Popular Education, Capacity-Building and Action Research: Increasing Aboriginal Community Control of Education and Health Research

Abstract

In the 1980s academic research was very unpopular with Central Australian Aboriginal organisations, and they regularly turned researchers away. ...By a circuitous route, one eventual outcome of this history was the establishment in July 1997 of the Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal and Tropical Health (CRCATH).¹ The CRCATH represents an unusual partnership between old enemies. It brings together three academic research institutions with three direct service providers, of which one is the Northern Territory Government health service and two are Aboriginal community-controlled health services. Thus, it seeks to bridge the gulf that once separateduniversities and governments on the one hand, and Aboriginal community-controlled organisations on the other. ...However, this reframing of old disputes is by no means as straightforward as simply saying it suggests, and somehistorical questions remain to be answered before we can 'move on'. Of these, the most important is this: Why havedecades of academic research into the conditions of Aboriginal life not yet substantially reduced the socio-economicand health inequality between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people? ... How might the CRCATH break with this pattern? A commonly held view is that, as Aboriginal people become 'better educated' they will be better equipped to take control of the research process themselves. This, in fact, is an assumption of the CRCATH's Indigenous Health and Education Research program. But this begs the question of how people become better educated, and who will judge that they have become so, when currently in Australian society the same academic institutions that control research also sit at the summit of the education system that judges who are sufficiently educated to undertake research.