AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Indigenous communities in Australia have ancestral philosophies for caring about their local environments. As an aftermath of European imperialism, such philosophies have been racialized and silenced in attempted genocides and epistemicides by governing institutions in settler-colonial states. When environmental policies in most industrialized states have failed to prevent cascading environmental crises, how should we understand the relationship between the environmental philosophies of Indigenous peoples and the policymaking of settler-colonial states? Can such an understanding inform responses to environmental crises and the bestowment of collective reparations on Indigenous communities? We propose the Truth-Telling and Environmental Policy (TTEP) model to address these questions. Focused on case studies from Australian history, the TTEP model examines both vicious and virtuous cycles of cultural transmission in the relations between the philosophies of First Australians and environmental policy. The vicious feedback loop maintains the epistemic malpractices and falsehoods caused by racialization and settler privilege. According to TTEP, virtuous and reparative feedback loops are established by using truth-telling and rational understanding to remediate injustices and pass decolonial knowledge intergenerationally. Truth-telling operates as a circuit breaker of racialized ignorance and collective silencing.

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.

Relationality is a significant theme across Western and non-Western frameworks, and its ‘relational turn’ has been a genuine achievement in dislodging atomistic, substance-based thinking. Yet even in radical formulations (e.g., Buber’s I-Thou and Whitehead’s process philosophy), relational ontology commonly presupposes participants that precede relation. This ‘participant presupposition’ reveals a deeper problem: relationality is not only a metaphysics but also a validity regime - it privileges what can be represented as relations between terms, and therefore misrecognises Aboriginal epistemological validity when its warrant is enacted rather than abstracted.
This paper reframes the issue by arguing that Aboriginal epistemological validity is constructed performatively through lawful enactment on/with Country, as exemplified in Songlines and ceremonial practice. Rather than opposing ‘verb’ to ‘noun’ as a familiar Western binary, I argue that Aboriginal knowledge-transfer trains an integrated capacity to hold action, place, law, story, and entity together in one enacted intelligence - where Country, protocol, and obligation are not ‘context’ but warrant. The paper closes by outlining what philosophy (and HDR evaluation practices) must become if Aboriginal knowledges are to be received without validity-destroying translation, including in contemporary debates about representing Indigenous knowledge in AI.

“Who is truly human—the one who reasons, or the one who recognizes kinship in all life?” This paper rethinks animal ethics by moving beyond dominant Western frameworks such as Sentientism and Biocentrism, which evaluate moral worth through anthropocentric criteria like sentience or biological life. Such models, while influential, neglect relational forms of moral engagement central to non-Western thought. Drawing on Indian Adivasi philosophies—particularly the Gond and Santhal traditions—this study foregrounds a worldview in which humans, animals, and forests exist as interdependent members of a shared moral community. Animals, here are treated as ancestral kin, their protection ensured through ritual, taboos, and negotiated reciprocity. This relational orientation resonates with Mahabharata’s account of Yudhishthira, whose loyalty to a dog surpasses the promise of celestial reward, extending moral concern beyond human boundaries. By integrating epic scripture with Adivasi philosophy, the paper proposes a relational animal ethics that centres co-existence, humility, and attentiveness. It positions interspecies relationships—not rational mastery—as the foundation of ethical life. Such an approach offers a transformative alternative to the alienation of the Anthropocene, framing morality as an ongoing negotiation of kinship with the more-than-human world, where ethical life emerges through care, respect, and shared becoming.