Dr Samantha Disbray

My role in the School of Languages and Cultures is Lecturer in Endangered Languages, focussed on the development of an Indigenous Languages Revitalisation program. Since 2021 I have worked closely with Indigenous Industry Fellows Des Crump and Robert McLellan and an Indigenous Steering Committee to consult and design the program. I am also an active researcher, with several projects in Central Australia.

My approach to teaching and research is collaborative, community-guided and applied. This informed by my on-going self-reflexivity as a non-Indigenous woman and my experience living and working on unceded Kaurna, Arrernte, Warumungu, Warlpiri, Pintupi-Luritja country and, since moving to the University of Queensland in 2019, Jagera and Turrbal country.

My academic research life began in 2004, after a decade as an educator and community linguist. I worked with Warumungu linguist B Morrison Nakkamarra on the ARC funded Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition Project and after the completion of my PhD research at the University of Melbourne in 2008, I returned to industry as regional linguist with the Northern Territory Department of Education.

Since 2014 I have held research positions at Charles Darwin University on the Red Dirt Education project, the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Languages at the Australian National University. In this project I worked with Warumungu linguists and families to return and repurpose a set of archived recordings for language and cultural revitalisation through arts-based practice, an outcome of which was the 2019 co-curated exhibition 'Ankkinyi Mangurr, Ankkinyi Apparr' at the 2019 Tarnanthi Fesitval of Contemporary Art.

I have a published Warumungu learner's dictionary, language teacher resource books, 15 articles, 10 book chapters and a co-edited volume, along with numerous commissioned reports and reviews in education and languages policy. I currently hold an ARC Discovery grant for the project 'The Illustrated Literature of Papunya and Strelley, 1979-1998) in collaboration with University of Western Australia.