We live in an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Indigenous) policy era where the institutions of health disciplines and universities are embracing the need to better service Indigenous peoples, or at least to be seen as doing so. Such initiatives for the nursing discipline include a commitment to better preparing nursing graduates to work with Indigenous peoples by embedding Indigenous health curricula into undergraduate nursing education. Since 2009, the inclusion of Indigenous health curricula within undergraduate nursing education became a discipline regulation requirement in Australia, and a strategic priority for the university sector. Standardising Indigenous health curricula within undergraduate nursing education should be celebrated, however, the history of the Australian nursing discipline as implementers of discriminatory government policies that harmed Indigenous peoples, suggests that caution should be exercised.
This presentation is based on my PhD thesis which engaged mostly Indigenist research approaches to critically investigate the experiences of Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics tasked with developing and delivering Indigenous health curricula.
Moreton-Robinson’s Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint theory is respectfully used to elucidate my social positions as the ‘Black man’, the ‘’Black male nurse’, the ‘Native academic’, and the ‘Indigenist researcher’. Her theory of relationality and white possessive logic weaved together with Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of rhizomes enabled a practice of assemblage (originally conceptualised by Deleuze and Guattari) that is more reflective of my peoples’ ways of knowing.
My exercise of assemblage enabled my genealogical analysis of historical literature on Indigenous health education in nursing programs, my analysis of associated contemporary social, political and material conditions, and my engagement of research yarning and dadirri with my participants for knowledge co-creation and with our research yarning transcripts for my analysis.
This presentation will elaborate on the design and exercise of an Indigenist approach to assemblage used in my PhD thesis.