Care-full digital practices in northern Australia

Digital technologies are increasingly being entangled with everyday practices of Indigenous connection and responsibility to Country in Australia. However, the effects of this digital entanglement on places, people, and more-than-human relations are poorly understood. Feminist scholarly debates have identified glitch politics as a way of querying the implications of intertwining technological infrastructures with governance, while highlighting the possibilities of radical change and alternative innovations grounded in place-based realities. In this presentation, I reflect on the digital women ranger program, to investigate how care praxis was used as an approach to explore and mediate the glitchy disruptions and transformations that emerge when using digital technologies for land management on Indigenous Country. Through mediating technological design and deployment with care, I consider the materialities, communities, and subjectivities that are emerging through the careful collaborations of Indigenous women rangers and researchers in northern Australia. These care-full digital practices embrace Indigenous-led and collaborative methods rooted in mutual relations, reciprocity, and shared commitments that respect responsibilities to kin and place and appropriate Elder authority. This care approach shows the leadership of women to guide land management, provide gender and culturally appropriate technologies, and account for diversity in institutional and individual capabilities. This work informs feminist digital geographies by expanding the notion of ‘glitch politics through care praxis’ to create sites of expansive digital possibilities where Indigenous women enable digital technologies to honour customary rights and stewardship