I am in the process of reviewing a proposal for a large scale project that frames itself in terms of addressing healthcare disparities. After giving us sermons about how disparities are bad, and so on and so forth, the proposal goes on to talk about some silly and outdated concept of "external locus of control" and makes the claim that addressing external locus of control would change behaviors. The behavior in question, my favorite, eating fruits and vegetables. So the evaluation measures of the project that is asking for a large sum of money to address health disparities is played out in getting the target community to eat more fruits and vegetables. Silly, silly, silly...and more importantly, one might suggest, wastage of tax payer dollars. Nowhere in the proposal does the researcher show awareness of the prices that the poor have to pay for securing fruits and vegetables, or of the fact that fruits and vegetables are typically out of the reach of the common person. Most importantly, after exhorting us to consider the problem with health inequalities, nowhere does the proposal show an awareness of the structural roots of these disparities. Instead, it blames underserved communities for not eating adequate servings of fruits and vegetables, and labels the communities with the tag of "external locus of control." It is about time that we train our social scientists to look at the big picture rather than think about social problems through the myopic lens (often of some individual behavior driven social psychology) that they have been trained in.
March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University. Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute