CARE COVID19 Lecture Series- Fear, Trauma, Loss and Grief: The effects of Terror and Covid-19 on Polarity and Discrimination within Workplaces with Dr Fatima Junaid, School of Management, Massey University
Abstract: In this talk Fatima talks about the implications of prolonged exposure to terrorism, and the current context of Covid-19. She highlights the influence of stress and trauma due to loss, and how that impacts us in terms of drawing closer to those we trust, while the fear of death makes our social attitudes rigid, especially towards those who are different. This complexity can cause polarity and discrimination within workplaces.
Abstract: The rise of authoritarian regimes across the world has made it more and more difficult for immigrants, migrants, asylum seekers and refugees to move to places and spaces that provide more avenues of sustainable livelihood, security from religious or other forms of persecution, or simply a better life for themselves and their loved ones. Their situation has been made even more vulnerable within the context of COVID-19 and border closures. In this talk, I review current literature on (im)migrant populations and racism and critically analyze the discourses of powerful politicians from different parts of the world to unpack how their response to COVID-19 and the control of their borders have deeper and long-lasting meaning and implications for (im)migrants and other vulnerable populations. The analysis reveals that politicians’ COVID-19 responses achieve several racist and nationalist goals: tilting the ideological wars in favor of labor laws that largely disregard the value and needs of (im)migrants; promote the nationalist agenda of restricting legal immigration; and fan the fires of the strong, pressing, and, sometimes violent, aspirations of the dominant White class eager to play exclusionary politics with regard to (im)migrants’ religious/ethnic/racial identities. I end with a reflection from my personal experience as an immigrant within the COVD-19 context and provide some directions as to how discourses of resistance can be formed, even within the restrictive policies and politics of the authoritarian impulses that are rampant realities in today’s world.
COVID-19 has placed squarely into the public eye some fundamental academic debates within the discipline of critical health communication, broadly defined as the scholarly interrogation of the ideological bases of available public discourses of health. In this talk, combining personal reflection and a review of relevant literature, Dr. Shaunak Sastry analyzes the politicization of personal protection in global responses to COVID-19. Masks, a crucial element in COVID prevention, symbolize an individual action to minimize a societal risk, but masking (as policy) operates on certain social, institutional and political consensuses. While it is impossible to ignore the “culture war” around masking in the United States, Dr. Shaunak Sastry attends to this singular aberration and explore the everyday politics of masking in other global contexts, with a focus on China. In particular, Dr. Sastry explores the identity work that ensues from masking as public health policy, the implications of masks as social currency, and the role of “mask diplomacy” as a futile response to the conditions of neoliberal globalization that exacerbated the global risk of COVID-19. Finally, he looks at mask politics through a historical-critical lens to argue that the politicization of protection is not “novel”, but a fundamental condition of pandemics through time.
Dr. Shaunak Sastry, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Cincinnati and Affiliate Faculty, Center for Culture-centered Research and Evaluation (CARE) at Massey University, New Zealand. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of health and culture, globalization and health, and the cultural politics of infectious diseases. His work combines ethnographic and field-based methods with critical analysis of public discourses of health. He has published on HIV/AIDS in India, the politics of global HIV/AIDS interventions, and on the 2014 Ebola epidemic.His work has been published in leading international peer-reviewed journals like Health Communication, Communication Theory, Journal of Health Communication, Culture, Health & Sexuality, Frontiers in Communication, and Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, in addition to several book chapters and more than 30 paper presentations at national and international conferences. He is a Senior editor of the journal Health Communication, and sits on the editorial boards of several other academic journals. He is currently working on a digital ethnography of China’s early response to CoVID-19 and the politics of masking.
Thousands of headlines in the past few months alone have referenced the uncertainty that we are going through, and “during these uncertain times” is a part of nearly everything written about the pandemic. However, uncertainty is not new. In fact, it individuals have experienced (and tried to manage) uncertainty since the advent of time, so, what, if anything, makes this pandemic moment unique? Prof. Walid A. Afifi, a Fellow of the International Communication Association, is among the worldwide leaders in the study of uncertainty. In this discussion, he will overview some of the decades of research on uncertainty across disciplines and geographic boundaries, and reflect on both the uneven distribution of uncertainty across communities and on the implications therein. He will also share preliminary data from a four-wave national study collected in the United States across a three month period spanning early stages of the covid pandemic, and introduce for the first time a framework that identifies four broad coping strategies for community-wide and chronic experiences of uncertainty.
Bio: Walid A. Afifi (PhD, University of Arizona) is a Professor in the Department of Communication and Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He is an author on over 75 articles, chapters, and books, served as Chair of the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa (2013-2016), served as Chair (2016-2018) of national Task Force on academic-community collaboration with members of oppressed communities, and is a leading voice in the Communication discipline to create more inclusive spaces. His program of research revolves around uncertainty and information-management decisions and has led to the development and refinement of the Theory of Motivated Information Management. That work has increasingly focused on immigrant communities and/or communities experiencing trauma. He was recently elected as a Fellow of the International Communication Association (the first Palestinian so honored) and recognized by UCSB for “extraordinary commitment to the general growth and development of students and the quality of student life.” He is a proud father to two daughters.
In this talk, based on the example of the COVID-19 response in the state of Kerala, Mohan Dutta will examine socialist processes of organizing politics and economics in COVID-19 response. He will drawon the key tenets of the culture-centered approach (CCA)to outline culture-centered principles of socialist organizing of health, economics, and politics.
Evaluation research is desperately needed to provide the evidence needed to guide effective prevention, preparation, and response efforts for countering the deadly effects of pandemics, such as COVID-19! We need to conduct surveillance research (such as epidemiological research) to monitor impending health risks, disseminate the latest surveillance data about health risks to policy makers, first-responders, and affected publics, using research to guide evidence-based health risk reduction efforts. Research should guide mobilization of essential risk response resources and personnel, determine needed education and training activities, and guide the implementation of relevant public policies and programs to prepare for pandemics.
When pandemics do hit, we need good data to guide development of coordinated treatment and mitigation programs, including designing relevant communication efforts to inform, persuade, and enforce the best evidence-based health risk response activities. These risk response efforts must be carefully monitored and evaluated to identify what is working and what is not when responding to pandemics, to guide needed refinements to health risk programs and policies. Needs analysis research must examine the nature of health risks, identify who is at risk, and suggest what can be done to reduce their risks. Audience analysis must guide appropriate communication with key at-risk populations, especially by actively engaging members of these populations to participate in developing and implementing appropriate response programs. Dr Gary L. Kreps examines the best evaluation research strategies for guiding effective communication and response efforts for pandemics to reduce risks and save lives!
The health and economic impacts of the covid-19 pandemic have spun our world on its axis. What was ‘normal’ before the covid-19 crisis hit is unlikely to ever be the same ‘normal’ again. In this contribution to the discussions taking place across progressive left communities at present, Dr Sue Bradford, Community Educator with Kotare Research and Education for Social Change in Aotearoa, explores some of the opportunities she sees opening in front of us to imagine together a vision for this country which moves us not only post-covid but also post-capitalism and post-colonialism; and to share some ideas about how we might invigorate our work within and across some of the sectoral, geographical, academic/activist and other differences which too often divide and weaken our efforts. On its own, imagining a better future is never enough, although a vision that inspires is essential to creating change.
Bio: Dr Sue Bradford, Community Educator with Kotare Research and Education for Social Change in Aotearoa, former longtime unemployed workers’ rights activist and Green MP (1999 – 2009).
Poet Teng Qian Xi and Center for Culture Centered Approach to Reseach and EvaluationDirector Mohan J Dutta will discuss resistance, poetry, and the intersections between the two. Drawing on her experience of publishing politically critical poetry as a teenager, her longtime engagement with the Singaporean poetry and activism scene, and her experience of teaching literature and creative writing, she will discuss the potential and limitations of poetry as a form of resistance in Singapore under COVID-19. She will also share her perspective on how she thinks poetry and activism can complement each other to offer more just and compassionate narratives around which we can build our lives and societies.
Teng Qian Xi’s poetry has appeared in several anthologies and journals, including Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia (2007), Language for a New Century (2008) and Speaking for Myself: An Anthology of Asian Women’s Writing (Penguin India, 2009). Her poetry collection, They hear salt crystallising (2010), was shortlisted in 2012 for the English-language category of the Singapore Literature Prize.
Her translations of Tan Chee Lay’s poems have appeared in Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, published by Two Lines Press (2010), and online journal Asymptote. She has taught literature at the School of the Arts and Raffles Girls’ School, and is now a full-time private tutor specialising in A-level Literature. She has also given creative writing workshops at the Creative Arts Programme, the School of the Arts and Raffles Girls’ School.
She was born in Singapore, and graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Comparative Literature and Society.
Professor Arvind Singhal, from The University of Texas at El Paso speaks about harnessing distributed wisdom and practice-based evidence: the positive deviance approach. Positive Deviance (PD) is a novel approach to individual, organizational, and social change based on the observation that in every community there exist certain individuals or groups whose uncommon behaviors and strategies enable them to find better solutions to problems than their peers, while having access to the same resources and facing worse challenges The PD approach has been systematically employed in over 50 countries to address a wide variety of complex social problems, including • Decreasing malnutrition and infant and maternal mortality in Vietnam and Pakistan • Reducing school dropouts in Argentina and in the U.S.; and • Reducing hospital-acquired infections in the U.S. and Colombia.
Driven by data, the PD approach turns upside-down the normative ways of conducting expert-driven needs assessment and gap-analysis, and follows a systematic process of uncovering cost-effective and culturally appropriate solutions from within the local community.
Positive Deviance Books, Articles, and Cases Downloadable at NO cost on the links below
About CARE COVID19 Lecture Series: In this lecture series, we will cover the various aspects of health communication within the context of the COVID19 pandemic. From strategies of risk messaging, to community organizing, to systems of governance, to processes of structural transformation, we will explore the ways in which communication is constituted by the crisis and in turn, constitutes the crisis. Anchored in the key tenets of the culture-centered approach (CCA), the series will draw on lectures, conversations, and workshops with community organizers, activists, academics, and policy makers across the globe.
Prof. Mohan. J. Dutta, Jolovan Wham and Kokila Annamalai will unpack the communicative gaps and inequalities migrant workers experienced during the covid-19 pandemic, and the systematic mechanisms to silence workers that underpin these inequalities. Undertaking an analysis of dominant state narratives and counternarratives that have characterised public discourse around the pandemic, they will reflect on how workers’ voices can be co-opted by both.
They will also look at how the space for workers’ voices is and can be expanded through allyship, art, creative resistance and courage. The possibilities for involving workers in decision-making, community care, information sharing and other valuable roles, whether during the pandemic or rebuilding after it, will be imagined by drawing from efforts that workers, activists and NGOs have taken in this direction.
The work of NGOs, charities, activists and others in civil society has also come under focus in this period. Civil society is being relied upon greatly in getting us through this crisis, and as actors in this space, the speakers will reflexively examine how notions of altruism, generosity and protection may complicate and undermine workers’ agency, rights and dignity. The character of civil society in Singapore is particular to its authoritarian context, which makes the ethics of solidarity and resistance uncomfortable for many actors, but pertinent nevertheless. The speakers will share their perspectives on what the work of building solidarity with workers and activists looks like.
About CARE COVID19 Lecture Series: In this lecture series, we will cover the various aspects of health communication within the context of the COVID19 pandemic. From strategies of risk communication, to community organizing, to systems of governance, to processes of structural transformation, we will explore the ways in which communication is constituted by the crisis and in turn, constitutes the crisis. Anchored in the key tenets of the culture-centered approach (CCA), the series will draw on lectures, conversations, and workshops with community organizers, activists, academics, and policy makers across the globe.
