We Are the Data,but Never the Researchers: Epistemic Violence in the Study of Technology-Facilitated Abuse

Abstract

This article presents an auto-ethnographic analysis of research on technology-facilitated abuse affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, grounded in the author's experience as an Indigenous scholar working across academic, policy, and funding institutions. Indigenous women experience disproportionate levels of online harassment, image-based abuse, surveillance, and algorithmic profiling, yet are excluded from shaping research agendas, funding decisions, and policy responses. Key institutional processes governing technology-facilitated abuse research are opaque by design and inaccessible to conventional empirical methods. Auto-ethnography is therefore used to expose how settler institutions extract Indigenous experiences as data, accumulate funding and prestige, and reproduce colonial research economies that deny Indigenous authority over knowledge. Drawing on Critical Indigenous Studies and Indigenous feminist scholarship, the article argues that technology-facilitated abuse reflects settler-colonial logics embedded in research governance. It calls for Indigenous leadership, data sovereignty, and relational accountability as foundations for ethical research and meaningful reform.

Introduction

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are relentlessly targeted by technology-facilitated abuse (TFA), including digital surveillance, image-based exploitation, and predatory online harassment. These harms are systemic, racialised, and gendered, and they are not incidental. They are the digital extension of settler-colonial violence, mobilising new technologies to reproduce long-standing hierarchies of racial and gendered control (Carlson, 2024; Carlson & Day, 2021a, 2021b, 2022; Day & Carlson, 2024; Powell et al., 2021; Worrell & Haua, 2025). Yet as these harms intensify, Indigenous peoples remain largely excluded from power over the research that claims to address them (Bargallie & Carlson, 2025, 2026). Settler institutions extract Indigenous experiences, convert trauma into data, and accrue funding, prestige, and policy influence, while Indigenous peoples are marginalised from agenda setting, decision making, and authorship. This is not a failure of the system but its design. It is a research economy built on Indigenous dispossession and the commodification of Indigenous lives.

This article argues that research on TFA is a contemporary site of epistemic violence. Drawing on Spivak's (1988) theorisation, epistemic violence describes how dominant systems silence subaltern voices while appropriating their knowledge. In Australia, settler research institutions continue this violence under the language of equity and inclusion, extracting knowledge from Indigenous pain while retaining authority over representation and response. Research into online gendered violence has generated reputational and institutional capital for non-Indigenous scholars, even as Indigenous women and LGBTQIA+ peoples experience disproportionate harm (Day & Carlson, 2024). Indigenous communities are over-studied but under resourced, quoted but not cited, consulted but denied control. The result is research that reproduces the very colonial relations it claims to critique.

Indigenous leadership must therefore be the non-negotiable baseline for any inquiry into technology-facilitated abuse (TFA) involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Justice requires the transfer of power over funding, design, data, and publication to Indigenous peoples, with accountability grounded in community relationships. Without this shift, colonial research structures will continue to rebrand while maintaining control, leaving Indigenous peoples positioned as data rather than researchers.

This article is grounded in critical auto-ethnography as a method for exposing these dynamics. Critical auto-ethnography situates lived experience within broader political and institutional structures and uses it to interrogate relations of power rather than claim neutrality (Adams & Herrmann, 2023; Manning & Adams, 2015). Drawing on my experiences as an Aboriginal scholar working in TFA research, I demonstrate how settler research economies operate in practice, including how authority is deferred, Indigenous knowledge is extracted, and exclusion is reproduced through institutional processes. These experiences are not presented as personal grievance but as situated evidence of systemic governance failures that shape who is authorised to carry out research, to receive funding, and to define harm.

Indigenous sovereignty is central to this analysis. Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015) argues that Indigenous sovereignty is an ontological condition grounded in enduring relationships to Country, not something granted through settler recognition. Settler research governance, by contrast, operates through the white possessive, asserting control over knowledge, data, and resources while rendering Indigenous sovereignty invisible. In TFA research, this logic is evident in institutional control over agendas, data, and authorship. Indigenous leadership in knowledge production is therefore not a matter of inclusion or ethics but an expression of self-determination that contests the foundations of the research economy.

Indigenous data sovereignty scholarship makes these relations explicit. Palawa scholar Maggie Walter and Ahtna scholar Stephanie Russo Carroll (2020) define Indigenous data sovereignty as the right of Indigenous peoples to govern the collection, interpretation, and use of data about their lives. They demonstrate how data governance shapes policy outcomes and how deficit-based regimes reproduce colonial power. In the context of TFA, control over digital data and funding directly shapes how harm is understood and addressed.

The Maiam nayri Wingara Indigenous Data Sovereignty Principles (2018) operationalise this framework by asserting Indigenous authority across the entire data lifecycle. Grounded in relational accountability, collective benefit, and the protection of Indigenous knowledges, these principles challenge settler research economies that treat Indigenous lives as extractable while denying Indigenous governance. They make clear that ethical and effective research on TFA requires Indigenous control, not merely participation, within research systems.

Colonial Continuities in Research

In 2021, I was invited to deliver the keynote for the Australian Academy of the Humanities’ annual lecture on ‘Culture, Nature, Climate: Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment’. ¹ At the time, I had only recently been elected a Fellow, joining the small number of Indigenous scholars to hold this position in the Academy's long history. It was an honour, but one marked by contradiction. As I prepared my address, a familiar pattern became clear. In a room celebrating Indigenous knowledges and environmental futures, Indigenous voices were scarce. The most highly funded and institutionally powerful ‘experts’ were overwhelmingly non-Indigenous. Their projects traversed our knowledges, lands, and communities, producing data and publications, yet rarely ceded leadership, control, or tangible benefit to the people whose knowledges they drew upon.

This was not personal discomfort but evidence of a normalised structural exclusion within the Australian research landscape. Indigenous peoples are expected to provide stories, access, data, and legitimacy, yet are seldom resourced to lead, define agendas, or share in the benefits. Research systems routinely signal inclusion through committees, partnership roles, and the language of co-design, while the real levers of power, funding, and recognition remain firmly in settler hands. Across research academies and funding bodies, Indigenous leadership remains the exception rather than the norm.

My keynote, to the discomfort of many in the audience, became a direct critique of this erasure. I asked how Indigenous knowledges can be valued when Indigenous people are absent from the research spaces that claim to protect and advance them. How can research on our lives, from environmental justice to TFA, claim legitimacy when we are reduced to data points or footnotes rather than recognised as architects, owners, and theorists?

This is not an accidental oversight but the expression of enduring settler-colonial logics of knowledge production. Authority to know, define, and govern remains concentrated in the colonial centre, while Indigenous peoples are marginalised. Although funding schemes routinely claim to prioritise Indigenous perspectives and leadership, their structures reproduce the exclusions they purport to address. Research on Indigenous lives, particularly in areas of acute harm such as TFA, is most often led by non-Indigenous scholars who extract Indigenous experiences, build professional capital, and produce solutions largely disconnected from the communities most affected.

This dynamic exemplifies what Unangax^ scholar Tuck and Yang (2012, p. 1) describe as the ‘settler move to innocence’, where symbolic gestures of reconciliation or inclusion deflect critique while colonial structures remain intact. In research funding, this is evident in the rhetorical prioritisation of Indigenous issues, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, without transferring decision-making power or material resources to Indigenous peoples. Rather than enabling self-determination, these practices sustain a funding landscape in which settler institutions control priorities, eligibility, and evaluation, positioning themselves as benevolent gatekeepers while excluding Indigenous scholars from leading work in their own communities. This is not a neutral administrative effect but a continuation of epistemic and material dispossession that keeps Indigenous knowledges subject to settler oversight rather than Indigenous sovereignty and control.

Within the research economy, the invocation of Indigenous knowledges in grant proposals, policy frameworks, and strategic statements often serves as a decorative marker of ‘inclusion’ rather than a genuine redistribution of power. The underlying settler structures remain untouched; Indigenous methodologies are appropriated to signal institutional responsiveness to decolonial imperatives, yet this signalling rarely disrupts the entrenched regimes of control. Funding decisions, accountability measures, and definitions of legitimacy continue to be governed by settler logics, with Indigenous scholarship routinely subjected to external validation, surveillance, and bureaucratic gatekeeping. In this way, Indigenous presence is instrumentalised to enhance the credibility of settler institutions, while the authority to resource and direct Indigenous research remains firmly out of Indigenous hands (Alshihabi & Federman, 2025; Bargallie & Carlson, 2025; Carlson & Day, 2021a).

This process is characterised by a continual deferral of Indigenous leadership and authority in research contexts. Rather than enabling substantive shifts, Indigenous participation is made conditional, always delayed, always subject to shifting criteria manufactured, adapted, or interpreted by non-Indigenous authorities. These procedural barriers, couched in the language of technical rigour, compliance, or accountability, operate as a technology of settler governance (Strakosch, 2019). They produce what might be called a state of permanent probation for Indigenous scholars, and we are perpetually required to justify our presence, prove our expertise, and conform to rules we did not write. Many Indigenous scholars will recognise this dynamic. When searching for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experts across higher education, we often find ourselves relegated to the margins, if we appear at all. Instead, the lists are dominated by non-Indigenous colleagues who research about us, a stark reminder that our expertise remains second to theirs in the settler academy's hierarchy of authority.

Theorising further, we can read these practices as manifestations of settler-colonial endurance and the settler state's ability to absorb critique and adapt its surface while entrenching and reproducing relations of domination. The ‘performance’ of inclusion does not dismantle the structures that disempower Indigenous knowledge holders; instead, it reinforces settler authority by rendering decolonisation aspirational rather than actionable. Thus, the gestures of inclusion and acknowledgement are not ends in themselves but serve a dual function in that they (mis)represent progress to broader publics while simultaneously securing settler institutions against meaningful redistribution of power and resources. This dynamic is not mere oversight or inertia, but an active settler-colonial strategy (see Veracini, 2024; Wolfe, 2006), one that recirculates the rhetoric of decolonisation and inclusion to forestall the unsettling of foundational logics and the material transformation required for genuine Indigenous sovereignty and research leadership.

Epistemic violence is evident in the field of TFA. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, youth, and gender-diverse people are among the most targeted by digital harassment, threats, and exclusion – harms compounded by systemic racism, misogyny, ableism, trans and queerphobia (Carlson, 2019; Carlson & Day, 2021a, 2022; Carlson & Frazer, 2018a, 2018b, 2021b). Yet when governments, industry, or institutions commission research to address these issues, Indigenous leadership is almost absent. We are treated as data points, not decision-makers. In the tech sector itself, the exclusion is just as stark: as of 2022, Indigenous people made up less than 1.4% of the tech workforce (Luvo Talent, 2022). How many of those few are in roles with the power to define safety standards, write policy, or shape platform design – or indeed allocate research grants? These numbers don’t reflect a pipeline problem – they reveal a structure that actively resists Indigenous governance. The people most harmed are systemically locked out of the very systems that claim to protect them. This is not oversight. It is the architecture of settler control.

In my own experience, despite a career dedicated to investigating and exposing the unique contours of digital violence for Indigenous peoples, and despite leading nationally significant projects, shaping public policy, and advising industry stakeholders, I continue to encounter closed doors, especially from institutional, industry, and philanthropic funding schemes. Year after year, I submit proposals to lead Indigenous-designed and community-driven research projects designed with Elders, women, LGBTQIA+ people, youth and people with disabilities, centreing relational accountability and Indigenous methodologies. Time after time, these are dismissed on tenuous grounds, minor wording, vague assurances that ‘other applications were stronger’, or feedback so superficial as to be insulting – consistently failing to acknowledge expertise, community partnerships, or long-standing impact.

While funding rejection is common in academia, the refusal of Indigenous-led research proposals is not equivalent to routine competition. Such refusals occur within funding systems that lack transparency about Indigenous representation on assessment panels, evaluation criteria, and Indigenous-led award outcomes. Within settler-colonial research systems, Indigenous leadership is frequently treated as a risk rather than an asset, particularly where projects centre Indigenous governance or institutional critique. The absence of transparent data obscures how racialised norms of expertise shape funding decisions, allowing systemic exclusion to appear as meritocracy. In this context, repeated rejection of Indigenous-designed projects reflects ongoing colonisation in which control over research resources and futures remains concentrated in settler institutions.

One constant barrier I encounter is the narrow and racialised framing of ‘Indigenous research’ as something that must take place in ‘remote’ communities – an imagined, distant elsewhere. Funding bodies often struggle to comprehend that most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples live in urban and regional settings. This refusal to acknowledge Indigenous presence in cities reinforces colonial spatial logics that erase our existence unless we conform to settler expectations of authenticity. Yet the statistics are clear: 63.4% of Indigenous people reside in New South Wales (34.2%) and Queensland (29.2%) – not in the so-called remote areas. This does not mean that those living in remote communities are undeserving of research and investment; on the contrary, they are often neglected and face distinct forms of structural exclusion. But the idea that ‘real’ Indigeneity only exists out bush functions as a settler fantasy that justifies the denial of resources to Indigenous peoples in cities, where most of us live, work, love, and survive.

The refusal to fund research that reflects this reality, particularly in the TFA space, is not merely outdated; it constitutes a form of epistemic violence. This concept, first articulated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) concerning colonial knowledge systems and the silencing of the subaltern, was later systematised by Miranda Fricker (2007) through the notion of epistemic injustice. Fricker identifies two primary forms: testimonial injustice, where speakers from marginalised groups are not believed, and hermeneutical injustice, where they are denied the conceptual resources to make sense of their experiences. Her work deepens the understanding of how power operates through credibility deficits and interpretive marginalisation, particularly within liberal institutional settings. In the Australian settler-colonial context, these insights have been applied and expanded by Indigenous scholars (Bargallie et al., 2023; Bargallie & Carlson, 2025, 2026) to expose how Indigenous peoples are systematically denied epistemic authority, even as their knowledge is extracted for institutional gain.

In settler-colonial research contexts, epistemic violence manifests through erasure, misrecognition, and appropriation, especially when Indigenous critique challenges settler norms. As Bargallie, Carlson, and Day (2023) argue, this violence is structural, not incidental, embedded in the institutional logics that determine who is recognised as an ‘expert’, whose knowledge is funded, and who is authorised to speak. It operates through citation politics, grant schemes, leadership appointments, and ‘inclusion’ mechanisms that extract legitimacy from Indigenous presence while withholding decision-making power. Epistemic violence regulates which forms of Indigeneity are rewarded, typically those aligned with whiteness, and silences those that centre sovereignty, collectivity, or refusal (Bargallie & Carlson, 2025). Indigenous women are often called on for legitimacy or narrative input but denied the authority to lead, define, or shape research. The result is a research system that consolidates settler control under the guise of inclusion, continually drawing on Indigenous lives and knowledges without redistributing power or resources.

Across Australia's major competitive funding schemes, Indigenous leadership is not incidental; it is structurally marginalised. The Australian Research Council ² reporting for 2021–25 shows that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researchers constitute only a very small fraction of funded chief investigators (around 1–2%), far below population parity. Comparable patterns appear in health research funding, where the National Health and Medical Research Council ³ (NHMRC) data indicate that only a small minority of grants are led by chief investigators who identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander (4.4% in 2024–25), even though a substantially larger share of NHMRC funding is directed to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research. Consequently, research on Indigenous lives, harms, and policy priorities continues to be overwhelmingly designed and led by non-Indigenous investigators.

These outcomes are not anomalies but symptoms of a research economy structured to deny Indigenous authority over knowledge production. The language of ‘Indigenous-led’, ‘First Nations priority’, and ‘equity and inclusion’ functions to legitimate extractive practices while settler institutions retain control over funding, expertise, and research futures. The consequences are both immediate and generational, constraining community-driven responses to TFA and limiting pathways for the next generation of Indigenous scholars.

This dynamic is not unique to digital violence, it resonates across the entire spectrum of research economies that have historically treated Indigenous lives as sources of data, rather than subjects of knowledge (Lovett et al., 2020; Moreton-Robinson, 2020; Nakata, 2007). What is required is not symbolic partnership or rhetorical inclusion but a wholesale transformation of the research economy itself. Meaningful transformation requires alignment with Indigenous Data Sovereignty Principles, which assert Indigenous governance over the full data lifecycle. Frameworks such as the Maiam nayri Wingara Principles ⁴ (2018) make clear that transformation is not about increasing Indigenous participation, but about ceding control over data, research design, funding priorities, and knowledge production. Without this shift, calls for transformation risk reproducing extractive practices under new institutional language rather than dismantling settler-colonial research governance. This means shifting funding priorities, relinquishing power over research design and dissemination, and investing directly in Indigenous intellectual, methodological, and material sovereignty. Until Indigenous peoples are not only the ‘data’ but also the drivers, owners, and recognised experts – until research governance is reimagined along lines of justice, sovereignty, and accountability – the cycles of epistemic violence described in this article will remain unbroken.

Equally harmful is the routine erasure of Indigenous peoples through crude Indigenous or non-Indigenous binaries. These practices flatten data, marginalise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in findings, and obscure how TFA disproportionately targets Indigenous women, youth, and LGBTQIA+ peoples. Maggie Walter (2018, p. 257) describes this as BADDR data – blaming, aggregate, decontextualised, deficit, and restricted data – which foregrounds problems while stripping away context and cultural or geographic specificity. The result is statistical invisibility that further entrenches exclusion from policy, funding, and research leadership.

Challenging epistemic violence therefore extends beyond who conducts research to dismantling the settler logics embedded in funding structures, evaluation metrics, peer review, and institutional cultures that make exclusion both possible and profitable. As this article demonstrates, disrupting these cycles requires centring Indigenous leadership, not as an ethical add-on, but as the necessary condition for any meaningful response to TFA affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities.

We Are the Data, but Never the Researchers

As my colleague and I have previously argued (Carlson & Day, 2021a, 2021b, 2022; Day & Carlson, 2024), Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples – particularly women, young people, and LGBTQIA+ individuals – are not merely over-represented among those harmed by TFA, we are its primary targets, subject to a continuum of violence that spans image-based abuse, online harassment and predatory conduct on dating apps, and endless racist commentary. The TFA we endure is not exceptional or random but, rather, systemic, woven into the settler-colonial logics that continue to organise Australian institutions and social life (Carlson, 2019; Carlson & Frazer, 2020; Day & Carlson, 2024). Despite this reality, Indigenous peoples are rarely resourced to lead the research that addresses these harms. While funding programmes addressing TFA exist, public reporting rarely demonstrates Indigenous leadership as chief investigators. Limited transparency on Indigenous-led awards, funding distribution, and governance obscures how research resources remain concentrated in non-Indigenous institutions, even when Indigenous peoples are designated as priority populations. Our stories become raw data, while research funding, prestige, and authorship, remain the preserve of non-Indigenous academics and institutions.

This form of epistemic violence is compounded by our findings (Day & Carlson, 2024), which expose white settlers not only as the architects of damaging digital ecosystems but as active perpetrators of both online and offline violence against Indigenous peoples. In ‘Predators and perpetrators: Cultures of White Settler Violence in So-Called Australia’ (Day & Carlson, 2024), we show how white Australians, particularly men, weaponise dating apps and digital platforms to sexually terrorise, fetishise, and dehumanise Indigenous people, especially women and LGBTQIA+ individuals. These are not isolated incidents; they are expressions of a settler-colonial logic of elimination, sustained through racialised and gendered domination. Online violence is not separate from colonial violence – it is its latest frontier.

Yet even as this crisis intensifies, research rarely interrogates perpetrator subjectivity, patterns, or cultural licence, particularly whiteness and settler power. Of the limited work that does, almost none is led by Indigenous researchers with the lived expertise and community trust to ask the most consequential questions. Institutional ethics processes, framed around neutrality and balance, often recentre whiteness, depoliticise violence, and insulate settler sensitivities, thereby protecting the status quo.

National Indigenous research ethics guidance exists through the NHMRC and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Isladner Studies (AIATSIS) Code of Ethics, but both frameworks leave critical gaps for research on TFA. NHMRC guidance is administered through institutional committees that retain settler control over approval and governance, while the AIATSIS Code centres Indigenous authority and self-determination over research agendas and outcomes. Neither framework adequately addresses ethical risks specific to digital violence, including platform data extraction, algorithmic harm, and the use of digital traces without Indigenous governance. As a result, the research economy not only sidelines Indigenous leadership but also shields those implicated in systemic harm, continuing to treat Indigenous experiences as extractable data rather than as the basis for transformative analysis.

This destructive cycle is sustained through institutional performances of allyship that Sara Ahmed (2012, p. 117) describes as ‘non-performative speech acts’, where commitments to inclusion and diversity fail to produce material change. Such declarations protect institutions from critique, allowing them to appear progressive while maintaining settler-colonial hierarchies. Settler scholars and administrators occupy leadership, funding, and agenda-setting roles, while Indigenous communities are asked to contribute stories of trauma, stripped of the political and historical context that gives them meaning.

As Ahmed argues, diversity is frequently deployed as institutional branding, using the language of inclusion to manage dissent and neutralise critique. Practices framed as collaboration, consultation, or co-design often function as exploitation disguised as partnership. As Walter and Russo Carroll (2020) note, these approaches do not constitute Indigenous self-determination when decision-making power, data control, and authority over outcomes remain with non-Indigenous institutions. In such arrangements, Indigenous peoples may contribute knowledge without governing priorities, funding, or data use.

Self-determination requires Indigenous control over research agendas and data governance. Without this transfer of authority, collaborative language legitimises settler-led projects while leaving colonial power relations intact. The structure remains extractive: Indigenous contributions are taken, authority is denied, and communities receive little material benefit or control within research processes.

The dominant settler approach to TFA, framed through ‘harm minimisation’, ‘resilience’, and ‘digital safety’, reduces systemic violence to individual behaviour or technical fixes (eSafety, 2019; Office for Women, 2022; Powell et al., 2021). Such framings misrecognise TFA as an expression of settler governance rather than isolated harm. Platforms are not neutral; they are built on logics of surveillance, extraction, and control that reproduce colonial hierarchies of safety, harm, and voice.

The eSafety (2019) promotion of ‘Safety by Design’ gestures towards reform by shifting responsibility onto platforms, yet remains limited. Safety by Design centres platform responsibility, risk mitigation, and user reporting, leaving authority with platforms and regulators, and positioning Indigenous peoples as protected users rather than rights-holders. It does not explicitly address Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, instead relying on universalist assumptions of neutrality and consultation.

By contrast, the Maiam nayri Wingara Indigenous Data Sovereignty Principles reject neutrality and assert Indigenous self-determination through control over data, research, and digital governance. Where Safety by Design mitigates harm within settler-controlled systems, Indigenous Data Sovereignty demands a redistribution of power as the basis for justice. Without this shift, reforms risk reproducing uneven safety and reinscribing Indigenous vulnerability while leaving the structural conditions of technological, colonial, and epistemic violence intact.

In an Indigenous-led, community-driven project exploring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's experiences of TFA, we exposed the systemic failure of platforms and regulatory bodies to respond to harm (Carlson & Frazer, 2021a). Participants who were Indigenous women and LGBTQIA+ people all shared consistent experiences of reporting abuse to tech platforms, only to be told it didn’t breach ‘community standards’, if they received any response at all. Those who attempted to report to the national regulatory body, the eSafety Commissioner, stated that they were met with bureaucratic confusion or outright dismissal. One was told their abuse didn’t meet the definition of harm; others gave up trying. Not a single participant received adequate support, yet all were harmed.

Platforms and regulators claim universality yet routinely fail Indigenous users. What they offer is not protection – it is structural abandonment masquerading as policy. Australia's hate speech laws, at both federal and state levels, are meant to offer recourse for racial or identity-based harm online. Yet inconsistent definitions, enforcement gaps, and jurisdictional limitations make them largely ineffective in practice. Platforms amplify hate, while laws lag behind. For Indigenous users, this systemic inertia means online abuse frequently goes unresolved, enabling hostility to proliferate unchecked, a stark example of how digital systems fail to serve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and particularly women and LGBTQAI+ people (Kennedy, 2020; O’Regan, 2018).

The recent eSafety Commissioner v X Corp (see Smith et al., 2024) case underscores these failures: while the Federal Court upheld the Commissioner's power to compel platforms to remove harmful content, it also exposed the limits of Australian regulation in the face of transnational tech power. The case revealed that even when legal tools exist, enforcement is weak, jurisdiction is contested, and platforms can delay compliance or challenge the process. This confirms what our participants already knew – regulatory systems are inaccessible, ineffective, and ill-equipped to protect Indigenous users from digital harm. Our communities are over-surveilled yet under-researched on our own terms (Carlson & Day, 2021a, 2021b, 2022). We are the data – but rarely the researchers, the grant recipients, or the ones empowered to design the solutions. To break these cycles, research on TFA must centre Indigenous leadership and be governed by our communities, operating through frameworks of relational accountability and sovereignty. Only then might research begin to dismantle, rather than reproduce the violence it seeks to address.

Extraction, Surveillance, and the Coloniality of Digital Data

In the current digital era, tech platforms are among the most powerful engines of data extraction – mining, storing, and monetising the digital traces of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples without us fully understanding the implications, nor are we involved in decision making or governance. These platforms, operated by global corporations with little accountability to those they surveil, represent a new frontier of colonial resource extraction. Our social interactions, struggles, and even reports of TFA circulate within data-driven systems that can be scraped, reproduced, and repurposed beyond Indigenous control, raising serious risks for Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP), consent, attribution, and cultural safety in AI-enabled contexts (Fitch et al., 2024).

This is not a neutral process. It is a direct extension of colonial dispossession into the digital realm (Worrell & Carlson, 2025). Indigenous digital presence becomes another site for exploitation, our pain commodified for research, product development, and profit. Tech platforms routinely act as arbiters of what data are collected, how data are categorised, and who can access or ‘research’ the data. Indigenous people are rarely at the table when these decisions are made. The result is systematic erasure of our rights over our own information and a denial of Indigenous data sovereignty that mirrors the historic theft of lands, bodies, and cultures.

The lack of Indigenous data sovereignty is intensified by institutions, universities, corporate research labs, and government agencies, that willingly partner with tech companies, accessing platform data with little regard for Indigenous-led governance or consent. Under the guise of public interest, safety, or innovation, they reproduce extractive logics, privileging settler control over narratives, analysis, and outcomes, while relegating Indigenous people to the role of passive data sources.

This political economy of digital extraction does more than aggregate harm: it protects perpetrators and entrenches racialised hierarchies. Platforms deflect responsibility for Indigenous safety, claiming neutrality, while their business models profit from the very abuses they enable. This platform-centric approach diverges from Indigenous self-determination. Tech companies retain unilateral control over data, moderation, and system design, positioning Indigenous peoples as users rather than rights-holders. Indigenous self-determination requires Indigenous authority over data governance and decision making, exposing claims of neutrality as mechanisms that obscure settler and corporate power rather than deliver justice. Meanwhile, policy discussions about ‘digital inclusion’ or ‘harm minimisation’ deliberately ignore the foundational question of who owns, governs, and benefits from data generated from Indigenous lives.

Redressing this techno-colonial order requires more than token consultation or decorative inclusion. It demands structural transformation: the recognition of Indigenous data sovereignty as a non-negotiable right (Ruckstuhl, 2022; Walter et al., 2020). Tech platforms and their institutional enablers must cede control, share governance, and be held accountable to Indigenous communities – not through symbolic gestures, but through the redistribution of power, resources, and decision-making authority. We are not just Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) committee members or artists hired to embellish your offices and the front cover of your reports. Until Indigenous peoples are enabled to exercise full sovereignty over our digital lives, platform research and governance will continue to reproduce colonial logics of extraction and control. This is not a matter of diversity; it is a fight for Indigenous self-determination in both offline and online realms.

I am reminded of advice from my colleague and mentor, Distinguished Professor Maggie Walter, a leading scholar of Indigenous data sovereignty (Walter, Kukutai et al., 2020; Walter, Lovett et al., 2021). She cautions Indigenous peoples against serving on advisory boards dominated by non-Indigenous research leadership. Repeated invitations to advise without decision-making power or funding relegate Indigenous scholars and community leaders to symbolic roles, where expertise may be acknowledged but easily disregarded.

Such arrangements reinforce extractive colonial dynamics, mining Indigenous knowledge for legitimacy and institutional optics rather than valuing its transformative potential. They also perpetuate structural exclusion. When Indigenous peoples are not trusted or resourced to lead, set terms, or serve as chief investigators, our sovereignty over knowledge is denied and our participation in shaping research and policy that affects our lives is curtailed. Advisory-only roles thus operate as co-option, appearing inclusive while preserving settler control. Meaningful change requires Indigenous leadership in decision making and direct investment in Indigenous intellectual authority, not consultative tokenism.

Knowing Without Authority: Settler Feminism and the Politics of Refusal

The history of feminist scholarship in Australia is marked by a paradox and its language of justice and inclusivity often masks deeper structures of exclusion. Moreton-Robinson's groundbreaking Talkin’ Up to the White Woman (2020) lays bare how white feminist discourse has consistently cast Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women as those who are ‘known’, as objects of analysis or symbols of struggle, while simultaneously barring them from epistemic authority. This is not a matter of incidental academic bias; it is a structural extension of settler-colonial power. The ability to interpret, theorise, and profit from Indigenous lives is reserved for those with institutional legitimacy, while the gatekeeping of resources, recognition, and research governance systematically denies Indigenous women intellectual sovereignty.

The myth of inclusion, visible in funding rhetoric, project descriptions, and the proliferation of ‘partnerships’ serves to perpetuate an extractive research logic. Within this landscape, Indigenous scholars are frequently positioned as sources of data, peripheral collaborators, or evidence for funding priorities. Rarely are we recognised as theorists, agenda-setters, or architects of the field we have, in many cases, created. The routine erasure of Indigenous epistemic authority is a form of epistemic violence, echoing the settler-colonial right to define, contain, and commodify Indigenous experiences.

Educator Nado Aveling's pivotal article, ‘Don’t Talk about What You Don’t Know’ (2013), offers a rare instance of settler academic introspection. She charts her own shift from a well-intentioned researcher to a critical accomplice, recognising that meaningful solidarity does not mean speaking for Indigenous peoples but disrupting the institutional architectures that exclude them. Crucially, Aveling situates her responsibility not in producing research ‘within’ Indigenous contexts, but in holding settler systems, ethics committees, funding bodies and institutional gatekeepers, accountable for the ways they perpetuate exclusion. She calls for unsettling how ‘rigour’ is defined, challenging the criteria by which merit is policed, and refusing to co-opt the direction or credit for Indigenous-led research.

This aligns with what Kahnawake Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson (2017) theorises as both the politics of refusal and an exposure of the ruse of consent. In the research economy, token invitations to contribute or the symbolic invocation of Indigenous knowledges can operate as forms of contractual recognition, gestures that appear to affirm inclusion while preserving settler authority over resources, legitimacy, and time itself. Such moments are framed as if Indigenous scholars have consented to these arrangements, masking the coercive conditions and structural violence that produce them. Refusal, in this sense, is not simply declining participation; it is a deliberate rejection of the terms by which inclusion is offered, an insistence that Indigenous sovereignty, over knowledge, priorities, and material resources, be the starting point rather than an afterthought. It is a stance that exposes the false neutrality of funding criteria, the settler ownership of research agendas, and the ongoing theft of Indigenous intellectual and material labour under the guise of benevolence or meritocracy.

Together, Moreton-Robinson and Aveling illuminate the epistemic architecture of a research economy built on the dispossession of Indigenous intellectual sovereignty. This is not merely academic debate, it exposes the material consequences of settler control over knowledge production. The research economy systematically rewards those who can extract value from Indigenous experiences while denying Indigenous scholars the authority to lead, define, or theorise. For Indigenous academics, this is a lived and structural reality. Even internationally recognised leaders on TFA are routinely denied funding to pursue Indigenous-designed, community-driven research. My own scholarship, for instance, is widely cited to demonstrate that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are disproportionately affected by TFA, but it is rarely engaged as critical theory, strategic leadership, or foundational epistemology. This reflects what Moreton-Robinson (2015) describes as the ‘white possessive logic’ that structures knowledge economies whereby Indigenous knowledges can be acknowledged but not owned by Indigenous people, or cited for legitimacy but never centred. The settler-colonial research system treats Indigenous people as data, not theorists. This erasure is reinforced discursively in institutional and industry publications that begin with Acknowledgements of Country and statements recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as Traditional Owners, yet fail to substantively include our voices, knowledges, or citations in their analyses.

I have read countless reports on technology-facilitated violence and digital life that perform symbolic gestures of inclusion, often a solitary note that Indigenous peoples are ‘particularly at risk’, yet no Indigenous authors are cited, nor are Indigenous frameworks engaged (see, for example, Mejia-Canales, 2024). This reflects a citation politics in which Indigenous scholarship is treated as evidence rather than theory, cited parenthetically to substantiate deficit or risk rather than engaged narratively to frame analysis. For example, the eSafety Commissioner's (2020) literature scan of tech-based family, domestic and sexual violence positions Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women primarily within deficit-focused sections, with little engagement of Indigenous theoretical frameworks. Indigenous theorists invert this logic: Walter and Russo Carroll's (2020, pp. 6–7) concept of ‘fracasomania’ theorises data policy failure as a fixation on Indigenous deficit, while, read through Moreton-Robinson's (2015, p. 172) theorisation of the white possessive, contemporary data practices can be understood as extensions of settler property logics that deny Indigenous sovereignty. In one case, I contributed to a handbook on gendered violence and technology, and recommended another Aboriginal colleague. The volume contains 34 chapters, yet none of our extensive publications are cited beyond our own contributions. Such omissions are not incidental oversights; they exemplify the systemic erasure of Indigenous scholarship even when Indigenous scholars are nominally included.

Ahmed (2017) reminds us that citation is never neutral but a politics of recognition that determines whose work is built into the canon and whose is left outside it. Ahmed describes citation as ‘feminist bricks and feminist memory’ and states:

Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow. In this book, I cite feminists of color who have contributed to the project of naming and dismantling the institutions of patriarchal whiteness. (2017, p. 17)

Acknowledging and establishing such genealogies is part of producing more just intellectual practices. For Indigenous scholars, citation is not only a matter of professional acknowledgement but of survival and resurgence. We cite each other to make visible the intellectual traditions that settler academia continually erases, to honour the ‘Big Playas’ who carried knowledge through hostile conditions and gifted us the foundations of Critical Indigenous Studies (Carlson & Day, 2023, p. 2), and to build sovereign intellectual lineages that future generations can inherit. Just as Ahmed describes citation as ‘feminist bricks and feminist memory’, so too do Indigenous genealogies of citation lay the bricks of our survival, remembering those who came before and ensuring our intellectual traditions endure.

When our work is cited, it anchors Indigenous perspectives as foundational; when it is erased, our presence is reduced to tokenism, and the canon remains firmly shaped by settler logics. Thus, the politics of citation is also the politics of Indigenous sovereignty. To cite Indigenous scholars is to recognise our authority and embed our knowledge systems in the genealogies of a field (Bargallie & Carlson, 2025). To refuse to do so is to reinscribe settler colonialism at the level of academic practice. An Indigenous genealogy of citation, then, is an act of refusal and resurgence and it disrupts the settler reproduction of the canon and affirms that our intellectual traditions are not peripheral, but central to the pursuit of just and transformative knowledge.

The violence of this refusal is amplified in the context of TFA. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities endure some of the most severe, targeted, and intersectional forms of digital harm. Settler-led projects, however well intentioned, too often reproduce the very marginalisations they purport to address by relegating Indigenous researchers and communities to passive roles. Without substantive redistribution of research power, the status quo persists: Indigenous perspectives are instrumentalised but rarely centred.

Refusal, in this context, is not obstructionist. It is a necessary, life-preserving strategy against the ongoing colonial appropriation of knowledge and experience. It is the assertion that justice and survival require more than partnership rhetoric; they demand a research economy in which Indigenous people are theorists, designers, and decision-makers, especially when the subject content is us. It is past time for the academy and industry to move beyond symbolic gestures and actively dismantle the structures that sustain settler dominance. Only then can we confront the epistemic violence that sustains both digital and institutional harm.

The Burden of Being ‘The One’

I have carved out a hard-earned reputation as a leading voice on Indigenous digital lives – but visibility should not be mistaken for support. My experience embodies the very structural violence this article critiques. I am routinely invited to sit on government and industry advisory boards yet denied funding to lead the very projects I have built with Indigenous communities. My work is widely cited, but only to affirm that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples suffer disproportionate online violence, stripped of its critical analysis, political context, and calls for systemic change. I am invited onto panels, often at the last minute as a form of damage control, to shield institutions from criticism over the absence of Indigenous voices, not because they are committed to our leadership. These gestures acknowledge our suffering while avoiding any real challenge to the structures that produce it, including the ways those same actors help preserve these systems to protect institutional authoritiy and acadmeic standing.

The violence of tokenism became painfully legible to me after reading Community as rebellion (2022) by Lorgia García Peña. Framed as both syllabus and love letter to Latinx, immigrant, and working-class students, the book offers a fierce indictment of the academy's exploitation of scholars of colour, a critique that resonates deeply within the Australian context for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander academics. Peña (2022, p. 5) describes how racialised scholars are cast as ‘the one’: essential for institutional optics and equity metrics, yet entirely disposable when they challenge the status quo. For years at my current institution, I was the only Indigenous professor, a convenient shield against accusations of exclusion (there are now two). But being ‘the one’ means bearing the weight of institutional diversity, mentoring dozens of marginalised students, educating settler colleagues, sitting on countless committees, symbolising change, while being denied the power, resourcing, or authority to enact it. It is not inclusion; it is containment. And it sustains the very systems it claims to transform.

Recently, I applied for internal institutional strategic research funding to support a project centring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ perspectives on artificial intelligence (AI) including AI companions. The aim was to engage community members to establish a baseline understanding, currently non-existent, of their knowledge, perceptions, and concerns about AI technologies, including the potential opportunities and risks they pose for Indigenous communities. The application was unsuccessful, but the institution expressed interest in ‘supporting’ the project. The condition, however, was telling: to be eligible for half the requested funding, I would need to partner with a non-Indigenous colleague with expertise in applied AI.

This requirement reflects broader funding architectures in which Indigenous leadership is rendered conditional through opaque assessment criteria, non-transparent panel composition, and institutional definitions of expertise that privilege settler norms. This requirement reflects what Walter and Russo Carroll (2020) identify as the assumed superiority of non-Indigenous expertise within settler research governance. Indigenous knowledge, leadership, and community authority are treated as insufficient without validation by external technical expertise. These assumptions are not neutral assessments of capacity but racialised governance practices that position Indigenous scholars as lacking while reaffirming settler authority over what counts as legitimate and fundable research.

The ‘conditions’ were not framed as optional. The effect was to reorient the project away from the priorities articulated by community participants and towards the skill set and research agenda of the non-Indigenous partner. Moreover, the non-Indigenous colleague's requirements for involvement absorbed almost the entire grant, leaving no funds to engage with community, the very heart of the project. When I explained this, the funding authority informed me that my application would not proceed. In this way, Indigenous women's leadership was rendered a risk factor, and without non-Indigenous endorsement, Indigenous-led research was deemed unworthy of support.

This is precisely the kind of manoeuvre that Simpson (2017) identifies as the ruse of consent: an offer that appears to affirm inclusion but is contingent upon accepting terms that preserve settler authority over resources, expertise, and intellectual direction. In this case, my ‘consent’ to the funding means relinquishing Indigenous-led framing in favour of a settler-defined approach, thereby transforming a project designed to meet community needs into one calibrated to institutional comfort and disciplinary recognition. The gesture of support thus masked a deeper structural refusal to resource Indigenous women's leadership in research, reinforcing a funding economy in which access to material resources remains dependent upon ceding control over the scope, methods, and authorship of Indigenous work.

This dynamic echoes with brutal clarity across the landscape of TFA research. Indigenous scholars are routinely expected to lend cultural legitimacy to settler-led projects, sit on ethics panels, or appear in footnotes, yet we are rarely resourced to lead. We are invited to contribute chapters to handbooks which Indigenous scholarship is otherwise absent, as if our inclusion alone redeems an entire volume. When we develop rigorous, community-driven proposals, they are dismissed on technicalities. When we produce empirical evidence of harm, it is ignored. When we challenge this exclusion, we are framed as ungrateful, difficult, or ‘un-collegial’. This is not incidental. The system is engineered to reward settlers for studying our pain, while structurally excluding us from the power to define, lead, or transform the conditions that produce it. Settler mediocrity is not just tolerated – it is institutionalised. Mediocrity, when white and well-networked, is rewarded with grants, platforms, and legitimacy, while Indigenous relational accountability is endlessly scrutinised, deferred, or dismissed.

García Peña's (2022) warning is urgent: tokenism can be internalised. Some of us, under relentless pressure, may be tempted to embrace ‘the one’ role as a survival strategy – distancing ourselves from community to pursue individual advancement. But such survival is lonely, and it never transforms the conditions of violence. Like García Peña, I reject this path. I believe change comes from solidarity, not scarcity, from collective refusal, not isolated success.

The struggle against TFA is not just about online safety – it is a struggle over power. It is about who defines harm, who receives resources to respond, and whose voices are legitimised. As long as Indigenous people remain the researched, not the researchers, cited but not funded, included but not empowered, we will remain data points in a system built to exclude us. My work refuses that colonial arrangement. This article is part of that refusal. Its intention is to add to the discomfort generated when I speak publicly on this issue. For it is my belief that the dis-ease, embarrassment and, in some instances, the shock of the truth expressed herein will possibly bring about a shift, or at the very least, an intervention into the power relations that keep Indigenous scholars in our ‘place’.