School of Social Science Seminar Series: 'My people right here...' Indigenous young people, alienation and paint sniffing in inner city Brisbane

Event Details

Date:

Friday, 14 August 2009

Time:

1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Room:

816

UQ Location:

McElwain Building (St Lucia)

URL:

Event category(s):

Full Description:: School of Social Science Seminar Series: 'My people right here...' Indigenous young people, alienation and paint sniffing in inner city Brisbane

Speaker: Tom Ogwang (PhD Candidate)

This seminar will present the findings of ethnographic research undertaken with a group of young Indigenous people who were engaged in chroming (paint sniffing) and ‘sleeping rough’ in inner Brisbane in 2004.

The research explored ways young Aboriginal volatile substance mis-users describe their marginalisation from wider society and its elite structures of opportunity such as education; and the findings demonstrate the centrality of material disadvantage and racism to their lives.

The young peoples’ wild behaviours and interactions with the broader society are described to explain the ways their group rejection of mainstream social norms expresses an alienated and marginalised social status.

The principal state response to paint sniffing - employing a strong police reaction still in effect today - is described to explain its effect of increasing the young peoples’ alienation and marginalisation from society whilst failing to address the young peoples’ substance use and other concerns.

It is concluded that, given Indigenous paint sniffing is at least in part an encoded and obnoxious rebuttal of broader societal norms, the dominant (normalising) modes of treatment addressing paint sniffing risk further alienating an already oppositional group.