Reshaping the Field from the Outside in: Aboriginal People and Student Journalists Working Together

Mason et al. offer an examination of a field struggle in a university journalism project set-up to foster collaboration between journalism students and Aboriginal peoples. The authors employ Bourdieu’s theory of practice as conceptual tool to structure the project as an intervention in the journalistic field, through the sub-field of journalism education, and as analytical and explanatory tool to identify, map and examine power relations, positions and other field structures and dynamics, enacted and made evident through the symbolic challenge the project represents. Through field analysis, the authors conclude that the field struggle operates from the project, via sub-field and field, to society, and that heterodox collaborative practices can contribute to challenging broader, misrecognised power relations of dominance between Australian settler and colonised peoples.