Skip to main content

Communication always was and will be the key to any problem...

The story that I enjoyed reading the most and that probably stimulated my thinking the most was Hawkins' story about Dr. Lewis and Mr. Pearsall. I pondered for a while over the statement or rather justification that Dr. Lewis used to make himself feel better after he first told Mr. Pearsall about his treatment option: "He didn't lie to Mr. Pearsall about those side effects, because Mr. Pearsall didn't ask." It make me think about how may people I know that go by the motto "don't ask, don't tell" and the fact that they can live and deal with their consciousness of NOT telling. There has to be a cognitive process that fights your inner feeling of what is right (can we call that morals or maybe instinct) and justifies your actions. Are those morals/instincts learned or do they reside in all of us naturally? Do your emotions influence your decision-making and your justifications when you have to make choices in life? According to Hawkins in case of Dr. Lewis that was the case. Is this the same for everybody...I don't think so, because then problems of social inequality wouldn't exist, if everybody would feel just a little bit for the person next door. Can altruism be the solution to approach problems of inequality?

I learned a lot from Adelson's description of the Canadian Aborigines. The annual gatherings are a way to enact their agency, are a way to share with their own and with people from the outside what their "culture" is all about. These gatherings also allowed to raise their voices and engage in dialogue, not only to save what might be lost when the elder member of the community pass, but also to simply exchange in dialogue and by doing so enact their agency. The chapter on losing a piece of culture made me wonder, if, when culture is considered flexible and changing with time, can it even be possible to "lose culture" or does it simply change and evolve? Does change = loss or does change automatically assume losing parts and gaining others?

In past readings we discussed the importance of narratives of people with chronic pain for example and how important these narratives are for "the others" to even try to comprehend and feel their pain. Chambers and Montgomery illustrate in their piece, that there is indeed different plots (perspectives) to the same story, depending whose eyes we see through. Sad but true, in today's medical approaches, stories such as Mr. Kaufmann's, will remain very "paper-based", following a certain protocol to come to a diagnosis. Unfortunately this, through the eyes of a doctor/politics approach loses its realness and closeness to what is actually going on with people sometimes, it makes us lose the core, we get side tracked. The fact the the medical business is an all money making business these days, that won't allow for those deeper approaches and that won't allow for the narratives of the patients. Is the lack of time and dedication one reason why chronic diseases and unsolvable cases even exist?

Popular posts from this blog

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

  The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...
Read more

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

  The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026 There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist  at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported , Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mai...
Read more