Learning with Country: Noongar-Led Inquiry and Culturally Regenerative University Practice

Abstract Amid growing calls for Australian universities to engage meaningfully with Indigenous knowledges, this article examines how Indigenous-led, place-based inquiry can reorient academic practice toward culturally regenerative possibilities. Drawing on a Cooperative Inquiry conducted with Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar, we follow six Noongar-led experiences involving Country, language, ceremony, deep time, embodiment and more-than-human relations. Through cycles of experiential, presentational and reflective practice, these engagements restructured attention, temporality and conduct, foregrounding relational ethics of permission, reciprocity and refusal. Multimodal forms including movement, image and creative response were treated as epistemic practices, enabling us to register affective and relational reorientations that are not readily accessible through propositional forms alone. Our analysis traces how these reorientations unsettled extractive research habits and repositioned knowledge-making as embodied, participatory and accountable to Country. We argue that culturally regenerative university practice does not emerge through policy statements, curricular add-ons or inclusion alone, but through lived, relational engagements that reconfigure how knowledge is generated, held and shared. The study contributes empirical insight into how such reconfigurations unfold in practice and highlights the institutional conditions required to sustain accountable relationships with place.