Weaving care praxis to mediate glitches in Indigenous digital land management in northern Australia

Digital technologies increasingly entangle with everyday Indigenous land management practices, from place-based biocultural monitoring to political decision-making. As Indigenous knowledge and governance practice intersect with big data and technological devices, questions remain around how Indigenous agency can lead situated digital engagement while navigating the systemic injustices exposed through technological glitches. Drawing on glitch feminism debates, this paper examines the mechanisms that open possibilities for Indigenous-led digital disruptions and reimagines technologies through culturally grounded practices. Here, we present the notion of ‘care praxis’ as a collective approach for mediating the glitchy disruptions and transformations that emerge when using digital technologies for land management on Indigenous Country. Through collaborative work between Indigenous women rangers, coordinators and researchers in northern Australia, we show how care praxis sustains Indigenous rangers' agency and facilitates alternative socio-technical relations that attend to the materialities of digital infrastructures, community relations, and the rangers' subjectivities. Indigenous-led and collaborative methods nurture women's leadership in local land management and strengthen community networks to foster capabilities, as guided by the appropriate Indigenous authorities. Our findings show that glitches are not merely shifts from breakdowns to possibilities, but reveal care as ongoing, collective work that assists in resisting exhaustion and precarity that otherwise falls disproportionately on Indigenous women. By extending glitch politics and epistemologies through the lens of care praxis, this work highlights how Indigenous agency reworks technological breakdowns into the co-creation of sites of expansive digital possibilities rooted in customary obligations and stewardship responsibilities.