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This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Please check back later for the full article.All over the world, indigenous peoples are engaged in domestic and international struggles over their ability to self-determine. Though the specific character and aims of each struggle are different, most resonate with the definition found in the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which states in article 3 that "Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development." The rights extended to "all peoples" under the UN Charter (1945) now explicitly include all indigenous peoples. On the other hand, the right to a State, or what could be called external self-determination, does not seem to follow as article 46, section 1, UNDRIP stipulates that "Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, people, group, or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act contrary to the Charter of the United Nations or construed as authorizing or encouraging any action which would dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States." Even singular documents like the UNDRIP highlight the tension that exists between indigenous peoples' quest for self-determination and national majorities who exercise control over them through the international state system.The topic of indigenous self-determination is approached from many angles. Legal positivists strive to understand the implications of legal documents like UNDRIP, the International Labour Organization Convention 169, treaties, domestic laws, and, increasingly, sui generis, indigenous law. In debates about the nature, extent, and importance of self-determination, normative political theorists continue to study relationships between territory, citizenship, sovereignty, colonialism, human rights, justice, and institutions including the various legal orders previously mentioned. Increasingly, and combining the legal and normative with the strategic, indigenous scholars have taken the lead in debates that evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of various political approaches in promoting and securing what they believe to be their inherent right to self-determination under difficult circumstances. These range from local cultural revitalization to international indigenous social movements, and often involve evaluating trade-offs between direct action and co-operation with states or between treaty negotiations versus legal actions. In summary, indigenous self-determination is a broad field of study with many approaches, most of which endeavour to understand and ultimately help achieve the emancipation of indigenous peoples from centuries of problematic colonial relations.

Background: Data quality is fundamental to the integrity of quantitative research. The role of external researchers in data quality assessment (DQA) remains ill-defined in the context of secondary use for research of large, centrally curated health datasets. In order to investigate equity of palliative care provided to Indigenous Australian patients, researchers accessed a now-historical version of a national palliative care dataset developed primarily for the purpose of continuous quality improvement. Objectives: (i) To apply a generic DQA framework to the dataset and (ii) to report the process and results of this assessment and examine the consequences for conducting the research. Method: The data were systematically examined for completeness, consistency and credibility. Data quality issues relevant to the Indigenous identifier and framing of research questions were of particular interest. Results: The dataset comprised 477,518 records of 144,951 patients (Indigenous N = 1515; missing Indigenous identifier N = 4998) collected from participating specialist palliative care services during a period (1 January 2010–30 June 2015) in which data-checking systems underwent substantial upgrades. Progressive improvement in completeness of data over the study period was evident. The data were error-free with respect to many credibility and consistency checks, with anomalies detected reported to data managers. As the proportion of missing values remained substantial for some clinical care variables, multiple imputation procedures were used in subsequent analyses. Conclusion and implications: In secondary use of large curated datasets, DQA by external researchers may both influence proposed analytical methods and contribute to improvement of data curation processes through feedback to data managers.

"Author Bagele Chilisa updates her groundbreaking textbook to give a new generation of scholars a crucial foundation in indigenous methods, methodologies, and epistemologies. Addressing the increasing emphasis in the classroom and in the field to sensitize researchers and students to diverse perspectives - especially those of women, minority groups, former colonized societies, indigenous people, historically oppressed communities, and people with disabilities, the second edition of Indigenous Research Methodologies situates research in a larger, historical, cultural, and global context to make visible the specific methodologies that are commensurate with the transformative paradigm of social science research"--

"Australische Aborigines waren und sind Meister in der Verknüpfung von Sozial- und Dingwelt. Die Besonderheiten dieser Verknüpfung werden gerade bei der Einführung neuer Objekte (Autos u.ä.) besonders deutlich, zeigen aber auch, dass die flexiblen Grenzziehungen wie die facettenreichen Vermittlungsbestrebungen zwischen den beiden Welten weniger auf einem opaken metaphysischen bzw. 'totemistischen' Weltbild fußen, sondern Ausdruck kulturspezifischer Eigentums-, Identifikations- und Kommunikationsstrategien sind." (Autorenreferat)

This paper examines the implications of welfare reform for the meaning of social citizenship in Australia. Australian welfare reform has been under way since the late 1980s, and reflects the themes of activity and participation that are shaping social policy in many advanced industrial nations. The paper suggests that Australian welfare reform is following a liberal trajectory of change which places a continuing emphasis on market and family as the preferred institutions for social support with a newly salient appeal to moral ideas about the responsibility of citizens to be self‐sustaining. The paper argues that welfare is being transformed from a limited social right to support provided on condition, and from treating the claimant as a sovereign individual to a subject of paternalistic supervision. Together, these changes are redefining the meaning of equality in Australian social citizenship.