The Touch Pad Body: A Generative Transcultural Digital Device Interrupting Received Ideas and Practices in Aboriginal Health

• Main Authors: Michael Christie, Helen Verran
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2014-05-01
• Series: Societies
• Subjects: Aboriginal; digital; health literacy; health communication; transdisciplinary
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/4/2/256

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.