Access, oppression, and social (in)justice in epidemic control: Race, profession, and communication in SARS outbreaks in Canada and Singapore

Abstract

is currently a second year graduate student at North Carolina State University in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program. His main areas of interest are political philosophy, philosophy of mind and nonordinary states of consciousness, social moral epistemology, social justice, ethics, and ideology critique.

Crowdsourcing, Social Media, and Intercultural Communication About Zika: Use Contextualized Research to Bridge the Digital Divide in Global Health Intervention

“…Despite the widespread acclaim about the benefits brought by ICT and the Internet, such technologies are limited in their reach because of constraints such as costs, affordability, connectivity, and infrastructural access. Another complicating factor is literacy—namely, technological literacy and educational literacy—which, directly connected with social justice, influences people’s access to informational justice and procedural justice (Ding et al., 2016). Health crises are often political crises, as demonstrated by Ribeiro and Hartley’s (2018) description of Zika as a political problem for Brazil.…”

“…In their study of social justice in epidemic control, Ding, Li, and Haigler (2016) highlighted three types of connections: those among infrastructure access, distributive justice, and procedural justice in terms of both process control and decision control, those among literacy access, procedural justice, and interactional justice, and those among social acceptance access and interpersonal justice (see Figure 2). In their model, Ding et al. (2016) put professional and technical communication as the field that can bridge access (infrastructural, literacy, and social acceptance), procedural justice, and interactional justice by connecting end users and affected communities with decision makers.…”

Local Knowledge as Illiterate Rhetoric: An Antenarrative Approach to Enacting Socially Just Technical Communication

“…We must know that such privilege should not prevent us from respecting and reflecting on how our actions marginalize those who do not enjoy the privilege we have. Ding et al (2016) remind us that "structural oppression is not the only form of social injustice, however; privileged communities and individuals also participate in the oppression of their fellow citizens for political, economic, and personal gain" (p. 22). Instead of dismissing marginalized knowledge, we should rather invite, respect, acknowledge, centerless privileged knowledge.…”

Bridging Analysis and Action

“…A second strategy is to legitimize women’s technologies, such as household technologies or reproductive technology, through analyses that recognize these technologies as worthy of study. One way to build on these kinds of feminist critiques is to seek out technologies of the Global South, for example, in our examinations through a social justice perspective (see Ding, Li, & Haigler, 2016; Mukherjee & Williams, 2016; Opel & Stevenson, 2016). A third approach is studying how technology affects women in the workplace in order to “challenge the popular belief that technologies are designed and chosen from value-neutral positions” (Gurak & Bayer, 1994, p. 262).…”