Melbourne School of Population and Global Health - Research Publications

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Real-time Repatriation: Data Governance for Social Anthropology in the 21st Century

Rose, JWW (Paris Nanterre University, 2022)

Social Anthropologists are currently grappling with complex simultaneous changes in research ethics and data governance regimes across diverse jurisdictions. Internationally, repatriation of unethically acquired ethnographic collections is becoming common-place, resulting in the return of both tangible and intangible cultural assets to their rightful owners. In Europe, the open data movement and the recent implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation appears to challenge social anthropologists’ commitment to protect the confidentiality of oftenvulnerable research participants. Meanwhile, in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere, the popular refrain ‘Indigenous data sovereignty’ is compelling many social anthropologists to face discomforting aspects of their field’s involvement in colonial administrative regimes. In this paper I present a model for how social anthropology might reconcile three interrelated factors contributing to this complex situation: 1) Repatriation of data collected from research participants without clear or sufficiently comprehensive consent; 2) Risks and opportunities presented by legislated instances of the open data movement and; 3) Relevant and operable features of the Indigenous data sovereignty movement. Drawing on my 20-year career as a forensic and expert social anthropologist working with Indigenous community organisations on land rights and cultural heritage preservation cases in the Australian Federal Court and under Northern Territory statutory regimes, I illustrate how this model of social anthropological data governance can be put into effect. ‘Real-time repatriation’ describes the synthesis of leading ethical, legal and technological standards in proactively upholding and safeguarding the interests and decision-making autonomy of participants in social anthropological research.
Forensic and Expert Social Anthropology as Cultural Expertise: Developing Professional Standards

Rose, JWW (Paris-Sorbonne University, 2022)

Social anthropology has served as a specific form of cultural expertise in legal-administrative processes since the late 19th century. Since the 1970s, social anthropology has served increasingly as a source of forensic and expert evidence in legal processes in particular, including asylum claims, traditional land ownership and cultural heritage restitution claims, human rights abuse inquiries, and international development initiatives, among others. Notwithstanding this increasing specialisation, internationally recognised professional standards for the provision of forensic and expert social anthropological evidence have remained historically absent. In response, in late 2021, the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) commenced development of a professional standards and certification framework for social anthropologists engaged in the provision of forensic and expert evidence to courts and other legally empowered bodies. The RAI initiative represents the first internationally coordinated effort by a professional social anthropological representative organisation to develop such standards. The RAI framework provides a mechanism by which social anthropologists may engage in the provision of forensic and expert services in a relevant, systematic and professionally recognised manner across a range of legal-administrative jurisdictions. The RAI framework establishes terms and definitions for use by both social anthropologists and legal professionals in assessing the prospective relevance of social anthropological services to legal-administrative processes, and in deciding the form that such services should take. This paper will provide a summary of the RAI forensic and expert social anthropology framework and its particular relevance to legal-administrative processes as a specific form of cultural expertise more broadly.
Data Governance and Social Anthropology

Rose, J (European Association of Social Anthropologists, 2021-12-09)
The Structure of Indigenous Data

Rose, J (Systems and Society Research Network, University of Melbourne, 2019-11-28)

All data may be considered as exhibiting structure at two levels: a ‘micro’ level of constituent elements and relations, and a ‘macro’ level of patterns in the dataset as a whole. Macro-level structure emerges from micro-level structure, via a combination of factors both internal and external to the data itself. When we are dealing with data about people, dataset structure is determined at a macro-level by the interaction of two factors: The lived reality of the people from whom the data is collected, and the research objectives of the people who collect the data. The interaction between these two factors may range between harmony and tension, which in turn generates either self-consistency or contradictions in dataset structure. In colonial administrative settings, because of the competing and asymmetrically resourced interests of Indigenous and colonizing communities, data collection has historically been performed by government, while the people whose lands have been colonized are the ones from whom data is collected. Conflicting interests tend to shift the structure of resulting datasets towards a state of inherent contradiction, generating limited insights. The twin emerging movements of Indigenous data governance, and Indigenous data sovereignty provide an opportunity to engage in large-scale data restructuring initiatives. A new interest on the part of government departments and agencies in facilitating Indigenous governance over data concerning Indigenous peoples, means that there is now an opportunity to reconsider not only the historic skewing of data collection and modelling, but also the ongoing practice of exclusive data structure management by government.
The Spatiotemporal Signature of Indigenous Kinship Networks

Rose, J (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 2020-09-15)

The relationship between social anthropology and geography has been mediated by anthropology's specialised subfield of kinship analysis since the discipline's foundation in the 1870s. As this specialisation evolved with the incorporation of more formal modelling and analysis techniques from the 1960s, and especially with the incorporation of computing from the 1990s, both kinship analysis and geographic information systems have become more precise, with corresponding datasets growing to very large sizes. During the same period in Australia, social anthropology has been adopted by Commonwealth, state, and territory governments as a forensic discipline in the negotiation and litigation of Indigenous land rights via the Federal Court. This turn of events has spurred the development of the new methodology of spatio-temporal kinship network analysis (stKNA), a computer-based technique for modelling Indigenous kinship-based population networks as three-dimensional structures distributed over real geographic space and historical time. Using this methodology, forensic social anthropologists are able to demonstrate the kinship-based cohesion of Indigenous communities over large time-scales, together with their systemic association with the particular geographic regions to which they assert traditional ownership. This paper outlines the methodology of stKNA and its application in Australia.
Indigenous Australian Population Geometries: Tailoring Geospatial Data Structures for Enhanced Community Service Delivery

Clinch, D ; Rose, J (Australasian eResearch Organisation, 2020)

Data structures used by Australian federal government agencies for spatialising Indigenous geographic population distributions omit critical features necessary for effective service delivery. Currently, the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) incorporates a so-called ‘Indigenous Structure’ derived from generic administrative geometries used for statistical purposes in wider population censuses. In this paper we present recent work on the development of an enhanced geometry, derived from linked geographic data and data structures, including Aboriginal community-controlled service providers, land councils, native title claims, language distribution maps, and other pertinent data assets. The objective of developing an enhanced Indigenous population geometry is to provide a maximally useful standard for the coordination and delivery of essential services into Indigenous communities. This work forms part of the core activity of the Indigenous Data Network (IDN) at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. Staffed by Indigenous and non-Indigenous experts in data science, geoscience, software engineering, population health, epidemiology and social and medical anthropology, the IDN is working to develop and implement best-practice national standards for Indigenous governance of Indigenous data.

Melbourne School of Population and Global Health - Research Publications

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