Professor Chelsea Watego

Biography

Professor Chelsea Watego (formerly Bond) is a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman with over 25 years of experience working within Indigenous health as a health worker and researcher. She is the Executive Director of QUT’s Carumba Institute, and her scholarship has drawn attention to the role of race in the production of health inequalities, leading to the formation of Indigenist health humanities as a new field of research supported through an ARC Discovery Grant. She has cultivated an extensive research program which is committed to the survival of Indigenous peoples locally and globally, foregrounding Indigenous intellectual sovereignty and expanding interdisciplinary approaches to Indigenous critical race theory.

She is a prolific writer and public intellectual, having written for IndigenousX, NITV, The Guardian, and The Conversation. She was a founding board member of Inala Wangarra, an Indigenous community development association within her community, founder and former Director of the Institute for Collaborative Race Research, but most importantly, she is also a proud mum to five beautiful children. Her debut book Another Day in the Colony, published by UQ Press, was released in November 2021 and met with critical acclaim. Her second book, Black Thoughts Matter, was published this year and gathers groundbreaking essays previously published on a range of digital platforms. The collection also offers fresh critical context for these pieces as well as newer writing that captures more recent political preoccupations.