Indigenous Peoples, Whiteness, and the Coloniality of Co-design

The sustained inequities experienced by Indigenous peoples have been rigorously documented. Co-design has increasingly been posited as a way forward in the design of healthHealth interventions or services with Indigenous peoples and other groups that experience significant adverse health Healthand social inequities. However, the relatively rapid rise in co-design rhetoric within health Healthand disability settings has not necessarily been accompanied by an increased understanding of what co-design is. In addition, an ever-increasing enthusiasm for co-design as “the solution” has not equated with a growth in the evidence base around its effectiveness or appropriateness as an applied approach within Indigenous well-being contexts. This chapter deconstructs concepts of co-design within the context of deep-seated racialized social divisions central to Whiteness and coloniality. The chapter also draws upon the authors’ research identifying the emergence of co-design as a market/commodity and the parallel presence of harmful colonial, racist, paternalistic, deficit, othering, voyeuristic, and extractive discourses within the field of co-design. These discourses reveal an apparent disconnect between the rhetoric of co-design and its purported benefits and how co-design appears to be currently practiced. The extent to which current co-design practices naturalize colonial knowledge hierarchies and thus reify, rather than unsettle, Whiteness in health and disability settings is explored.