Chelsea Watego: Can We Decolonise Health and Community Care? [Booked Out]

Professor Chelsea Watego is a Munanjali and South Sea Islander woman with over 20 years of experience working within Indigenous health as a health worker and researcher. Now, for a special event with Monash University Faculty of Arts, Watego appears at the Wheeler Centre to deliver a lecture exploring one of the nation’s most pressing topics: can we decolonise health and community care?

Following her lecture, Watego will be joined by Robyn Newitt, a researcher in the social and criminal justice systems, and Petah Atkinson, a PhD student and emerging First Nations expert in the Health Humanities field. They’ll discuss challenging settler-colonialism through Indigenist health humanities, foregrounding Indigenous intellectual sovereignty in research, and the role of Health Humanities as a new field committed to the survival and the autonomy of Indigenous peoples locally and globally.

Presented in partnership with Faculty of Arts, Monash University

The bookseller for this event is Mary Martin Bookshop.

Indigenist health humanities is an emerging field of research that foregrounds Indigenous intellectual sovereignty and survival, locally and globally. It seeks to mobilise intellectual collectives through the shared values expressed in the Inala Manifesto which extend our investments in health beyond the prevailing biomedical frame and attends more explicitly to the socio-political conditions in which racialized health inequalities are produced. Here, Watego considers the applicability of such values in the context of calls to decolonise health and community care – the premise, the promise and the pitfalls.