Gorkin III, Robert A. Research Fellow

My ethnographic work with young women to explore their understanding of their relationships and their sexual health began in 2005 in the remote Indigenous community of Ngukurr in South East Arnhem Land. This was in response to community concerns about early initiation of sexual activity and high levels of teen pregnancy in the community. On the basis of my paper (with Richard Chenhall) Walkin' about at night, I was asked by the Centre for Communicable diseases (NT Health) to be the CI on an ARC Linkage project to explore how young people in communities across the NT, WA and SA understood and made decisions about their sexual health and their relationships. During the course of this research, an innovative visual methodology of scenario based body mapping to explore embodied experiences was developed and refined. This method elicited very rich and detailed responses from young people allowing a very rare insight into their lives, which was then fed back to service providers such as NT Health and youth focussed organisations such as HEADSPACE as well as relevant Government Ministers. On taking up my position with UOW in 2014, I began work with local sexual health organisations, in particular the HIV and related programs Unit. I delivered a series of workshops for them about my research and the methods I used to engage with young people. On the basis of their enthusiasm for the project, we worked to translate the method into an educational resource.  To do this we worked with a range of youth focussed organisations to test and refine the concepts that would be included in the resource and engaged design students from UOW to design the look of the resource and its components.

My ethnographic work with young women to explore their understanding of their relationships and their sexual health began in 2005 in the remote Indigenous community of Ngukurr in South East Arnhem Land. This was in response to community concerns about early initiation of sexual activity and high levels of teen pregnancy in the community. On the basis of my paper (with Richard Chenhall) Walkin' about at night, I was asked by the Centre for Communicable diseases (NT Health) to be the CI on an ARC Linkage project to explore how young people in communities across the NT, WA and SA understood and made decisions about their sexual health and their relationships. During the course of this research, an innovative visual methodology of scenario based body mapping to explore embodied experiences was developed and refined. This method elicited very rich and detailed responses from young people allowing a very rare insight into their lives, which was then fed back to service providers such as NT Health and youth focussed organisations such as HEADSPACE as well as relevant Government Ministers. On taking up my position with UOW in 2014, I began work with local sexual health organisations, in particular the HIV and related programs Unit. I delivered a series of workshops for them about my research and the methods I used to engage with young people. On the basis of their enthusiasm for the project, we worked to translate the method into an educational resource.  To do this we worked with a range of youth focussed organisations to test and refine the concepts that would be included in the resource and engaged design students from UOW to design the look of the resource and its components.