Lectures and workshop by Dr. Debbie Bargallie

27 October 2025, 18 h
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Schillerplatz 3, Room M13a

Lecture by Dr Debbie Bargallie
Unmasking Australia’s Racial Contract: Indigenous Exploitation and the Racial Regime of Recognition and Reconciliation

Beneath Australia’s national performance of reconciliation lies a racial contract built on dispossession, denial, and exploitation. This uncompromising lecture reveals how the racial contract is maintained through recognition, reconciliation, and the managed inclusion of Indigenous peoples. Indigenous Australian sociologist and critical race scholar Dr Debbie Bargallie exposes the racial regime underlying settler performances of justice, and highlights Indigenous refusal as a reassertion of unceded sovereignty and a challenge to (in)justice. This lecture builds on Bargallie’s award-winning monograph, Unmasking the Racial Contract: Indigenous voices on racism in the Australian Public Service, which traces the everyday operations of structural racism in Australian public institutions, and her ongoing collaboration with Alana Lentin, whose recent book, The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy, examines how white supremacist rule adapts in today's world.

Welcome address by BA EMBA Mag. Angelina Kratschanova, Head of the International Office, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Presentation and moderation by Prof. Dr. Marina Gržinić, Asma Aiad, MA, Mag. Artis, and Anahita Neghabat, MA

28 October 2025, 11–13 h
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Schillerplatz 3, Room M13a

Workshop by Dr Debbie Bargallie
Critical Racial and Decolonial Literacies: Breaking the Silence

Presentation and moderation by Prof. Dr Marina Gržinić, Mag. Asma Aiad, MA. Artist, and Anahita Neghabat, MA

Drawing from the edited collection Critical Racial and Decolonial Literacies: Breaking the Silence, this workshop will collectively examine two key chapters that engage decolonial feminist praxis and critical race theory within the challenging contexts of Australian settler colonialism and the imperial university. Indigenous Australian academic and artist Fiona Foley critiques the racelessness of Australian education and institutions, using her artistic practice—such as the exhibition Courting Blakness—as a provocative political statement against colonial narratives and institutional racism. Diasporic-settler academic Joseph Pugliese employs autoethnography to trace his own formation as a diasporic-settler subject, connecting his family’s migration from Southern Italy (viewed through a racialized, anti-Blackness lens) to their complicity in the Australian settler-colonial debtscape.

29 October 2025, 11–13 h
Interdisciplinary Research Center Islam and Muslims in Europe (IFIME), Sigmund Freud Private University Vienna
Freudplatz 3, 1020 Vienna

Lecture by Dr Debbie Bargallie, in collaboration with The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Punjabi Dreaming: Mapping our Roots and Routes

When archives fail, memory, kinship, and return become a method. Punjabi Dreaming traces a transnational journey to recover ancestral relations erased by colonial systems — and to reclaim them on Indigenous terms. Over 130 years after her great-grandfather — a Punjabi Muslim man — and his brother departed a village on the Indian subcontinent, now located in Pakistan, Dr Debbie Bargallie uncovered the place from which they left, a fact that had otherwise remained unknown. In Australia, their origins were obscured for generations by colonial misrecording, racialised misnaming, and the systemic silencing of non-European histories. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s theorisation of cultural identity as a process of being and becoming, the lecture explores how identity is formed through rupture, relation, and the labour of return. Blending critical Indigenous studies, critical race scholarship, cultural studies, and the oral, poetic, and written traditions of the Mirasi knowledge holders — hereditary genealogists and custodians of ancestral memory — Punjabi Dreaming unsettles the colonial archive and reclaims story and return as both method and relation.

Welcome words by Mag. a. Amena Shakir, head of the IFIME research center.

Presentation and moderation by Prof. Dr. Marina Gržinić and Mag. Asma Aiad, MA, Artist

Dr. Debbie Bargallie is an Associate Professor (Principal Research Fellow) at Griffith University, an Honorary Professor at Macquarie University, and an Adjunct Professor at Universitas Pesant ren Tinggi Darul Ulum Jombang, Indonesia, reflecting her commitment to global Indigenous solidarity and decolonial scholarship.  She holds a Doctor of Philosophy from the Queensland University of Technology, and her research focuses on the theorisation of race. Dr. Bargallie serves as President of the Queensland Muslim Historical Society and Director of the Queensland Muslim Cultural and Heritage Center (QMCHC) – an extension of the new Brisbane Islamic Center. She is an Associate Investigator with the Indigenous Research Stream of the Centre for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (CEVAW), where she leads a program of work focused on advancing racial literacy in workplaces. Dr Bargallie's monograph Unmasking the Racial Contract: Indigenous voices on racism in the Australian Public Service (2020) is published by AIATSIS Aboriginal Studies Press. Her co-edited book, Critical Racial and Decolonial Literacies: Breaking the Silence (2024), was published by Bristol University Press.

Debbie Bargallie is a descendant of the Kamilaroi and Wonnarua peoples of New South Wales, Australia, and a descendant of the Muslim Jat Langrial clan from the Indian subcontinent—histories that shape her research and unwavering commitment to justice.