Institutional Racism and the Dynamics of Privilege in Public Health

Institutional racism, a pattern of differential access to material resources and power determined by race, advantages one sector of the population while disadvantaging another. Such racism is not only about conspicuous acts of violence but can be carried in the hold of mono-cultural perspectives. Overt state violation of principles contributes to the backdrop against which much less overt yet insidious violations occur. New Zealand health policy is one such mono-cultural domain. It is dominated by western bio-medical discourses that preclude and under-value Māori, the indigenous peoples of this land, in the conceptualisation, structure, content, and processes of health policies, despite Te Tiriti o Waitangi guarantees to protect Māori interests. Since the 1980s, the Department of Health has committed to honouring the Treaty of Waitangi as the founding document of Māori-settler relationships and governance arrangements. Subsequent Waitangi Tribunal reports, produced by an independent Commission of Inquiry have documented the often-illegal actions of successive governments advancing the interests of Pākehā at the expense of Māori. Institutional controls have not prevented inequities between Māori and non-Māori across a plethora of social and economic indicators. Activist scholars work to expose and transform perceived inequities. My research interest lies in how Crown Ministers and officials within the public health sector practice institutional racism and privilege and how it can be transformed. Through dialogue with Māori working within the health sector, fuelled by critical analysis and strategic advice from a research whānau (family) of Māori health leaders and a Pākehā Tiriti worker, and embracing the traditions of feminist and critical race theory I provide evidence of racism that can invoke strong emotional reactions. More disturbing is its normalisation to nigh imperceptibility within ones personal and professional life. The exposure of racism as a socially created phenomenon is a strength of the research presented here. My action orientation is my ethical response. Honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi is a pathway to transforming racism. Such change is likely to be resisted by the Pākehā majority. This anticipated resistance is not a credible reason to weaken responsibility for such necessary change. Transforming institutional racism needs to be driven by senior managers, professional bodies, unions, and by communities. Policies, practices and leadership that enable institutional racism need to be systematically eliminated from the health sector. Crown officials must be supported to strengthen their professional accountabilities and to embrace ethical bicultural practice. Greater transparency could enable more effective monitoring of Crown behaviour and support transformed practice

Pathways to Transform Institutional (and Everyday) Racism in New Zealand

Racism has become a normalised part of New Zealand society despite our governments’ endorsement of human rights treaties and our founding document Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The outcomes of racism appear as significant and enduring disparities in social outcomes between Māori and non-Māori. New Zealand has a range of strategies attempting to deal with inequities between population groups but currently lacks a coherent national plan and/or strategy to transform racism. Within this paper the authors offer four pathways as a contribution to a national plan i) addressing historical racism ii) improving racial climate iii) mobilising civil society through collective impact iv) strengthening controls through systems change approaches within public institution

A Fair Go for All: A Problematic Contribution to Anti-racism Praxis in Aotearoa

In New Zealand, the Human Rights Commission is the lead agency in countering institutional racism. They have recently undertaken a major research project, A Fair Go For All (Human Rights Commission 2011), to inform the development of a national strategy/approach to counter structural discrimination. This paper, from an activist scholarship standpoint argues their chosen approach has ignoring the power relations inherent in researching racism. Furthermore their approach has minimised both the historic element of racism against Māori and the significance of Te Tiriti o Waitangi to anti-racism praxis in Aotearoa. Rather than endorse an ad hoc approach with a focus on practitioner bias (personally-mediated racism), and addressing ethnic inequalities (the outcome of institutional racism) this paper advocates for a Tiriti based systems change approach to transform institutional racism as it manifests in the neo-colonial context of Aotearoa

Toward sustainable lifestyles through collaborative consumption platforms: a case study of a community from Montevideo city.

In a world in which market-oriented economies steer human endeavours on a global scale, the urgency for moving towards more sustainable futures has become more than evident. The role design plays as co-producer of everyday life, both in its physical and social construction, demands today designers to lead collective action through visions of sustainable lifestyles (Manzini, 2015; Irwin, 2015). Urban citizens, concerned with the unsustainability of dominant practices have been actively participating in such transitions, bringing changes into the lifestyles of their communities. Described as collaborative organizations, these bottom-up initiatives use social media and act as grassroots organizations (Manzini, 2015). Alternatively, these initiatives also fall under the umbrella notion of the collaborative or sharing economy. However, this notion is not representative of the diversity in those organizations as the phenomenon encompasses diverse endeavours wherein aims, motivations, organizational structures, and consequent societal and environmental impact vary widely from case to case. This research aims to learn, from an empirical viewpoint, how and why citizens interact and engage in these practices, through a case study of a citizen-led initiative from Montevideo, Uruguay. This platform and community propose a solution to the problem of accumulation of disused goods, configuring alternative practices of consuming, using, and disposing of goods. The case is analyzed with literature from collaborative economy studies; relevant concepts from Design for Social Innovation; and several theories brought together by Transition Design, used as a conceptual framework for sustainable lifestyles. The study suggests that on top of various motivations, engagement in community-oriented collaborative platforms can be explained by technological and cultural arrangements that foster a sense of belonging through giving active roles to participants in the community. Therefore, it is argued that these practices represent a step in transitions toward sustainable lifestyles as they engage citizens in self-organization and increase the possibilities of local and endogenous satisfaction of needs, at a global scale (in the sense of ‘cosmopolitan localism’). However, challenges for these platforms are building governance that prevents centralization of power and supporting its technological infrastructure without compromising their non-profit character with financial arrangements. Moreover, an important shortcoming is the reliance on centralized mass production and consumption, as these systems do not propose a distributed alternative to production but only to consumption practices. For that reason, environmental benefits cannot be claimed without further research

Nietzsche and the Fate of Art

Review of Philip Pothen, Nietzsche and the Fate of Art, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62:

Nietzsche's Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought

Review of R. Kevin Hill, Nietzsche's Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Though

Prototype of a new Engineering Masters project model: Working with marketing and software faculties to commercially kickstart university research

We describe a Master of Engineering (500-level) project modelled on the real-world arrangement where engineers work with marketing and software groups to prepare a product for commercialisation. A 4-member software team to develop and test embedded firmware and support applications on a mobile platform was provided through a final-year undergraduate software-engineering project course based outside the engineering school, in a separate faculty. A marketing team consisting of interns prepared logos, product names, and advertising materials, with input from a creative 200-level class. This team also considered possible exit strategies based on analysis of the market size and activity. This marketing effort was organised through the management communications group in the management school. The masters student acts as project manager and it is their remit to guide the product towards release on the crowd-sourced venture-capital site kickstarter.com. A small but original product idea is required to provide a viable vehicle for the project. Financial commitment to manufacture, even on a small scale, represents a novel outcome for a university project

Nietzsche's Attempt at a Self-Criticism: Art and Morality in The Birth of Tragedy

A general consensus exists among Nietzsche s interpreters that his retrospective assessments of his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy, are of little interpretive value. For these critical statements, it is argued, which appear in the preface to the second edition of BT entitled Attempt at a Self-Criticism and in the section on BT in Ecce Homo, do not serve as genuine self-criticism; rather, they are intended to project onto this early work views Nietzsche only later developed. My broad aim in this paper is to show that this accepted orthodoxy is mistaken, and that taking seriously Nietzsche s retrospective claims sheds considerable light on his main philosophical ambitions in BT. In particular, I want to substantiate Nietzsche s claim in ASC that BT s aestheticism summed up by the work s famous dictum that the world and existence can be justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon (BT 5) is in some sense embedded in a deep hostility to morality, hostility that is usually taken by commentators to characterize only the works from Human, All-Too-Human onwards. Taking up this claim, I am going to argue, broadly, that BT presents a fundamental opposition between moral and aesthetic value, and a related plea for a rejection of moral categories in favour of an evaluative framework conceived in aesthetic terms. My aim is to explicate this opposition and to examine Nietzsche's reasons in general for advocating the substitution of the aesthetic for the moral. I argue that this opposition forms the basic framework of BT and clarifies: (i) Nietzsche s rejection in BT of Schopenhauer s pessimism; (ii) his critique of Socratic rationalism; (iii) the meaning of the work's central notion of an aesthetic justification of existence; and shows that (iv) there are good reasons for believing that even as early as BT Nietzsche was seeking an alternative to morality. It follows, I conclude, that the orthodox, threefold periodization of Nietzsche s thought which separates BT from his later works is fundamentally misconceive