06T17:25:00+1200

What Can Philosophers Do to Support Victims of Gendered Violence & Racialization? Inquiries into Doura Truth-Telling Indigenous Feminism & Moral Revolution in Australasian Philosophy

Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

MSB1.21

The panel will deploy a reversed ‘anthropological gaze’ to examine and expand the practices of academic philosophy in Australasia. For the first time in its history, the AAP has invited Indigenous women from the Doura tribe (Hiri Koiari district, East of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea [PNG]) to discuss the contributions that philosophers could make to support victims of gendered violence and racialization. The leading guest speaker from the Doura team is Elder Helen Vai’i Gorogo, who presides the Doura Kabema’una Cooperate Society and has decades of experience in redressing colonial and patriarchal injustice. A key task for the cross-cultural panel will be to evaluate proposals for the delivery of moral and epistemic reparations to victim-survivors in PNG. Moreover, each contributing panellist will be invited to consider how culturally entrenched moral change – ‘moral revolution’ in Appiah’s (2010) sense – could be triggered when communities use Indigenous narratives to confront histories of exclusion, colonialism, and injustice (Rigney, 2017). Thus, the panel will seek to weave Indigenous philosophies, truth-and-reconciliation scholarship, and cultural change theory to elaborate the groundwork of an innovative decolonial philosophy. The panel will be a unique opportunity to celebrate Melanesian philosophies and pay respect to the underrepresented First Peoples of PNG.

Speakers