This page presents an outline of the regional International People’s Health University short course on Coloniality and the Struggle for Health, scheduled for 5-11 October 2025, to be held in Alice Springs (Mparntwe) in the Northern Territory of Australia. Apply here. The course will be followed by a one day meeting of People's Health Movement (PHM) in the East Asia and Pacific Region (in hybrid format). 

The course is co-sponsored by PHM and the Central Australia Aboriginal Congress. 

Objectives of the planned IPHU

The workshop in October 2025 will contribute to strengthening the Struggle for Health in Indigenous Australia and the East Asia and Pacific Region by:

• Deepening the mutual understanding within and across PHM circles (geographic and thematic) through a sharing of backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and campaigns; 

• Deepening our understanding of the barriers to Health for All including those which are local and specific, and those which shape everybody’s struggles, and also the relationships between the local barriers and the global structures; 

• Broadening the struggle for health by engaging with other progressive social movements in our region.

We hope that the outcomes of the workshop will include:

• Individual learning about the topics shared

• Understanding the structural causes of the barriers we face

• Deeper analyses and more confident strategic commitments

• Deepened solidarity across difference

• Deeper appreciation of the interdependence of our shared struggles 

• Stronger People’s Health Movement in East Asia and the Pacific.

Participant mix

We are hoping for a mix of:

• People working in Indigenous controlled health services in Australia;

• Indigenous health activists / community activists from around East Asia and the Pacific;

• Health activists from PHM circles around East Asia and the Pacific, including activists working in related sectors / movements but broadly aligned with PHM perspectives including from environment, climate action, food systems and gender justice;

• Diverse backgrounds across age, ethnicity, and gender.

Curriculum framework: Narratives of struggle

The workshop program will be organised around a central theme: forging ‘narratives of struggle’. ‘Narratives of struggle’ is a framework for capacity building for organisations and teams, and a framework for praxis for individuals. 

• Who am I, who are we? How am I (we) positioned in relation to the social change we want to see? Being reflexive about where we stand gives us insight into our practice but can also create blinkers.

• What are the priority challenges we need to address? What are the barriers to better health and wellbeing that we are facing? 

• What are the power structures which reproduce the barriers we are facing; what kinds of structural reforms might be needed to overturn those power structures? 

• What are the likely futures which could reshape the barriers and the power structures? What are the hopeful scenarios and what are the dreadful scenarios? 

• What kinds of social and political transformations would be necessary to make the hopeful scenarios more likely and the dreadful scenarios less likely? 

• What can I do – what can we do together - to drive those transformations and movements, overturn the power structures, take the pathways to better health?

This linear logic is a simplification of the more complex and chaotic ways in which we think about strategy, as individuals and as groups. In practice this kind of strategic narrative is assembled in various discussions, about different aspects, at different times; certainly not in this linear sequence. However, explicating such a ‘theory of struggle’ serves to bring into discourse considerations and connections which are often less clearly articulated. 

Participants will be invited to reflect on the various sharings, inputs, and activities during the course in terms of their own struggles (as individuals, in various organisations and teams, and as PHM).

Resource people will include: Pat Anderson, Tamara MacKean, David Legge, Delen de la Paz, Connie Marguerite Musolino, Paul Laris, Jamie Dasmariñas, and more. 

Program overview

Table 1. Program Overview 

Costs and applications

The IPHU is being supported by the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, PHM Global and the Political Economy of Health Special Interest Group of the Public Health Association of Australia. We are seeking further funding to provide some support for participants from low- and middle-income countries in the region. Australian organisations sponsoring staff will be asked to cover the costs of the IPHU including accommodation and course fee. 

Application details and forms here

Return to course announcement here