Jon Willis - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Jon Willis

This report provides details about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians living with ... more This report provides details about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians living with HIV who filled in and returned questionnaires as part of the HIV Futures II survey. The HIV Futures II survey was conducted by the Living with HIV research program at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University, in the second half of 1999. The survey asked PLWHA about their health, use of antiretroviral and complementary treatments, use of information and support services, and their housing and financial situation. It also asked about sex and relationships, people's social supports, recreational drug use, work situation and future planning.

Australian Journal of Public Health, 2010

The health problems of Aboriginal Australians, like those of many indigenous peoples, resemble th... more The health problems of Aboriginal Australians, like those of many indigenous peoples, resemble those of the developing world, yet they are dealt with using the tools, techniques, and high-technology medical solutions of first-world health. Such approaches ignore the social components of health and illness, including the need for preventive and educative programs at the primary health care level. The example of endstage renal disease provides a poignant example of the inadequacies of this approach. Central Australian Aboriginal people suffer from a high incidence of kidney disease from numerous causes including non-insulindependent diabetes mellitus and glomerulonephritis. The high incidence has led to numbers of people developing end-stage renal disease and moving into the Northern TerritorySouth Australia renal failure program for dialysis and/or transplantation. In requiring patients to leave their lands, communities and families, this program removes people from the religious and social support network that could ensure a reasonable quality of life in their final years, while offering only marginal extensions of those years. Expensive technology programs are of little benefit and of considerable cost to Aboriginal patients and draw attention away from efforts to reduce the exposure of at-risk Aboriginal people to the factors that facilitate the development of end-stage renal disease.

Culture, Health & Sexuality, 2003

This paper reports on ethnographic research on the culture-specific barriers that masculinity pos... more This paper reports on ethnographic research on the culture-specific barriers that masculinity poses to preventing HIV transmission in the sexual lives of Pitjantjatjara men. The investi-gation had three objectives: investigating how the Pitjantjatjara people model the physical and ...

Anthropology & Medicine, 1999

ABSTRACT In recent years, palliative care and hospice service providers have been criticised for ... more ABSTRACT In recent years, palliative care and hospice service providers have been criticised for their contribution to the increasing medical rationalisation of death and dying. At the same time, efforts to make palliative care more culturally appropriate for different ethnic ...

HIV, viral hepatitis and …

HIV, viral hepatitis and STIs: a guide for primary care Introduction Early diagnosis, monitoring ... more HIV, viral hepatitis and STIs: a guide for primary care Introduction Early diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of patients with recently acquired human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection may alter the long-term course of HIV disease. Knowledge of the clinical signs and ...

ABSTRACT Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Queensland, 1997. Includes bibliographical references.

Sexually Transmitted Diseases, 2007

The objective of this study was to determine levels of experience and knowledge concerning anal d... more The objective of this study was to determine levels of experience and knowledge concerning anal dysplasia, anal Pap smear tests, and human papillomavirus (HPV) among gay and other homosexually active men. Three hundred eighty-four men attending a large gay community event in Melbourne completed a short survey. Ninety-two percent identified as gay and 4.8% as bisexual. A total of 6.4% were HIV-positive and a further 3.5% did not know their HIV status. On a range of measures, it was clear that the men knew very little about anal cancer (19% scored zero on a 12-point knowledge scale) and virtually nothing about HPV (47% scored zero on an 8-point knowledge scale). A total of 55.1% had never heard of an anal Pap smear and 44.8% had ever heard of HPV; 56.4% did not know whether it affected men and/or women. The test for anal dysplasia is still largely unknown among Australian gay men and they currently have poor sense of personal susceptibility to the disease. Health education strategies are suggested to improve this situation.

AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples

There is a growing literature on Indigenous masculinities written by scholars in North America, H... more There is a growing literature on Indigenous masculinities written by scholars in North America, Hawai‘i and New Zealand which draws on a variety of approaches. While there are signs of scholarly interest in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander masculinities in Australia, this has yet to translate into a distinct body of work. This article is a potential opening onto such a future corpus, foregrounding and privileging how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men understand themselves. Interviews with 13 men, ranging in age from young teenagers through to Elders—among whom were Traditional Owners, school pupils, university students, community workers, health professionals and retirees—yielded a conception of Indigenous masculinities not concerned with recovering a lost masculinity. Rather, what was presented to us is a distinct conception of Indigenous masculinities rooted in place; a relationality motivated by an intergenerational sense of responsibility; a nuanced idea of “acting ...

Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists Newsletter, 1998

For many of the world's indigenous populations, a strong antipathy towards research is a common l... more For many of the world's indigenous populations, a strong antipathy towards research is a common legacy of the colonial era. Colonial authorities and their experts often seemed obsessed with documenting these captive populationseither cataloguing their exoticness, or recording their failures to comply with or thrive under colonial rule. They have been poked, prodded, measured and photographed; their graves and temples have been robbed and desecrated; their urine, blood, sweat and fingerprints have been sampled; and they have been bothered, queried and harried by every foreign expert under the sun. The challenges for researchers wanting to work with these populations are clear: what research questions, what approaches and methods, what potential outcomes are going to coax these very reluctant populations into participating in research? In this chapter, we examine a range of examples from Aboriginal Australia where research has been successful in terms of both satisfactory processes and outcomes. We particularly explore: the use of participatory research techniques; the value of research workers drawn from within the population; the importance of concrete and immediate outcomes; the benefits of building an information or skills exchange into the research; and methods to transfer degrees of ownership of each stage of the research to the community being studied.