Elected to the Academy in 2025, Professor Debbie Bargallie is Professor – Principal Research Fellow with the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research (GCSCR) and Griffith Institute for Educational Research (GIER) at Griffith University. She also holds positions at Macquarie University and Universitas Pesantren Tinggi Darul Ulum (UNIPDU) in Jombang, Indonesia.
Before moving into academia, Bargallie worked for the public service for over twenty years, an experience, as she explains, spurred her to pursue a PhD.
From public service to academic service
“My move into academia grew directly out of my time in the Australian Public Service, where I worked across multiple agencies and levels of government,” says Bargallie.
“Those experiences revealed to me how racialised power is sustained within institutions that present themselves as neutral and merit‑based. Indigenous employees were routinely positioned as both proof of inclusion and progress, and as sites of institutional anxiety, while racism remained largely unspeakable within the official languages and procedures of the state.”
“I ultimately left the APS through an (in)voluntary redundancy after a request to relocate on a long‑term basis from Canberra to work closer to Wollongong, following my mother’s major stroke, was denied. That denial, governed by bureaucratic procedure, was an institutional act; my decision to accept a voluntary redundancy was a political act made in response to those limits. But it came at a high cost in terms of career trajectory and financial security.”
“That moment sharpened my interest in how institutions organise inequity through bureaucratic processes that appear impartial and fair yet are racialised. My PhD thesis and its subsequent publication emerged from this context.”
Unmasking the Racial Contract: Indigenous Voices on Racism in the Australian Public Service, was awarded the 2019 Stanner Award for best academic manuscript, and subsequently published 2020 by AIATSIS Press.
“At its core, the book centres the lived experiences of Indigenous public servants, demonstrating how everyday and institutional racism are normalised through bureaucratic proceduralism, reinforced by institutional silence and justified by claims to objectivity,” says Bargallie.
Extending this work, Bargallie is now Associate Investigator with the Indigenous Research Stream of the Australian Research Council Centre for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (CEVAW), where she leads research on violence against women in workplaces, and separately advances a program of work on racial literacy.
Strengthening media with Indigenous voices
In 2023, UNESCO commissioned Bargallie and a Griffith University research team to develop the first globally endorsed research methodology for investigating Indigenous Peoples and the media. The report responded to Article 16 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007 (UNDRIP), which affirms the right of Indigenous Peoples to create their own media in their languages, and access non-Indigenous media without discrimination, and calls on states to ensure both public and private media reflect Indigenous cultural diversity.
“The UNESCO report emerged from longstanding concerns raised by Indigenous scholars, journalists and communities about sustained misrepresentation and structural exclusion within media systems,” says Professor Bargallie.
“The final study report, delivered in 2025, situates Indigenous media issues within global frameworks of racialisation, freedom of expression, media policy, and rights-based approaches to communication. It emphasises that media harm is not incidental but institutional, shaped by ownership structures, journalistic norms, and regulatory environments.
“Importantly, the report foregrounds Indigenous media-making as a site of sovereignty, not simply as an alternative voice within dominant systems.”
Tracing transnational family history
Complementing her research on race, labour and media, Bargallie is also a scholar of her own transnational family history, tracing lineages beyond Australia to the Indian subcontinent.
As a child growing up in Wollongong, NSW, she remembers becoming deeply interested in the origins of her uncommon last name.
“For most of my adult life, I have been tracing my great-grandfather’s roots back to the Indian subcontinent. As an Indigenous Australian scholar and a fourth-generation Punjabi descendant, my interest in family history is deeply entwined with my scholarly work,” she says. “It intersects with my scholarship by grounding theoretical work on race, labour, and colonisation in familial and genealogical trace. This work has also revealed how archives simultaneously preserve and erase, requiring attention to forms of memory and knowledge that sit beyond official records.”
Her paper, The Quest for Bargallie: Mapping Our Roots and Routes, was co-authored with Awais Hussain, a PhD researcher at the University of York, and published in the Journal of Global Indigeneity in 2025.
One of the most surprising discoveries of Bargallie’s research was learning that her ancestor Bargallie (Bagh Ali) and his brother Ramalli (Rehm Ali), both of whom married Kamilaroi Aboriginal women, had siblings who remained in the Punjab, and that these siblings’ descendants now form large, transnational family networks across Pakistan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Europe.
“While those families knew of our presence in Australia, we had no knowledge of them. This asymmetry has sharpened my attention to the role of family memory and South Asian genealogical knowledge traditions in sustaining connections across generations, even when colonial archives and national narratives fail to record them,” she says.
“Researching histories shaped by British colonisation and Indigenous dispossession, alongside racialised and indentured labour and migration, allows me to trace how families are reshaped across generations — critically engaging both with the ongoing colonial project in Australia and the long afterlives of empire in the subcontinent.”
Working across multiple research projects and supervisions, Bargallie says it is the insights from her conversations with academic and other colleagues that drives her work.
“What sustains me, day to day, are conversations that disrupt settled institutional narratives. This emerges through collaborative work, HDR and ECR supervision and mentoring, and from working in Australia and beyond with Indigenous colleagues and others whose lives and work are shaped by different forms of marginalisation, as we grapple with questions of race, power, and responsibility within institutional life.”
Watch: Prof Debbie Bargallie in conversation with Dr Jackie Huggins AM FAHA, about her Stanner-winning publication, ‘Unmasking the Racial Contract: Indigenous voices on racism in the Australian Public Service’, https://vimeo.com/431642089?fl=pl&fe=cm
