the touch pad body: a generative transcultural digital device interrupting received ideas and practices in aboriginal health
;Michael Christie;Helen Verran
food microbiology2014Vol. 4pp. 256-264
218
christie2014societiesthe
Abstract
Yolŋu Aboriginal understandings of the body, health, life and sickness, and roles their ancestral epistemologies and knowledge practices play in making agreement have seldom been taken seriously in the biomedical world. In this paper, we describe how insights developed in three different cross-cultural collaborative transdisciplinary research projects led to the design of a digital device aimed at intervening in communicative practices around body, health, life and sickness, interrupting the received practices and assumptions on both sides of the practitioner-client divide. The interrupting device slows down and opens up communication practices potentially leading to mutual understanding, collective agreement making, and bottom-up changes in remote Aboriginal health policy and practice.