ORCID Profile
0000-0002-0497-4166
Current Organisation
University of Wollongong
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Research Topics
In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Top 5 Research Topics
ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)
Studies of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Society | Cultural Studies | Multicultural, Intercultural and Cross-cultural Studies | Comparative Literature Studies | Political Theory and Political Philosophy | Information Systems | Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health | Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Information and Knowledge Systems
ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)
Expanding Knowledge through Studies of Human Society | Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health - Determinants of Health | Ethnicity, Multiculturalism and Migrant Development and Welfare | Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Development and Welfare | Communication Across Languages and Culture |
Related Links
Publications
Closing the Gaps: Competing estimates of Indigenous Australian life expectancy in the scientific literature
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2013
Beyond the pipeline: a critique of the discourse surrounding the development of an Indigenous primary healthcare workforce in Australia
Publisher: CSIRO Publishing
Date: 2019
DOI: 10.1071/PY19044
Abstract: A central strategy in addressing health disparities experienced by Indigenous people has been based on a concern with workforce improvement. In this paper, the Indigenous Australian healthcare workforce literature since 1977 is reviewed and its scope of concern, as being often limited to questions of ‘supply’, is critiqued. The pipeline metaphor, whether used explicitly or implied, regularly focuses attention on closing the gap on Indigenous representation within the health workforce. The exception though is the discourse concerning Indigenous Health Workers (IHWs), where questions concerning the legitimacy of the role continue to abound within a workforce hierarchy where community knowledge, though shown to be crucial to culturally safe health service provision, is trumped by the other health professions whose knowledges and legitimacy are not in question. This contrast exemplifies the need to examine the working of power not just ‘supply’. The pipeline metaphor is disrupted with concerns about a range of other ‘gaps’ – gaps in the recognition of Indigenous knowledges, in organisational structures, in governance and in self-awareness by the health professions of their whiteness. As the health system continues to measure workforce development in terms of pipeline capacity, our study questions what happens beyond the pipeline.
“So we tell them”: articulating strong Black masculinities in an urban Indigenous community
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 09-2019
Abstract: There is a growing literature on Indigenous masculinities written by scholars in North America, Hawai‘i and New Zealand which draws on a variety of approaches. While there are signs of scholarly interest in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander masculinities in Australia, this has yet to translate into a distinct body of work. This article is a potential opening onto such a future corpus, foregrounding and privileging how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men understand themselves. Interviews with 13 men, ranging in age from young teenagers through to Elders—among whom were Traditional Owners, school pupils, university students, community workers, health professionals and retirees—yielded a conception of Indigenous masculinities not concerned with recovering a lost masculinity. Rather, what was presented to us is a distinct conception of Indigenous masculinities rooted in place a relationality motivated by an intergenerational sense of responsibility a nuanced idea of “acting hard.”
Beyond Hermes: Metaphysics in a New Key
Publisher: Brill
Date: 10-12-2019
DOI: 10.1163/26836408-14010008
Abstract: The following pages engage a hermeneutic approach to African philosophy, focusing on the work of Tsenay Serequeberhan. At the heart of the discussion is the question of where to locate such an approach in the existing philosophical literature. Does this way of working render African philosophy a European enterprise? Giving an affirmative response, the writings of Paulin Hountondji, which draw upon Husserlian phenomenology, are taken up as an alternative response to questions raised here about the meaning and methods of hermeneutics. Ultimately, however, this perspective is also set aside. Instead, suggestions are put forward for the markers around which a contemporary African metaphysics, which is both restorative and creative, might be pursued.
South-South Dialogue: In Search of Humanity
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 20-09-2017
DOI: 10.1017/JIE.2017.24
Abstract: This paper is a meditation on the idea of South-South dialogue, beginning with the South-South Dialogues: Situated Perspectives in Decolonial Epistemologies symposium held at the University of Queensland in 2015. I interrogate the concept of South-South dialogue, apposing it to the Cartesian ‘I think’, and then question the plausibility of the concept. On the basis of a Gadamerian conception of understanding, I suggest that what passes for South-South dialogue is in fact more likely to be North-South or even North-North dialogue. This is buttressed by an examination of Valentin Mudimbe's Parables and Fables. I go on to suggest, however, that by staying within the realm of the concept, in what could be called a Cartesian paradigm, Mudimbe misses the important role that South-South dialogue can play. Drawing on the work of Sara Motta, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and the concept of hunhu, I claim that the promise of South-South dialogue is the creation of spaces in which humanity is fostered.
Living with diabetes: rationale, study design and baseline characteristics for an Australian prospective cohort study
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 05-01-2012
The North African Syndrome: Traversing the Distance to the Cultural “Other”
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Date: 2019
Introduction: Spinoza Today
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-07-2020
Mental health issues decrease diabetes-specific quality of life independent of glycaemic control and complications: findings from Australia’s living with diabetes cohort study
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 2013
Black to the Future: Making the Case for Indigenist Health Humanities
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 18-08-2021
Abstract: This paper outlines the development of Indigenist Health Humanities as a new and innovative field of research building an intellectual collective capable of bridging the knowledge gap that hinders current efforts to close the gap in Indigenous health inequality. Bringing together health and the humanities through the particularity of Indigenous scholarship, a deeper understanding of the human experience of health will be developed alongside a greater understanding of the enablers to building a transdisciplinary collective of Indigenist researchers. The potential benefits include a more sustainable, relational, and ethical approach to advancing new knowledge, and health outcomes, for Indigenous people in its fullest sense.
Picturing sanity, in black and white
Publisher: BMJ
Date: 02-06-2021
DOI: 10.1136/MEDHUM-2021-012146
Abstract: This speculative work grapples with a riddle: if white supremacy is noxious, and if it is inescapable, is apparent black health, black sanity, in fact healthy? In order to help the reader appropriately appreciate the feat that is black sanity, I begin with a treatment of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s literary character, Mr Golyadkin. I go on to extend my claim that Golyadkin’s ill health or lack of sanity can be understood in terms of the violation of the norms of sociality, onto Antonin Artaud. Dostoevsky and Artaud therefore provide case studies with which it is possible to begin to develop an outline of the bounds and mechanics of white sanity. I juxtapose this outline to readings from a selection of works by African writers—Bessie Head, Véronique Tadjo and Dambudzo Marechera. This culminates in an interrogation of Franz Fanon’s metaphorisation of disability. I grapple especially with the ethical and existential implications of his understanding of black utation. The conclusion that I eventually reach is another riddle, which may or may not amount to a restatement of the riddle with which I begin.
Ripple effects: integrating international medical graduates from refugee backgrounds into the health system in Australia
Publisher: BMJ
Date: 04-2022
DOI: 10.1136/BMJGH-2021-007911
Abstract: The field of ‘refugee health’ is generally understood in terms of the efforts of health professionals from a host country to provide care for humanitarian entrants. This paper attempts to undermine that idea, focusing instead on the service that health workers from refugee background communities are able to render, both to their own communities and to broader society, when barriers to their participation are made more equitable. The point of departure for this Practice paper is the 2019 pilot ‘Observership Program’ that was initiated by Mater Refugee Health in Brisbane, Australia. This was in response to, and in collaboration with, international medical graduates from refugee backgrounds. The two doctors who advocated for the programme had already independently embarked on a series of advocacy initiatives aimed at facilitating health workforce participation for members of their communities. In what follows we: outline the barriers to their medical registration and employment in Queensland, Australia describe the process of setting up a 9-month clinical observership for two participants and we reflect on the implications of the programme from a health policy and systems perspective. Ultimately, our contention is that because health systems are complex and adaptive, increased health workforce participation by members of marginalised communities has the potential to change the culture of the health system, making it more adept and responsive. Such, we propose, are the ‘ripple effects’ of addressing the obstacles to health workforce participation by members of refugee background communities.
Being Seen by the Doctor: A Meditation on Power, Institutional Racism, and Medical Ethics
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 15-01-2021
Pan-African Pandemonium: Identities, Histories, and Constellations
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University Press
Date: 04-2023
DOI: 10.5325/PHILRHET.56.1.0033
Abstract: Fiston Mujila’s Tram 83 provides a helpful point of departure for this philosophical treatment of pan-African subjectivity. His meditations on music resonate with continental and diasporic accounts of the musicality of African social organization. This in turn provides an opening into a discussion around the tension between conceptions of African identity tied to heritage and continuity on one hand, and considerations of the rupture brought about by the Middle Passage and colonialism on the other. Drawing on African philosophy and Black Studies more broadly, this article argues for a conception of African identity that, while taking seriously heritage and origins, ultimately emerges intersubjectively as a result of the movements and reverberations across the constellation of African worlds. Not only are these pan-African reverberations constitutive, the author argues that they are also key to our survival.
‘You cunts can do as you like’: the obscenity and absurdity of free speech to Blackfullas
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 04-07-2018
For Us, By Us
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Date: 09-2021
Abstract: This article examines the Australian ‘Continental Philosophy’ community through the lens of the Azanian philosophical tradition. Specifically, it interrogates the series of conversations around race and methodology that arose from the 2017 Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP) conference. At the heart of these were questions of place, race, Indigeneity, and the very meaning of ‘Continental Philosophy’ in Australia. The pages that follow pursue those questions, grappling with the relationship between the articulation of disciplinary bounds and the exercise of colonial power. Having struggled with the political and existential cost of participation in the epistemic community that is the ASCP, I argue for disengagement and the exploration of alternative intellectual communities. This is ultimately a call to intellectual work grounded on ethical relations rather than on the furtherance of the status quo. It is a call to take seriously the claim, ‘the land is ours’.
Dancing on the Tightrope of Existence: Deconstructing Black Consciousness
Publisher: University of Queensland Library
Date: 2017
‘Good in the Hood’ or ‘Burn It Down’? Reconciling Black Presence in the Academy
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 04-03-2019
Closing the gap between rhetoric and practice in strengths-based approaches to Indigenous public health: a qualitative study
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 04-2020
Abstract: To understand strengths-based practice as articulated by urban Indigenous community workers and to consider its application for public health approaches to Australian Indigenous health advancement. Semi-structured interviews with community workers from an urban Indigenous community. Interviews were video and audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data were analysed using thematic analysis, using an Indigenist research framework. For our participants (11 Indigenous and one non-Indigenous), a strengths-based approach was fundamental to their practice. This approach reconfigured the usual relationship of client and service provider to fellow community member. They understood the strength of Indigeneity that empowers in iduals and communities. They were not blinkered to the challenges in the community but resisted defining themselves, their community or their community practice by these deficits. Our participants had a sophisticated experiential understanding that a strengths-based practice is not simply a 'culturally acceptable' way for non-Indigenous peoples to work for Indigenous peoples, but rather it is the only way of working with Indigenous people. Implications for public health: Strengths-based practice requires a reconfiguring of relationships of power, of attending to structure over stereotypes, and privileging Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing. This reconfiguration is an ethical prerequisite for an approach that is genuinely strengths-based.
The Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities: A Foundation for Ethical Disability and Health Research in Developing Countries
Publisher: American Public Health Association
Date: 11-2014
Abstract: The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) has foregrounded disability as a human rights and equity issue, elevating it to a priority global research area. Academics from Western universities are likely to play an increasing role in disability health research in developing countries. In such contexts, there is a need to bridge the gap between procedural ethics and the realities of disability research in cross-cultural contexts. We provide guidance on engaging in ethical disability health research that intersects with and upholds the CRPD. We highlight challenges and tensions in doing so, underscoring the need to be sensitive to the sociocultural and political context of disability that determines how ethical research should proceed. We conclude with 5 recommendations.
Looking forward looking black: making the case for a radical rethink of strategies for success in Indigenous higher education
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 09-09-2020
DOI: 10.1017/JIE.2020.13
Abstract: Abstract This study takes a retrospective look at the educational experiences of Indigenous health professionals who graduated from The University of Queensland's Indigenous Health Program between 1994 and 2005, to understand the enablers for growing an Indigenous health workforce capable of advancing the health of Indigenous peoples. Drawing on the qualitative accounts of 31 students and 9 staff members, this paper examines the enablers to educational success at this time, juxtaposed against current Indigenising agendas in higher education, of aspiration and capacity building alongside the task of embedding Indigenous knowledges within curricula. We look back not as a call to return to Indigenous-specific cohort courses but rather reconsider both the measures of and strategies for success in Indigenous higher education, within health and beyond, interrogating the ideological assumptions that inform them.
Related Organisations
Related Funding Activities
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE210101089
Start Date: 01-2021
End Date: 01-2024
Amount: $441,173.00
Summary: Seeing the Black Child. This project aims to provide a deep understanding of the manner in which Black (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, African and Afro-diasporic) people understand their children’s situation. While dominant conceptions of childhood are typically assumed to be universal, they generally take the figure of the white child, emerging out of a predominantly European body of knowledge, as paradigmatic. This project seeks to expand, reconfigure and present a more complex underst .... Seeing the Black Child. This project aims to provide a deep understanding of the manner in which Black (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, African and Afro-diasporic) people understand their children’s situation. While dominant conceptions of childhood are typically assumed to be universal, they generally take the figure of the white child, emerging out of a predominantly European body of knowledge, as paradigmatic. This project seeks to expand, reconfigure and present a more complex understanding of childhood, one which more adequately reflects Australia today. It is thereby expected to contribute to the work of ensuring that as befits a just, plural society, those whose roles relate to children have an inclusive rather than a parochial grasp of childhood. Read more Read less
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityDiscovery Indigenous - Grant ID: IN210100008
Start Date: 05-2021
End Date: 05-2026
Amount: $1,776,000.00
Summary: Building An Indigenist Health Humanities Collective. This proposal aims to develop Indigenist Health Humanities as a new and innovative field of inquiry, building an intellectual collective capable of bridging the knowledge gap that hinders current efforts to close the gap in Indigenous health inequality. Bringing together health and the humanities through the particularity of Indigenous scholarship, a deeper understanding of the human experience of health will be developed alongside a greater u .... Building An Indigenist Health Humanities Collective. This proposal aims to develop Indigenist Health Humanities as a new and innovative field of inquiry, building an intellectual collective capable of bridging the knowledge gap that hinders current efforts to close the gap in Indigenous health inequality. Bringing together health and the humanities through the particularity of Indigenous scholarship, a deeper understanding of the human experience of health will be developed alongside a greater understanding of the enablers to building a transdisciplinary collective of Indigenous health researchers. The potential benefits include a more sustainable, relational and ethical approach to advancing new knowledge, advancing research careers and advancing health outcomes for Indigenous people. Read more Read less
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity