Why Do You Make It About Race? Epistemic Disobedience of a Public Health Doctoral Trainee

Abstract

In Australia, racism remains a challenge to dismantle within public health institutions. This paper examines the pressures I experienced from some public health scholars and practitioners to conform to colonial and positivist approaches in knowledge production that still dominate the field. To challenge this hegemony, my research practices turned into what Mignolo calls “epistemic disobedience,” an approach to delink from Western ways of producing knowledge. Based on this experiential learning process, I argue epistemic disobedience should not be overlooked in the discussion of decolonizing research and antiracist pedagogy in the context of doctoral training.

Why Do You Make It About Race?

In 2023, Australian voters were asked if they agreed to alter Australian Constitution to establish Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to inform government’s decisions on matters related to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities; the result was a resounding no (60.76% of 14,097,403 votes; Australian Electoral Commission, 2023). This outcome is a reminder that many Australians prefer to avoid discussions about racism, let alone to address it in a meaningful way (Bargallie et al., 2023); instead, they prefer talking about living in “harmony,” “tolerance,” and “inclusion and diversity” as disguises for racism that is structurally embedded within Australia’s institutions and society (Bargallie et al., 2023; Nelson, 2015). Even within Australia’s public health landscape, many scholars may have long acknowledged structural racism (Paradies et al., 2015), but public health institutions still find it difficult to recognize their complicity in reproducing racism (Watego, 2021). As Watego (2021) argued, despite the intellectual labor and activism of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scholars, the ideological basis of public health in this space remains predominantly focused on the question: “so what is wrong with Aboriginal people?” (p. 38). As such, the credibility of embodied knowledge that comes from adversely racialized scholars is often marginalized (Bhakuni & Abimbola, 2021). This marginalization also occurs for migrant scholars studying migrants’ health from a critical lens that challenges the power structure as I have experienced.

During my doctoral research on sexual health literacy among newly arrived Asian-born gay men, racism was a prominent theme based on the interviews with the participants. However, when I presented or discussed my work with public health scholars and practitioners, I received uncritical comments, such as “race is not something that one can choose,” “your research is bias,” “racism is an old issue,” “not everything is about race,” and “focusing on racism is not a strength-based approach.” In other words, why do I make my research about race? Against these pressures to avoid analyzing race and racism, continuing my doctoral project and training became an act of epistemic disobedience.

Epistemic Disobedience as Antiracist Pedagogy

Mignolo (2009) defined epistemic disobedience as delinking from Western ways of producing knowledge that position the researcher as a detached and objective observer. He emphasized the importance of decolonizing knowledge production by centering on local experiences, needs, and knowledge making. By “local,” Mignolo (2017) refers to the pluralities of strategies among Indigenous communities, queer people of color, and other structurally marginalized people to delink from Western tendency to universalize scientific methods. To do so is obviously not an easy task; I am aware that one of the tacit functions of universities is to train new epistemically obedient members (Mignolo, 2009). Thus, the aim of this reflective piece is two-fold: first, to highlight a few key challenges I have encountered while examining racism as the primary finding of my research, and second, to examine my responses toward the challenges that constitute as epistemic disobedience.

You’re Biased! A Question of Subjectivity

A few years prior to my doctoral training, I would have been categorized in the same group with my participants: a newly arrived Asian-born gay man. An insider. Being classified as an insider often comes with the assumptions that one has immediate access to recruit, build rapport, and develop a sophisticated understanding of research participants (Carling et al., 2013). However, as an (ex-)insider with some similar lived experiences, I have observed that my subjectivity as a researcher is not always welcomed. Researcher’s subjectivity can position the researcher as biased and put their research at risk of being deemed as unscientific (Mignolo, 2009). This is because of the Western domination over the resources to do science and to determine what is best practice (Bhakuni & Abimbola, 2021).

As an act of epistemic disobedience, I transcended my subjectivity beyond the binary of insider/outsider. Instead of labeling myself as an insider, I borrowed the concept of multi-positionalities (Ryan, 2015). Through this concept, I had to be more critical about the lived experiences I shared with the participants and to be inquisitive about our differences. Sharing similarities across age, sexuality, country of birth, level of education, and migration experiences did not give me an immediate, sophisticated understanding of sexual health literacy and racism among the participants. As such, multi-positionalities offer a more critical and transparent approach to researcher’s subjectivity.

Interview as a “True Dialogue”

During my interviews with the participants, I attempted to achieve what Freire (1970) called “true dialogue” by asking them to reflect on the discrepancies in their responses across three rounds of interviews. The purpose was to understand their ability to reflect on the structural factors that shaped their utterances. True dialogue also includes discussion about their capacity and experiences in participating in civic actions to address social inequalities influencing their health literacy (Abel & Benkert, 2022). When relevant, I also shared my knowledge from the literature and lived experiences to enable more in-depth discussions about the research topic. In this sense, true dialogue was about researcher-participants’ reflexivity and collaborative knowledge building. In doing so, we developed an understanding regarding social and sexual ties that played important roles for their sexual health, such as with other gay men, sexual health services, family, and diaspora communities. Most importantly, we gained a nuanced understanding of how racism shaped these interactions and distribution of resources to develop sexual health literacy.

As an act of epistemic disobedience, my approach to interviewing deviated from positivist approach to interviews that still dominates the fields of public health and medicine (Park et al., 2020). According to positivist paradigm, interviewers are supposed to maintain their objectivity (Park et al., 2020). Challenging participants by exploring discrepancies in their responses and engaging in knowledge sharing and building with them are often discouraged (Brinkmann, 2022). To respect participants’ capabilities to be reflexive, I continued using Freire’s true dialogue approach, while also observing the ebbs and flow of our power dynamic, and put this observation into my dissertation for transparency. More on this interview method will be explored in future publications.

Racism Is an Old Issue!

A senior public health scholar commented that “racism is an old issue” after listening to the preliminary findings of my project in a scientific forum. According to the scholar, contemporary Australia is much less racist, especially toward people from Asian backgrounds. Therefore, they indicated the focus on racism in my study came solely from my subjectivity instead of the participants’ responses.

As an act of epistemic disobedience, I decided to seek support from my doctoral supervisors to conduct a historical and cultural analysis of the discourse behind the term “Asian” in the literature review of my dissertation. I argued the term “Asian” is an ever-evolving cultural concept that is constructed through various communities and institutions including but also beyond Asian communities. How people in Australia understand what “Asian” means from pre-colonial to contemporary era has evolved. This evolution further suggests everyday racism has also changed, from predominantly direct discrimination to subtle cultural domination. By shifting from epidemiological understanding of “Asian” as a geographical location (see e.g., Blackshaw et al., 2019), my analysis challenged the assumption that anti-Asian racism is an old issue. Instead, racism continues to evolve; it is both an old and a new issue.

Implications and Conclusion

As an antiracist pedagogy, the starting point of epistemic disobedience is critical reflections on disciplinary, institutional, and sectoral power that marginalize adversely racialized scholars. To begin dismantling this racialized space, epistemic disobedience activates researcher-participants’ multi-positionalities, relationality, and reflexivity. Most importantly, researchers must challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about the communities they work with. To that end, epistemic disobedience advocates for decolonizing public health by drawing from diverse ways of knowing.