Skip to main content

The value of truth...

The marriage of Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) with the Culture-Centered Approach (CCA) seems to be one that was destined to happen...the synergies between these approaches to the uses of clinical information are incredible. This brings me to the core point about CCA, the one about Structure, and one that puts it in opposition to postmodern approaches to critical theory that often get reduced to the feel-good elements of identity politics in multiculturalism. In foregrounding the localized voices of the margins, the approach continually seeks to engage with entry points for making truth claims in relationship to social structures. That hunger is a truth in the most salient rendition of it is something that is continually brought to the forefront in multiple CCA studies.

If CCA is positioned in the quest for truth that is grounded in material evidence, the value of CER to CCA precisely lies in the quest for clinical evidence base for medical decision-making that is grounded in an empirical evidence base. The value of this evidence base precisely lies in the information capacity it seeks to build in the local communities at the margins. That information is ultimately powerful as a resource for patients who are often marginalized has been again and again articulated by community members. What is most amazing is the invaluable demonstration of ways in which individual community members search for this information base in their interactions with their physicians. The experiences of marginalization are often narrated precisely at these moments of physician-patient interactions, where information becomes the marker of structural violence. Community members talk about being marginalized precisely because they don't have access to information.

Therefore, for CCA to work well, where local communities feel empowered to make clinical decisions on the basis of the latest evidence base, the challenge is to (a) actually seek out the most credible evidence base for medical decision-making (if there is one thing that the CER process brings to surface, it is this: How often it is that medical decisions are made in the absence of adequate evidence-base for decision-making), and (b) find ways to center this evidence base as a resource for local communities (resist the grand narrative that local communities at the margins don't have the necessary skillsets to engage with information).

I want to wrap up this posting by foregrounding how important it is to continually come back to this quest for truth claims in CCA work because it is ultimately in these truth claims that we co-create opportunities for structural transformations.

Popular posts from this blog

Zionist hate mongering, the race/terror trope, and the Free Speech Union: Part 1

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

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 wit

Tova O’Brien and pedagogy of whiteness

So Tova O’Brien was looking for a click-bait opportunity to draw in listeners to her podcast and she found the migrant activist and Green Party politician Dr. Sapna Samant to pick on. In a gotcha moment, Tova shared with the Green Party co-leader James Shaw a series of posts made by Dr. Samant on whiteness, Hindutva, and multiculturalism, asking him if the tweets were OK. We don’t understand from listening to O’Brien’s podcast if her research team actively researched Dr. Sapna Samant’s social media posts, or whether these selective screen captures of Dr. Samant’s tweets were sent to her by someone wanting to target Samant. The thoroughly unresearched piece is poor journalism, reflective of the mediocrity that is perpetuated by whiteness , the hegemonic values of the dominant white culture in settler colonies. If indeed her research team had discovered the tweets, it’s worth interrogating why the social media posts of a migrant woman activist on whiteness are of interest to O’Brien’s po