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Clips
N' Chips
Liberal-Minded. Antillean-American. Queer.
Non-PC Feminist. |
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Joe.
My. God.
Gay Culture, Short Stories, & More! NY-Based.
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Kaleidoscope
Fellow Ann Arborite and
Gay Blogger. Sexuality & Human Rights focus. |
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Knucklecrack
Gay Activist Eric Levin's Fabulous NY-Based
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Lifelube
Gay, Sexy, Healthy - Just Like You! |
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Pam's House Blend
She's a fabulous North Carolinian blogging about politics, LGBT and women's rights, the influence of the far Right, and race relations. What more can I say? |
Trevor,
First, keep in mind I that I say all of the following in a loving way. As someone who has been doing comparative studies of science and technology for years, the best advice I ever received was from my graduate advisor. She offered the following:
If you are going to critique science, you must get your shit together. Like it or not, science wields a particular kind of heightened authority that enjoys privileged exemptions from critique by non-scientists. Do a lit review, do your homework, learn the science inside and out before you misrepresent it and then give critical analysis of your misrepresentation.
Do not portray public health as a monolithic discipline. Read the work of Jonathan Mann and others who provide answers to most of the questions you ask that puzzle you. Do not conflate epidemiology with public health: they are not necessarily one and the same. Quote and use public health theorists in the same ways you know and invoke social theorists.
As examples: Public health's medicalization and stigmatization of gay men's sex started long before the advent of AIDS. See my work on Gay Bowel Syndrome, which was invented in 1976, and read the work of folks like Steven Epstein, Jennifer Terry, Dennis Altman, Rafael Diaz, and Gary Dowsett.
You make false claims around very loaded topics like race and epidemiology, such as "Public health officials are stumped by this finding, because none of their tools explain why this is." This is simply untrue. There are dozens of published works by public health researchers that offer insights of deeper and richer complexity to make sense of African American incidence and prevalence of HIV, ranging from partner concurrency to racist standards of whiteness as a measure of idealized sexual desirability. These studies, scholars, and theoretical tools may not make their way into mainstream discourse or traverse disciplinary boundaries to sociology and your other usual stomping grounds, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Find them, because they are your allies, not your enemies.
Lastly, you identify a method involving continuous conversations and dialogues with others on these topics, which in turn gives you insight and new ways of thinking. If this is the case, you have an ethical and academic obligation to cite them. Name them and give them credit for their ideas and work. Give as much as you take, and as the Creepy Mormon Republican Steven Covey says, "Seek first to understand before being understood."
-Michael
Michael, your "loving way" is like the sisterly love of Bettie Davis in "All About Eve", dear.
I'm getting an MPH to address all of what you've just said -- but I'm a bit dubious at some of your claims. I'm making a claim about dominant methodologies and dominant discourses within Public Health. You seem to be misreading that as my making a claim about every single person in the field. It's like critiquing me for saying that Sociology is a field that privileges quantitative methods because there are qualitative methodologists (perhaps even more qualitative methodologists) working today. My aim here is not describe the way Public Health empirically is -- but instead to reveal the dominant ideological discourses about knowledge, method, and disease that reproduce the problems I'm describing in my presentation.
So while I appreciate the feedback, I get the sense that we're talking at each other rather than with each other.
And by "All About Eve" I clearly meant "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?". Sigh. I think I just lost my gay card.