2022 Fay Gale Lecture: Presented by Professor Chelsea Watego

‘No room at the Inn’: Rethinking critical race studies and its place in the Australian academy

Date: Wed 23 Feb
Time: 4:00pm ACDT / 4:30pm AEDT / 1.30PM AWST
Location: Ingkarni Wardli (top floor), The University of Adelaide

This public lecture is a reflection on the location of race in the Australian academy, both in its absence and presence. Rather than make an appeal for inclusion of critical race studies as a legitimate intellectual endeavour, Watego instead considers the dangers of domesticating Black emancipatory agendas, and in doing so, highlights the possibilities of intellectual work that is of service to the very people suffering the full brunt of racial violence.

Read the transcript here.

Chelsea Watego (formerly Bond) is a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman with over 20 years of experience working within Indigenous health as a health worker and researcher. Chelsea’s work has drawn attention to the role of race in the production of health inequalities. Her current ARC Discovery Grant seeks to build an Indigenist Health Humanities as a new field of research; one that is committed to the survival of Indigenous peoples locally and globally, and foregrounds Indigenous intellectual sovereignty. She is a prolific writer and public intellectual, having written for IndigenousX, NITV, The Guardian, and The Conversation. She is a founding board member of Inala Wangarra, an Indigenous community development association within her community, a Director of the Institute for Collaborative Race Research, and was one half of the Wild Black Women radio/podcast show, but most importantly, she is also a proud mum to five beautiful children. Her latest book Another Day in the Colony is published by University of Queensland Press.

The Fay Gale Lecture is named in honour of the late Professor Gwendoline Fay Gale AO (1932–2008), the first female President of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and an eminent human geographer well known for her contributions to the advancement of women within academia, Indigenous studies and juvenile justice. The lecture, inaugurated in 2010, is presented each year by a distinguished female social scientist and is open to the public. This lecture is jointly hosted by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Fay Gale Centre for Research on Gender.