Place Of Advocacy Research Articles

Finding Space for Advocacy and Scholarship on Mauna Kea and Beyond

Reflecting upon the role and place of advocacy in realtionship to scholarship in the context of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) dispute on Mauna Kea (Hawai’i), I chart shifts in my career regarding activism and advocacy with reference to moving away from the ‘purity’ demands on scholarship common in religious studies and toward an ethics of engagement more common in Indigenous studies. This framing is in the service of addressing questions about the entailments of public engagement, including its demands, rewards, and costs. My primary argument is that in some contexts engaged scholarship is the condition of possibility for ethical and theoretically generative scholarship. I distill three basic lessons from my experiences on and around Mauna Kea: (1) the importance of foregrounding community relationships, (2) the formative role of community led decision-making for charting research and advocacy efforts, and (3) a willingness to recalibrate expectations around academic timelines and outcomes.

Epistemic struggles: The role of advocacy in promoting epistemic justice and rights in mental health

Advocacy for people using health and social care services is widely promoted but its theoretical foundation is under-developed and its impact poorly conceptualised. This paper explores the liberatory potential of independent advocacy, using Fricker's concept of ‘epistemic injustice’ as a framework. People experiencing mental distress are particularly vulnerable to epistemic injustices as a consequence of deeply embedded social stigma resulting in a priori assumptions of irrationality and unreliability such that their knowledge is often discounted or downgraded. The mental health service user/survivor movement is at the forefront of validating personal experience and narrative to secure a different ontological and epistemological basis for mental distress. A foundational strand of this is advocacy to enable people to give voice to their experience.The case of independent mental health advocacy (IMHA) services under mental health legislation in England, provides an opportunity to critically examine whether advocacy can promote epistemic justice as a result of the legally sanctioned encounter between clinical assessment and subjective experience, pivoting on judgements about risk. This paper draws on empirical data from a national evaluation of IMHA services, which included 90 individual interviews with people subject to detention and three focus groups with mental health service users. Fricker's concept of epistemic injustice is used as a lens to investigate how this type of advocacy might mitigate forms of epistemic injustice, and thereby promote greater social justice in mental health.The concept of epistemic injustice provides a valuable theoretical basis for understanding the worth of advocacy in addressing testimonial injustice as well as its relative weakness in overcoming hermeneutical injustice. The challenge of independent advocacy to the dominant discourse within mental health is considered and questions raised about the place of advocacy in modern democratic mental health systems.

Dingo singing: the howl of the advocate

World Heritage protected areas are increasingly valuable for civil society. Sectors of broader society can feel invested in such areas and engage in forms of conservation advocacy that challenge traditional formal management. Advocacy is found wherever management decisions are negotiated or contested, revealing sharp divides in positions. But there are also opportunities for partnerships in advocacy. Identifying the narrative details of advocacy positions is crucial but complicated when the parties being represented are non-human animals, plant species or broader environments: they depend on the advocate’s voice as they cannot speak in any literal sense. Thus advocates discussed in this paper are those representing scientific decision-frames: managers and scientists. Both groups frequently draw on empirical research, giving primacy to the proof of scientific voice. In this research we presented methods to build interdisciplinary literacy to move beyond traditional categorical analysis. Semantic mapping was applied to identify narrative themes as the basis for close textual analysis in a specific case study: advocacy on behalf of the K’gari-Fraser Island dingo. We differentiated three critical pillars of wisdom – Indigenous, local and scientific – but here only considered the advocacy positions within the scientific knowledge decision-making community. Thus, we compared positions taken by the formal management community (government managers) with positions taken in the scientific research community (academic researchers). Narrative themes in advocacy agendas and metaphorical strategies taken to frame positions identify differences and common ground for the two groups. Management advocacy was premised on limits to human–dingo interaction while science advocacy called for dingo welfare. The synergy was tourists, defined as the greatest threat to dingo welfare and viability. This common ground provides an effective starting point to support dingo interests. Identifying options and constraints in advocacy positions is crucial for the future of dingoes on K’gari, but also for all people who engage with World Heritage values. Implicitly, this paper defends the place of advocacy in scientific discussion. By exploring potential options for negotiation, conservation outcomes that support contested iconic species in a World Heritage context are more likely.

Twenty-First Century Pathologists' Advocacy.

Pathologists' advocacy plays a central role in the establishment of continuously improving patient care quality and patient safety, and in the maintenance and progress of pathology as a profession. Pathology advocacy's primary goal is the betterment of patient safety and quality medical care; however, payment is a necessary and appropriate component to both, and has a central role in advocacy. Now is the time to become involved in pathology advocacy; the Medicare Access and Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) and the Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014 (PAMA) are 2 of the most consequential pieces of legislation impacting the pathology and laboratory industry in the last 20 years. Another current issue of far-reaching impact for pathologists is balance billing, and yet many pathologists have little or no understanding of balance billing. Pathologists at all stages of their careers, and in every professional setting, need to participate. Academic pathologists have a special obligation to, if not become directly involved in advocacy, at least have a broad and current understanding of those issues, as well as the need and responsibility of pathologists to actively engage in advocacy efforts to address them, in order to teach residents the place of advocacy, and its value, as an inseparable and indispensable component of their professional responsibilities.

Looking at and looking along: a conceptual framework for teaching different perspectives in geography

This paper builds on arguments made by Chalmers, Keown, and Kent [Exploring different ‘perspectives’ in secondary geography: Professional development options. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, 11(4), 313–324 (2002)], about teaching different theoretical perspectives in geography. A conceptual framework developed by C.S. Lewis is discussed and offered as one way of facilitating the teaching of different perspectives. The framework involves an analytic distinction between looking at and looking along. Looking at is associated with abstract, external, impersonal, uninvolved knowledge. Looking along is presented in terms of participant, inhabited, personal, committed knowledge. The analytic distinction between these approaches is applied to geography education using the perspectives suggested by Chalmers et al. of post-Fordism and deep ecology. Suggestions are made to illustrate what it might mean to look at and look along both of these theoretical perspectives. An argument is made that the analogy of looking at and looking along may inform on-going discussions in geography education research, such as critiques of school geography for not engaging with different perspectives, and debates surrounding the place of advocacy in the curriculum.