{"id":187,"date":"2020-03-08T11:04:03","date_gmt":"2020-03-08T11:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/?p=187"},"modified":"2020-03-08T11:07:33","modified_gmt":"2020-03-08T11:07:33","slug":"starting-a-conversation-evidence-informed-polemic-and-the-need-for-a-new-social-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/2020\/03\/08\/starting-a-conversation-evidence-informed-polemic-and-the-need-for-a-new-social-movement\/","title":{"rendered":"Starting a conversation: Evidence-informed polemic and the need for a new social movement"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I am\nre-reading, not for the first time, some of the work of legal scholar Catharine\nMacKinnon<\/a>.  (I used to refer\nto her as a feminist legal scholar; I don\u2019t do this any more, since the\nadjective can be read as a qualifier, or a denigration.  Scholarship is scholarship, full stop.)  Her work has been an inspiration to me for a\nlong time, since she combines impeccable, meticulously documented philosophical\nargumentation and legal reasoning with incandescent critique of injustice,\ngender inequality and misogyny.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But\nMacKinnon is much more than a hyper-accomplished academic.  Among a host of other achievements, she was\nco-counsel in the first US Supreme Court case that recognised workplace sexual\nharassment as a form of discrimination; contributed to the development of\nCanadian equality law under the country\u2019s Charter\nof Rights and Freedoms<\/em>; was co-counsel in the suit that won a landmark US\ndamage award against Serbian warlord Radovan Karadzic, establishing rape as an\nact of genocide in the context of \u2018ethnic cleansing\u2019; and subsequently served\nas the first gender adviser to the International Criminal Court.  MacKinnon\u2019s advocacy played an important role\nin generating what is now widespread recognition of rape as a weapon and\ncrime of war<\/a>.  She has written\nextensively about these experiences, and much else, in a style I think of as\nevidence-informed polemic. [1]<\/a>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The literature on health inequity includes at least a few examples of this style.\u00a0 For example, in 2013 David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu argued (in The Body Economic<\/a><\/em>) that: \u2018The price of austerity is calculated in human lives.\u00a0 And these lost lives won\u2019t return when the stock market bounces back\u2019.\u00a0 Immodestly, in 2015 Clare Bambra and I put forward (in How Politics Makes Us Sick<\/a><\/em>) the idea of neoliberal epidemics, specifying neoliberalism as a fundamental cause of health inequalities.\u00a0 And in 2017, Lancet <\/em>editor Richard Horton memorably described austerity<\/a> as \u2018a political choice that deepens the already open and bloody wounds of the poor and precarious\u2019.\u00a0 \u00a0Outside the academic bubble of citation counts, these interventions (we) have had approximately zero impact in the real world. This post is an effort to start a conversation about how to change that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One obvious\nobservation is that MacKinnon\u2019s impact results from a combination of advocacy\nand creative litigation using existing bodies of statute and doctrine.  One of the researchers interviewed by\nKatherine Smith<\/a> characterised health inequalities as \u2018the most\nfundamental abuse of human rights in the developed world. [I]f you imagine\nlocking up a substantial proportion of your population for the last five or ten\nyears of their life without any justification at all, well actually this is\nworse than that, it\u2019s like executing them arbitrarily\u2019.  Stated thus, the point seems obvious, but it\u2019s\nhard to see avenues for turning it into a basis for litigation.  Maybe concerned academics have simply not\nconnected with the right litigators, but issues of causation might present\nformidable barriers to success, given courts\u2019 (and many epidemiologists\u2019)\ntendency to set standards of proof that are often\ninappropriately high<\/a>.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At least in the UK, the deliberate corruption of universities\nby organising priorities and career paths around generating research income means\nfewer and fewer academics \u2013 mainly those near the end of their working lives,\nwithout dependents or with independent wealth \u2013 can engage in evidence-informed\npolemic rather than forelock-tugging before funders without fear of\nreprisal.  Professionals working in\npublic health in government are likely to be even more limited in their ability\nto speak out, however sophisticated their private understandings of the origins\nand politics of health inequality (and in many cases, again in the UK at least,\nthese are very sophisticated indeed).  The tendency of too many health promoters to acquiesce in\nthe popular conception of poor health<\/a> as somehow the fault of the\nindividual affected does not help.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps the most important issue is suggested by Sir Michael\nMarmot\u2019s call, after the release of the 2008 WHO Commission report, for \u2018a\nsocial movement, based on evidence, to reduce inequalities in health<\/a>\u2019.  That movement has yet to materialise.  Writing about women\u2019s resistance to workplace\nsexual harassment in the United States, Carrie\nBaker defines social movements<\/a> as \u2018a mixture of informal networks and\nformal organizations outside of conventional politics that make clear demands\nfor fundamental social, political, or economic change and utilize\nunconventional or protest tactics\u2019.  Crucially,\nmany coalitions that formed to fight sexual harassment connected women who were not otherwise similarly situated<\/em>\nin socioeconomic terms.   Another, much more recent manifestation of\nsuch a coalition is the powerful anti-violence performance \u2018A rapist in your path<\/a>\u2019, which\noriginated in last autumn\u2019s Chilean protests against inequality and has now gone viral in much of the world<\/a>.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s the\nrub.  As I wrote a decade ago in the\nCanadian context, effective social movements need not only evidence and\ncoalitions, but also rage, hopelessness, desperation, hope, shared passion,\nshared vulnerabilities, or some combination of these.  That\u2019s where their energy comes from.  If one adopts a suitably precautionary\nstandard of proof, as suggested by the human rights frame, there is no shortage\nof evidence \u2013 certainly not of the damage done by the past decade\u2019s systematic\nupward redistribution of resources and opportunity.  What possible coalitions could move the\nhealth equity agenda forward, and how can the necessary emotional energy be mobilised?  Let the conversation begin.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/a> A\nselection of MacKinnon\u2019s earlier work appears in Feminism,\nUnmodified<\/a> (1988); somewhat later work in Are Women\nHuman<\/a>? (2007); and her landmark explication of feminism as political theory\nin Toward\na Feminist Theory of the State<\/a> (1991).  A very recent open access introduction to her\nperspective is available here<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am re-reading, not for the first time, some of the work of legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon.  (I used to refer to her as a feminist legal scholar; I don\u2019t do this any more, since the adjective can be read … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1834,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[34,33,14,16],"class_list":["post-187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-catharine-mackinnon","tag-feminism","tag-social-determinants-of-health","tag-social-movements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1834"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":189,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions\/189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}