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us sermons about how disparities are bad, and so on and so forth, the proposal goes on to talk about some silly and outdated concept of "external locus of control" and makes the claim that addressing external locus of control would change behaviors.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.
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...