Karin Gerhardt 2024 Australian Marine Sciences Association Annual Meeting combined with NZMSS

Karin Gerhardt

I am currently working for the Great Barrier Reef Foundation in the Traditional Owner Partnerships team and provide scaling and evaluation expertise to the Queensland Indigenous Women Network. This provides an amazing opportunity to co-design with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in programs that are important to their country (including sea country). Throughout my career I have kept a central focus on the evaluation of Indigenous programs and projects and how to resituate the evaluation narrative to one that is important to Traditional Owners. I enjoy research that is community based and fosters participation and ownership of projects by Traditional Owners and this includes adopting more contemporary, participative social science methods which are used in pro-social research or human centred design. My current work sees me co-designing a Healthy Water program with Traditional Owners of the Great Barrier Reef and its catchment areas, working alongside the Queensland Indigenous Women Ranger Network to deliver an effective program and co-developing a climate change assessment protocol that is respectful and inclusive of cultural values and the Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property protocols that are needed at the western science and Indigenous Knowledge interface.

Abstracts this author is presenting: