Community Engagement and Consent: A Conversation with Azure Hermes

Community engagement and ensuring informed consent are highly important processes when engaging in co-creative research with Indigenous communities. Azure Hermes, Deputy Director of the National Centre for Indigenous Genomics (NCIG), shares her experiences navigating through these processes in her work with Indigenous communities consulting about potential uses of historical blood samples held by NCIG. Topics explored in the conversation with Azure include:

• Azures' process of learning how to do community engagement on complex and sometimes contentious issues
• Changes in ethical standards over time for conducting genetic medical research, and engaging Indigenous people in research in general
• How effective process of community engagement can form the basis of trust, protocols of access and informed consent, even for potentially unknown future uses of research material
• The challenges associated with gaining iterative consent, where consent is gained multiple times during a process for each new step or use

To ensure accessibility we are committed to providing transcripts of all our podcast episodes - you can read the full transcript here.

National Centre for Indigenous Genomics

Azure Hermes is the Deputy Director for the National Centre for Indigenous Genomics at the Australian National University. She has made a career of bridging the gap between policy intention and policy implementation affecting Indigenous Australians.   

You can find Azure online at National Centre for Indigenous Genomics website, Twitter and Instagram 

Email - [email protected]

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Collaboratory is written, edited and produced by Maya Haviland with production and editorial assistance from Nicole Deen. Audio engineering by Nick McCorriston. Music made especially for us by Seprock. Additional research and production support by Nicole O'Dowd.

Collaboratory is produced on the lands of the Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri  people.We pay our respects, an ongoing gratitude to the custodian's past present and future of the lands on which we work and of the knowledges from which we learn.

Collaboratory is a production of the Scaffolding Cultural Co-creativity Project hosted by the Center for Heritage and Museum Studies in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University funding is generously provided by the Australian National University Translational Fellowship Scheme.