Dr Lester-Irabinna Rigney

Dr Rigney is Director of the Yunggorendi First Nations Centre for Higher Education and Research, Flinders University. He is an Associate Professor of Education and is one of the most influential Indigenous educationalists in Australia today. His leadership in education is evident through his election by his academic peers since 2002, to the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Research Advisory Committee. His professional standing in education saw him inducted into the Australian College of Educators (ACE) in 1998. He is recognised as a national and international authority in the area of Indigenist Research Methodologies. Interest in his work by National and International universities has seen him uptake several prestigious Visiting Research Fellowships including Cambridge University, UK; Fort Hare University, South Africa; and University of British Columbia, Canada. Rigney is in constant demand as a commentator on national and international Indigenous matters and has published widely on Education, Languages and Knowledge transmission. His recent 2006 co-edited book titled Sharing Spaces: Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Responses to Story, Country and Rights, is the most up to date Australian text on Indigenous and non-Indigenous
race relations and how this converges in the vulnerable, vital and contested
space called education.

Research Keywords: Indigenist research Methodologies and Epistemologies;
Indigenous education and languages; numeracy and literacy; Indigenous affairs;
ethics and intellectual and cultural property in Indigenous research; critical,
postcolonial and feminist theory; globalised Aboriginal communites