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Some of The ALIVE National Centre Team have been awarded the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) Consumer-Led Research grant for the project: A Citizen Science Project to co-create ‘BigaagARri’ a Preventive Experiential, Arts, Cultural Evidence (PEACE) model for implementing at-scale in primary care and community.
PEACE leverages six exciting innovations in citizen science to co-create the new health knowledge essential for turning the tide in inequities of disease burden in Australia. The costs of these inequities are known, and they are socially and economically high. The impacts are most profound in priority populations where chronic diseases and intersecting issues of gender inequalities, family violence, mental ill-health, suicide, and ongoing trauma persist. Overall, too many life years have been and continue to be shortened. Current prevention approaches are not reaching people who need it most.
In Gumbaynggirr language, ‘bigaagarri’ means danger/threat to wellbeing. It signals to stay back and keep safe from this. This is a gifted word from one of our Aboriginal investigators to co-create preventive, experiential, arts based, cultural evidence models. To do this we will:
(1) co-design virtual and augmented reality immersive media that work to address trauma, violence and social disconnection AND prevent downstream chronic diseases and the multitude of ill-health – using crowdsourcing and co-design;
(2) co-create a holistic measurement framework to address current gaps in trauma-violence informed measures – led by people with lived-experience;
(3) pilot the platform in health and community settings – generating citizen science evidence and a plan for scalability.
PEACE will deliver this new knowledge collaboratively with lived-experience, humanities, primary health care, public health, arts and First Nations researchers. The digital platform will be co-created using crowdsourcing of innovations (2023), co-design and testing within the Big Anxiety festival (2024), then refinement for implementation in a service setting pilot (2025). The ‘BigaagaARri’ platform will be an immersive media environment that is universally available to increase public education, but is used in parallel to deliver targeted preventive care to facilitate holistic health conversations.
The research team for this project are:
| CIA | Prof Victoria Palmer – University of Melbourne |
| CI | Prof Michelle Banfield – Australian National University |
| CI | Prof Jill Bennett – University of New South Wales |
| CI | Prof Kelsey Hegarty – University of Melbourne |
| CI | Prof Sandra Eades AO (Noongar) – University of Melbourne |
| CI | Dr Oliver Black (Anaiwan) – Australian National University |
| CI | Phillip Orcher (Muruwori and Gumbaynggirr) – University of Melbourne |
| CI | Dr Katie Lamb – University of Melbourne |
| CI | Dr Jennifer Bibb – University of Melbourne |
| CI | Elise Dettmann – University of Melbourne |
| CI | Josh Moorhouse – University of Melbourne |
| AI | Dr Caroline Tjung – University of Melbourne |
| AI | Prof James Smith – Flinders University |
| AI | Noemi Tari-Keresztes – Flinders University |
| AI | Rebecca Moran – University of New South Wales |
| AI | Maggie Bell – University of Melbourne |
| AI | Ilona – University of Melbourne |
The ALIVE National Centre is funded by the NHMRC Special Initiative in Mental Health.
We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and sky. We pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging. We are committed to working together to address the health inequalities within our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. We accept the invitation to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that this site may contain images and voices of deceased persons.
This map attempts to represent the language, social or nation groups of Aboriginal Australia. It shows only the general locations of larger groupings of people which may include clans, dialects or individual languages in a group. It used published resources from the eighteenth century-1994 and is not intended to be exact, nor the boundaries fixed. It is not suitable for native title or other land claims. David R Horton (creator), © AIATSIS, 1996. No reproduction without permission. To purchase a print version visit: https://shop.aiatsis.gov.au/
The ALIVE National Centre for Mental Health Research Translation is funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Special Initiative in Mental Health GNT2002047.
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