Abstract
Embedding Indigenous values and principles into decolonising ethical methodologies has often resulted in challenging much of the status quo occurring in research design. In part, this has been due to dominant forms of scholarship leading to Indigenous knowledges, ways of knowing, being, and doing being exploitatively taken from the communities who had shared this information.
Indigenous values and principles have required actions such as a strong time and relationship commitment and reciprocity building for stakeholder communities. This case describes a project that was designed with community benefit as its first priority. In order to include diverse community representation, the project was positioned within a number of Aboriginal community-controlled health services in Queensland (QLD), New South Wales (NSW), and Western Australia (WA). The services were chosen to include metropolitan, regional, and rural communities as well as diverse cultural communities. The codesign element required reciprocity and making meaning together via enacting ganma concepts of knowledge sharing. A crucial part of the codesign process were the focus groups held with stakeholders, including mothers, workers, and community-based service providers to discuss nutritional understandings for mums during pregnancy. Broadly speaking, reciprocity can take a number of different meanings. This may include actions such as sharing knowledges (including new knowledges identified by women as important to their well-being or their babies) , gifting or sharing tasks.
This project as described in this paper shows how partnering and enacting reciprocity has aided in the codesign of mobile health technology from content to image and functional engagement both for our community partners and for the full Chief Investigator (CI) and Associate Investigator team. By naming ideological questions, shaping and sharing the strategy journey and exploring our learning we present students with ways to consider codesign with Indigenous ways of knowing and doing as central to the research process.