Saturday, December 27, 2014

Dangers of Western Methods in Indigenous Research

 During my time teaching public health in Bhutan I became very aware that many of the supposedly value-free public health concepts I was teaching were dripping with western world views that were almost invisible to me.  Even our ideas of time and space in the west can undermine Indigenous world views.  I got to feeling that just exposing Indigenous students to these ideas was a kind of violence against their culture.  So when I saw the article by Roy suggesting that epidemiology and public health had many parrallels to Indigenous ways of seeing the world I felt compelled to question this - particularly when the author appeared to question Shawn Wilsons's writings, so I wrote this letter to the editor with Shawn Wilson.  Interested in thoughts???

Saturday, December 13, 2014

Bath milk - cosmetic or bacteria-laden drink - Conversation piece

So the satirical tone of my article in The Conversation was a little too subtle and some folks thought it was actually an article about cosmetic safety, not food safety.... here