Anxiety must be assuaged: Bryan Smith, ‘Colonial anxiety and the virtuous work of the Humanities and Social Sciences’, Critical Studies in Education, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Anxiety must be assuaged: Bryan Smith, ‘Colonial anxiety and the virtuous work of the Humanities and Social Sciences’, Critical Studies in Education, 2025

30Jun25

Abstract: Curriculum, as a policy of the settler-state, is essential in carefully safeguarding learners and educators from encounters with the colonial project’s inherent violence. In Australia, the effort to create an acceptable engagement with the past via curriculum is particularly important given the need to reproduce liberal views and discourses of inclusion that define the politics of the contemporary settler state. At its core, curriculum thus works to placate colonial anxiety and furnish learners with ideas about the nation-state that are intrinsically geared toward colonial legitimacy and preservation. In this article, I take up this condition, highlighting how the Australian Curriculum represents the context of Australia in such a way that minimises any potentially productive anxious encounters with the violence of colonisation. Drawing on Lisa Slater’s idea of virtuous anxiety, I analyse and explore how the Australian Curriculum’s humanities and social sciences learning area represents the place and history of Australia as one that is fraught with violence all the while learners and educators are afforded space to learn about colonisation from a safe emotional and political distance.

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