Moving Forward Together in Aboriginal Women's Health: - Theses ...

Moving Forward TogetherJanet Kellyconcerns and challenges (think and discuss) and together we planned strategies toaddress the gaps and needs. Our collaborative action (take action) involvedmapping available resources, holding Women’s health days, and involving youngAboriginal women in programs. This chapter provides another perspective on manyof the issues raised by Aboriginal community women in Collaboration Area One.The focus in Chapter Nine is on health and well-being needs of young Aboriginalwomen. Although originally I intended to work directly with young Aboriginalwomen at the Gilles Plains campus, this did not eventuate for a range of complexreasons. Rather this Collaborative Area focused on how Gilles Plains AboriginalOutreach Health Service and the local high school, Windsor Gardens VocationalCollege, could work together to improve young Aboriginal women’s access tohealth information, services and well-being.In Chapter Ten I outline how co-researchers and I developed a collaborative decolonisingaction research and action learning conference embedded in Aboriginalpreferred ways of knowing and doing. This Collaboration Area emerged as a way toaddress Aboriginal women co-researchers’ concerns about the limited opportunitiesthey had to share and have their own personal and professional knowledge heard,valued and respected. I also had ethical concerns about writing this thesis andpresenting my account of our collaborative research, without first creating spacesfor co-researchers to share their own knowledge with a wider audience. A group ofAboriginal and non-Aboriginal researchers, academics, educators, project managersand other interested people came together to co-plan and co-host a nationalconference in Adelaide titled ‘Moving Forward Together’. Both the process andoutcomes are discussed as equally important aspects of this research. The thesis isbrought together in the final Chapter Eleven.Chapter two introduces the theoretical framework that underpins this research, andoutlines how Aboriginal and Western concepts of knowledge sharing andcollaboration are brought together to form the guiding philosophy.26