This paper is a philosophical examination of two narratives devised to invite social change (‘storyworks’; Archibald 2008). The first recounts key episodes of the life of Helen Vai’i Gorogo, a Doura woman from Papua New Guinea who experienced forced marriage and domestic violence before achieving community leadership. The second retraces Bhanu Bhatia and her sister-in-law’s shared exile from India to Australia. According to an interpretation derived from liberal feminism, both narratives depict how gender, kinship, and neoliberalism can conspire to reinforce patriarchal structures that exclude girls and women from the networks of social power. However, drawing on works published by Archibald (2008), Simpson (2017), Moreton-Robinson (2000, 2015), Shiva and Mies (2014), and Sreekumar (2022), we deploy autoethnographic and Indigenous epistemologies that challenge the reductionism of the liberal-feminist interpretation. The paper critiques liberal (non-Indigenous) feminism for (i) its inability to account for the moral and emotional creativity of the protagonists and (ii) its own historical complicity with colonialism. In centring philosophical examination on lived experiences, the paper highlights storywork as a transformative philosophical methodology for reimagining justice and belonging in the struggle experienced by Indigenous and non-Western women.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST GCI-273 HYBRID
One of Benedetto Croce's main teachings is 'all history is contemporary history': by this he meant that, however distant in time an event is, it is contemporary because we remember it and think of it to solve an intellectual problem that concerns us now. For example, an entity X, the English civil war, is contemporary to us and exists now when we think of it because of our present need to oppose absolutism in the name of freedom of thought.
If no one thought of the English civil war in the 17th century, it would not exist at all. The present is constantly changing and every new (emerging) thought about the English civil war will change - little or a lot - the content of it. Following this theory, there are no timeless entities. Indeed, one must analyse the characteristics of an entity that can be defined as 'timeless', even in Mac Taggart's specific description of the B-series.
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST GCI-273 HYBRID
