Indigenous academia talk

Let me continue my complaint about the way so much indigenous advocacy seems so deeply based in vague academic sociology language that is full of waffle and light on practicalities.  

The Brisbane academic Chelsea Watego has a lengthy Wikipedia page detailing her qualifications (and some recent controversy in her private life).  She's going to be giving a lecture in Melbourne, and this is what it will be about:

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.

And some more explanation of the talk:

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 PhD students and emerging First Nations experts in the Health Humanities field, Petah Atkinson and Beau Jayde Cubillo. 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.

She got sympathetic treatment in Nature in October 2022 in a story about her complaint that the University of Queensland didn't give her a good enough workspace:

Then, in 2020, Watego won an even larger ARC grant, worth nearly Aus$1.8 million, to establish a new field — Indigenist health humanities. She and her team moved to an old building that leaked, into an office up three flights of stairs. Her space was still nowhere near the school or the faculty to which she belonged. When a woman of colour in a neighbouring office revealed that she had previously filed a discrimination case against the university, it clarified Watego’s views on the accommodation. The university, she says, was sending her a message: “There’s no space for us in these institutions.”

Watego says that she detailed the poor working conditions in a 2019 race- and sex-discrimination complaint against the University of Queensland, which centred on her recruitment to a leadership position. The university told Nature that it would not comment on individual staff matters....

Last year, Watego says she dropped the case against the University of Queensland ahead of it going to court. She says that was mostly because of a lack — in her opinion — of legal support from her union. The National Tertiary Education Union did not respond to specific questions about the case, but, in a public statement last year, it said that it disagreed with Watego’s characterization and that it had given her “considered and professional advice” on her claim. Watego says she eventually quit the University of Queensland and joined Queensland University of Technology (QUT), also in Brisbane, where she feels included.

Uhuh.  The next bit, though:

But by tackling racism head on, Watego says her work seems to pose a threat to the institutions that house it. And, she says, her research must address race as an intellectual project. “I have a responsibility to my own people,” Watego says. Singh says that the backlash faced by researchers who “take the fight to their oppressors” can be fierce, exerting a serious toll on their physical and mental health, and can even lead to burnout.

Watego has faced strong resistance, and devising strategies around that is exhausting, she says. She is sometimes seen as a ‘radical’ researcher or a ‘difficult’ and ‘antagonistic’ person, and at the University of Queensland, she says she was excluded from regular staff meetings and Indigenous events, such as sashing ceremonies for graduating students. She describes several instances in which she was invited to write articles for a journal, but after peer review and legal scrutiny, the works were not published, and she had to find new venues for them.

In her writing, Watego often describes how her experience of racism in academia wore her down. “I bought into the idea of academic excellence offering some protection from racial violence in the workplace. And I would come to learn that that was not the case,” she says. “That’s what broke me.”

The stress manifested in many ways — in weight gain, high blood pressure and a tendency to grind her teeth at night, to the point that one fell out. It has also cost her her marriage, and the separation from her husband took a toll on her five children. But, she says, those experiencing racial violence outside academic institutions have it much harder. And now, at QUT, Watego finally feels her work is valued, especially by the Indigenous leadership.

You can also read the Tribunal's decision about her attempt to have police who arrested her outside a nightclub in 2020 done for racial discrimination.   

She makes useful contributions on Twitter like this:

And as for her field of Indigenist health humanities, you can read a 2021 paper about it here:   it's so full of waffle, like this:

Indigenist Health Humanities seeks to bridge the knowledge gap of Indigenous health
by broadening the intellectual investment: inviting humanities and social science per-
spectives about the social world that Indigenous people occupy to better understand its
role in the production of health, illness, and inequality. This is particularly salient given
the increasing recognition of the social and cultural determinants of health, both locally
and globally [15 ,16 ]. The assertion of an ‘Indigenist’ health humanities, as opposed to
the emerging fields of medical and health humanities, is an important demarcation that
recognises the violence of the humanities upon Indigenous peoples. Indigenist Health
Humanities makes explicit the criticality of critical Indigenous studies and, particularly,
Rigney’s Indigenist research principles of resistance, political integrity, and privileging
of Indigenous voices [14 ]. Indigenist Health Humanities insists upon a foregrounding

of Indigenous intellectual sovereignty to resist and remedy the prevailing racist research
paradigms found across both health and humanities. Similarly, Indigenist Health Hu-
manities is not a field whose parameters are defined by the Indigeneity of researchers or
research subjects; rather, it is a field that regards Indigenous knowledges as foundational
for knowing not just an ancient past, but a possible future. In being Indigenist, rather than
Indigenous, neither the knowers or known must be Indigenous; however, the principles of
Indigenist research, as expressed by Rigney, provide the parameters by which knowledge
is produced.

 
Indigenist Health Humanities as a field of research harnesses a holistic and reparative
methodology in the context of Australian health research. It represents a new Indigenous
health research paradigm that can revitalise efforts to improve health beyond an Indigenous
Australian context.

Etcetera, etcetera.