Prof. Chelsea Watego
Chelsea is a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman and a leading researcher in race, racism and Indigenist health humanities. She has worked as an Aboriginal Health Worker and researcher in communities across south-east Queensland for the past 20 years with her work focused on interpreting and privileging Indigenous experiences of the health system, including critically examining the role of Aboriginal health workers, and the narratives of Indigeneity produced within public health.
Director, Principal Researcher. She/her. See Chelsea’s work on Google Scholar.
Chelsea has helped champion a strength-based approach in Indigenous public health and her more recent work has drawn attention to the role of race in the production of Indigenous health inequalities.
With the support of an ARC Discovery Grant she is leading an interdisciplinary team of scholars to build Indigenist Health Humanities as a new field of research, one that is committed to the survival of Indigenous peoples locally and globally, and foregrounds Indigenous intellectual sovereignty.
She has an extensive track record of publications, invited editorials, research grants and PhD supervision. A leading public intellectual, Chelsea has been invited to edit a global health humanities text, keynote conferences for each of the Indigenous health peak bodies as well as at international fora and has written for IndigenousX, NITV, The Guardian, Meanjin and The Conversation. A/Professor Bond is a board member of Inala Wangarra (an Indigenous community development association within her own community), and was one half of the Wild Black Women on Brisbane’s 98.9FM and NITV’s The Point. Her forthcoming book ‘Another Day in the Colony’ published by UQ Press is to be released in November 2021.