October 5, 2024 • 27 mins
Rosemary Jolly, Penn State professor and author of the recently released book, The Effluent Eye: Narratives for Decolonial Right-Making, discusses an approach to human rights that challenges the tired narratives and sparks vital conversations in today's diverse and interconnected world.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome back to What's at Risk. I'm Mike Christian. Rosemary
Jolly was born in South Africa and left for Canada
in nineteen eighty one due to the apartheid regime of
the time. She came to Penn State as a professor
(00:25):
in twenty thirteen. Her overarching interest is in the ways
in which representations of violence and reconciliation actually affect inner, governmental,
inner community, and interpersonal relations in context of conflict. She
has worked globally with victim survivors of state sponsored torture,
(00:46):
gender based violence, and communities fractured by illness. She explores
the ethics of working with highly vulnerable communities in research
and development. In the Affluent, Rosemary Jolly argues for the
decolonization of human rights, attributing their failure not simply to
(01:08):
state and institutional malfeasance, but to the very concept of
human rights. Using what she calls an affluent eye, Jolly
draws on fifth wave structural public health to confront the
concept of human rights, one of the most powerful and
widely entrenched liberal ideas. She builds on indigenous sovereignty work
(01:31):
to engage decolonial thinking on a range of urgent topics
such as pandemic history and grief, gender based violence and
sexual assault, and the connections between colonial capitalism, substance abuse,
and climate change. Jolly argues for an affluent form of
reading that begins with the understanding that the granting of
(01:54):
rights to individuals is meaningless in a war compromised by
pollution and successive pandemics. Well, we're here with Professor Rosemary Jolly,
author of the Affluent Eye Narratives for Decolonial Right Making. Rosemary,
thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate you
(02:15):
being here.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Well, maybe a good place to start would be for
you to tell our listeners a little bit about your background.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Okay, So I was born in South Africa. Important to
say right at the beginning. I was born white in
South Africa and was born into quat on the one side,
at least an impoverished family, on the other side, not
so much. And my parents moved around. So we were
in Cape Town, we were in Johannesburg, we were in Durban.
(02:48):
For those people who know the Antipartheic struggle, we were
in Durban when Steve Peko was in the medical residence
that my father was the warden off. We then moved
to Lasutu, which is an independent country in the middle
of South Africa that is one of the poorest on
the UN lists still to this day. And then finally
(03:08):
we were evicted from South Africa in between my schooling
and university years and went to Canada. And I finished
my education in Canada, doing a BA in Saskatchewan and
an maphd at Toronto and teaching for twenty two years
in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. And then at that stage in
(03:30):
twenty thirteen, Penn state maybe an offer I couldn't refuse,
which was a Chair of Human Rights.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
And then your bio mentions that you have a keen
interest in the ways in which representations of violence and
reconciliation affect inner community and interpersonal relations in contexts of conflict.
That's a mouthful there, but I think I have a
sense of it, and I think it's important and it's
(03:58):
something that it would be great if you could tell
our listeners what that means and how you focused in
on that in your life.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
I have developed an expertise in working with communities who
were experiencing extreme violence. So one of the first ones
I worked with was a very highly abused women in Soweto.
One of the second ones I worked with was the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission Victim Survivors victim survivors of state
(04:26):
sponsored torture under their Aparthech regime. I continued after that
to work with gender based violence and HIV doing prevention work.
So a very sort of clear example is the best
way to demonstrate this, which is that if you're working
in a community that is really rife with violence and
(04:47):
you're trying to support women, and then you have a
public and national set of images on media that keep
on producing women who have been sexually assault as victims,
it becomes very difficult to engender a culture of self
(05:09):
esteem in victim survivors. And I would say that that's
true for the US as well. For example, it seems
in many representations by news and other media that try
to represent women who have been sexually assaulted, it seems
to me that they suggest that they're victims with our brains,
as though women who when they are sexually assaulted suddenly
(05:32):
lose their entire ability to think, which, if you think
about it, is really crazy. I mean, obviously they're distressed,
obviously they need support, but obviously they have the ability
to self determine their own needs, and so that would
be an example of the ways in which representation of
victims can actually negatively affect people on the ground in
(05:54):
a community.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
And beyond women, that could be the case for a
lot of different groups.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Case. For example, the kinds of groups I've worked with
that have been highly stigmatized are white gay men in
South Africa who have AIDS because it's predominantly a heterosexual
epidemic in South Africa. The other ones I've worked with
are Indigenous people in Toronto who are HIV positive. The
(06:21):
other highly highly stigmatized communities are immigrants who are not
registered as legal in their countries and happen to need
to access care for HIV, AIDS and or gender based violence.
So there's a huge profile of stigmatized conditions that come
(06:42):
to the four in violent communities when you're doing this
kind of work.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
I remember a while ago I had a conversation and
it was with a group of It was a mixed
race group, people of color there and also white people
like me, But we were talking about some of the solutions,
especially when it comes to poverty and some of the issues,
these inherent issues that have been in some of these
(07:08):
underresource groups. And I said what might a solution be,
and someone looked at me and said decolonize, And so
I thought that was an interesting commonist probably the first
time anybody ever said that to me, And since then
I've heard the term used in a variety of different ways.
But in your experience, how do people react to that?
I think it's self explained to it, but maybe just
(07:29):
a little explanation of what the term means, and then
how do people generally react to it when they're faced
with that.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
So decolonization is really a move, as to define it,
a move to understand how colonization and after and alongside
of it, colonial capitalism have developed structures of inequity. And
that sounds really you know, colonial capitalism sounds like a
(08:00):
terrible term, too clunky, But what it really means is
if you look at their history. For example of capitalism
in the US, capitalism didn't get going without some ventions
from slavery. So even locally here, that's one way in
which it's never generated equality. The idea of what you
do with decoloniality in the situations where communities are under
(08:21):
enormous stress, impoverishment, inadequate access to healthcare, racialized empowerverishment, and
so on. Is one that's very alien to many people,
which is that the best way to do it is
to go in and facilitate how the communities self determine
(08:42):
their needs and how one can then best organize and
have them organized resources to meet their needs. So one
of the things that I have tried never to do
in my work with poor communities is to say this
is what you need. That's a non starter to begin with,
(09:03):
so decolonize. Decolonizing would mean say, for example, I'm trying
to help women of color access reproductive rights in Baltimore.
Baltimore has a very long history of women for very
good reasons, Black women and biracial women not accessing reproductive
healthcare because of fear. So how do we change those things?
(09:24):
I mean, the first thing is going in and doing
and asking the community who do they want working for them?
How do they self identify their needs? So, for example,
when I was working in gender based violence and working
with women and children that were being sexually harassed and
so on by the community or other family members, I
(09:47):
would go in and I would say, what is it
that you think you need? And they would say, well,
the first thing we need is food, right, and you
would go, okay, so let and what kind of food?
So then you'd start to work on that solution. But
it wasn't a preimposed idea for the from the outside
that the first thing the family wants this self esteem.
(10:07):
They have a hierarchy of needs and they're telling you
what their needs are, and you need to respect them
and then work with them to provide those needs and
also work with them to make sure that the community
knowledge and the services that are provided are sustainable. I
think that there's a very long history, as far as
I can tell in North America of the strope of
(10:31):
the hero and the victim. So at the end of newsclips,
you'll often see, you know, the usually male firefighter who
saved the helpless child or somebody who saved a dog,
and it's usually this juxtaposition between a hero and a victim.
And I think that that's not very helpful at all
mindset for working with community with respect for the community
(10:55):
and with an understanding that they know how they've been victimized,
and why better than you being the person who's coming
in from the outside with potentially a set of professional skills,
but not necessarily deep knowledge of the community.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Yeah, that makes complete sense. So when we talk about
human rights, is there a standard for that term? I
mean people use that term all the time, human rights,
and you use it a lot in your book and
in a lot of other areas. But what is a
standard that we might be thinking about.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
So the basic standard is the one which I mean,
this is a great irony because Eleanor Roosevelt really sorry,
I'm pronouncing her name in an Afrikaans Wait. Roosevelt was
very much involved in drawing up the Human Rights of
the Human Rights and the United Nations Decoration on Human
Rights the un d HR. And it was done in
(11:50):
order that something like World War two would never happen again.
And I have a pretty deep investment in that because
apart from being South African, I'm Jewish. But the issue
you there is it was drawn up with a Western
framework in mind. So there is a set of human
rights like you have the right to associate with whom
(12:11):
you please, you have the right to access health, you
have the right to have a family life, you have
all kinds of rights. Those are in the United Nations
Decoration on Human Rights, and if anybody wants to access that,
they can just type them in and they will come
up on the Internet immediately. Two things to say first
(12:33):
is the United States is not actually a signer of
the United Nations Decoration on Human Rights because they believe
that national sovereignty should bump human rights, okay, so that
if they want to potentially break somebody's human rights in
order to protect the country as they see fit, they
will do that, and so the US is not a
(12:54):
signatory to that convention. That does not mean that we
don't have organizations in the United States States that do
work for those rights. We do indeed have those, but
they were not adopted the same way they were in
many other Western countries and signed into law. The second
thing I would say about them is something that Hannah
Aren't said many years ago, which is that if you
(13:16):
need human rights, you don't have them, and if you
have human rights, you don't need them. That is to
say that the people who want and need human rights
are those who are most unlikely to be able to
get them. Because if you are impoverished, illegal working on
a farm somewhere, your ability to be able to ensure
(13:38):
your rights is going to require legal help and resources
which are not part of your world to begin with.
So the contradiction in human rights is, like I say,
if you have them, you don't need to access them
in any kind of formal way. If you don't have them,
it's the very rare person who is able to access
them through the law normally adopted by some news agency
(14:04):
or some cause in order to be able to put
them up to the level where they can fight for
their human rights in court. So one of the points
of my book is we really need to think differently
about human rights because accessing them or thinking that people
can the people who need them can access them, is
really not a solution. We need to be way more
involved than that.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
You use the word affluent I in the title of
your book, it's the affluent eye Narratives for decolonial right making.
What do you mean by that term the affluent because
I think of affluent as run off wastewater things like
that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
And I thought about the title because I grew up
in communities that were rife with tuberculosis and water born diseases,
and you know, sub Saharan Africa is always being visited
by plagues like cholera, and so i'm things that really
that you really have to have clean water to get
away from. And the reason I picked that term is
because it became very clear to me that not that
(15:09):
there are groups of people that are treated as waste
product by other humans, as what I would call a
kind of disposable populations, right where we say that we
care about all humans equally, but we don't really. So,
for example, I'm quite pleased and this is a positive
(15:30):
development that we now have another pandemic running rife in
Central Africa, and that would be monkey pocks. And instead
of saying we don't have to worry about that it's
too far away and it's only Africans, there's at least
going to be in the first instance, a meeting between
health officers in Africa and the African CDCAS and for
(15:53):
Diseases Control and folks over here, because there's been a
strong recognition in recent years that it brought break broke
out in nineteen seventy six and we didn't have a
vaccine for it until the twenty fourteen pandemic October, and
that was because it was thought that we don't need
something like that because the eball is never going to
(16:13):
make its way to the western and developed world. So
if you think about that, that means that we are
deciding when we do that, when we say it's not
going to hit us directly, so we don't need to
bring our technologies to bear on it. We're basically making
a decision that those people are affluent as indisposable. So
(16:34):
the other part of the affluent that is not negative
is that a lot of times these wasted and wasting
communities have amazing resources for figuring out how to live
in a diminished planet. So, for example, the sun who
are colloquially known negatively as derogatorily as the bushmen in
(16:59):
the Kalahara very game reserve, go to pick particular herbs
that are extremely good for various conditions, which is where
most of our herbs come from. When they take certain
herbs out of the ground, they are duty bound to
thank the earth and to make sure that they leave
the root, or if they have to pull out the root,
(17:20):
that they plant another one later on, because you can't
keep just extracting without having a reciprocal responsibility towards the earth.
Of course, in Western cultures, we don't have that, but
we're also we also need to recognize that that's a
resource or a gift or even a necessity, because when
(17:44):
you work on bugs and epidemics the way I do,
you do realize that if you kill the host i e.
Your planet, humans aren't going to survive. So the good
part of the affluent is that people who are thrown
away or sidelined have kinds of knowledge has developed out
of their circumstances that we can learn from but often don't.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Yeah, I think that's a great point, is taking that
perspective of the indigenous people and incorporating it into the
way that you.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Look at this.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
And it's almost like the Native American concept of the
making a decision based on how it's going to impact
the seven generations from now fact.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
And that's very very similar to what I have been
grown up in and brought up in, which is Ubuntu,
where you have to have relations of respect and duty
between the unborn, the living, and the ancestors. Very similar.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Yeah, And unfortunately our world is based on short term
decisions for short term gain. I'm not sure how we
change that. Yeah, that momentum has been there for a
long time ago ahead I think.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
That your listeners might be interested in is I keep
on telling people, you know, we don't recognize harm reduction enough.
So harm reduction is a term that comes from substance abuse.
And if you ask me, while we have so much
substance abuse in certain areas of the world, I will
tell you that it's not it's because we don't live
(19:15):
in ways that satisfy what humans need. So the idea
in capitalism is that you accrue and you need all
these things, and you have to keep on needing and
wanting them for the whole system to work. So that
whole idea is in and of itself a form of addiction.
And so it's a model that we are imprinted into,
you know, in the world. But I do think that
(19:38):
harm reduction can work. Now, harm reduction originally comes from,
you know, you've got X in the family who is
addicted to let's say alcohol and gets really really drunk
and tends to fall over and becomes very dangerous to themselves.
So then a harm reduction plan would go, Okay, we
know this is going to happen, but how can we
(20:00):
make sure that that particular family member does not hurt
themselves in this situation. Can we have somebody there, what
can we remove? What is the plan to limit the harm?
So if we recycle, for example, and I can just
see myself going out to the recycling backet going why
am I bothering? It doesn't look like it's ever going
(20:21):
to make a difference. I think that that's very disincentivizing
and not very self supportive, and so I think having
a much more communal idea of I don't have to
save the planet. I need to do what I'm capable
of doing, for sure, but I'm never going to do
it on my own. I think having that kind of
(20:41):
more modest proposal about what we do and really recognizing
the everyday ways in which many of us do harm
reduction is very very important.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
I think that's a great point. That's almost the definition
of collaboration. You give a little, you get a little,
and you don't have to think about trying to solve
all the world's problems by yourself.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
No question.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
You've used a mix of quantitative and qualitative methodologies for
your work. Does that make it more embraced by the
academic community. What's been the impact of doing it that way?
So I know it's not completely unique to your work.
But how do you feel that's benefited communication of your work.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
I think it's really important. I mean a lot of
the work that I've done in quantitative and qualitative, So
just to define them. Quantitative is basically statistics, right, how
many people in a particular community, What is the difference
between the prevalence of a disease and an incidence of
a disease? You know, all kinds of work like that,
But basically it's using numbers to tell you what's going
(21:43):
on the weakness of numbers and where you need qualitative is.
I remember when I first started working on gender based
violence and we knew that one in three women in
South Africa had experienced gender based violence and coercion. And
people were saying to me, well, you can't work on
that because you don't know the exact statistic, and I
(22:05):
was going, well, that's a bit rubbishy because we will
never know the exact statistic of certain kinds of stigmatized conditions.
But it's dan big enough that you know you need
to work on it. How do you get people involved
then in working on those issues. Well, a lot of
that is through qualitative research, you know. I remember I
was working with a woman and I was looking at
(22:26):
the transcripts and I speak some Zulu, very little but enough,
and I kept on seeing this phrase that the woman
kept on repeating, when my husband beats me, I lose respect.
And I had a pretty good idea of what it was,
but I went and checked. And you really need qualitative
and language language ability to do this, because it turned
(22:47):
out she was talking about cronepa, which is a system
of ways in which you're not allowed to say your
mother in law or your father in law's name directly.
You have to use this incredible set of puns and
circumlocutions and so on to say their name without saying
their name. When I went to go see that, I
(23:09):
saw what she was doing, which is that she was
taking the risk of breaking a taboo, which was that
when her husband beats her, she refuses to speak respectfully
to him or his family. Now, you would never you
wouldn't understand that if you just took it at the
level of she loses respect, you need to actually go
(23:32):
and look at the Zulu word and see what it means.
And so those are the ways in which using you know,
I happened to come out of a comparative literature department,
among other departments, and that's the way that you can
really understand how people understand their own conditions on their
own terms.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
That's a great example. I think all of us can
learn a lot from that because we make so many
inferences and assumptions about what we hear and people that
we're talking to not necessarily taking into regard their background,
their culture, their more's, where they come from. It's a
really good point. Well, one last question. Did you ever
(24:12):
envision yourself doing this type of work for a lifetime.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Absolutely not. My father's a doctor. I grew up amongst doctors.
The other side of my family has a huge swath
of doctors, and I swore that I would never work
in health, and I ended up working very much in
public health. So no, I did not expect that. I
have a degree from the University of Toronto in English,
(24:39):
and I taught myself what I needed to know, and
I came at it through the fact that I was
looking at narratives from people who were either incarcerated or
otherwise and came to just realize that there were a
set of skills that reading literature that were not that
different from the skills you need to read literature. You
just need to acknowledge that the narratives you're working with
(25:00):
our real narratives, and there are real people behind them,
and they thought there are things that you can do
to help them. And that's been a really a driving
factor in my reading of these kinds of stories.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
We've been speaking with Rosemary Jolly, the author of The
Affluent I Narratives for Decolonial Rite Making. Rosemary, thank you
so much. Really appreciated your insights.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Thank you. I really enjoyed myself.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Well, that's all for this week. I'm Mike Christian, inviting
you to join us again next week on What's at Risk.
Also check out our podcast at Wbznewsradio dot iHeart dot
com What's on your Mind? Send us your thoughts, comments
and questions to What's at Risk at gmail dot com.
(26:02):
That's one word, What's at Risk at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Thank you big.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Thank you to our producer Ken Carberry of Chart Productions.
(27:01):
In day
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Comment
Welcome back to What's at Risk. I'm Mike Christian. Rosemary
Jolly was born in South Africa and left for Canada
in nineteen eighty one due to the apartheid regime of
the time. She came to Penn State as a professor
(00:25):
in twenty thirteen. Her overarching interest is in the ways
in which representations of violence and reconciliation actually affect inner, governmental,
inner community, and interpersonal relations in context of conflict. She
has worked globally with victim survivors of state sponsored torture,
(00:46):
gender based violence, and communities fractured by illness. She explores
the ethics of working with highly vulnerable communities in research
and development. In the Affluent, Rosemary Jolly argues for the
decolonization of human rights, attributing their failure not simply to
(01:08):
state and institutional malfeasance, but to the very concept of
human rights. Using what she calls an affluent eye, Jolly
draws on fifth wave structural public health to confront the
concept of human rights, one of the most powerful and
widely entrenched liberal ideas. She builds on indigenous sovereignty work
(01:31):
to engage decolonial thinking on a range of urgent topics
such as pandemic history and grief, gender based violence and
sexual assault, and the connections between colonial capitalism, substance abuse,
and climate change. Jolly argues for an affluent form of
reading that begins with the understanding that the granting of
(01:54):
rights to individuals is meaningless in a war compromised by
pollution and successive pandemics. Well, we're here with Professor Rosemary Jolly,
author of the Affluent Eye Narratives for Decolonial Right Making. Rosemary,
thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate you
(02:15):
being here.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Well, maybe a good place to start would be for
you to tell our listeners a little bit about your background.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Okay, So I was born in South Africa. Important to
say right at the beginning. I was born white in
South Africa and was born into quat on the one side,
at least an impoverished family, on the other side, not
so much. And my parents moved around. So we were
in Cape Town, we were in Johannesburg, we were in Durban.
(02:48):
For those people who know the Antipartheic struggle, we were
in Durban when Steve Peko was in the medical residence
that my father was the warden off. We then moved
to Lasutu, which is an independent country in the middle
of South Africa that is one of the poorest on
the UN lists still to this day. And then finally
(03:08):
we were evicted from South Africa in between my schooling
and university years and went to Canada. And I finished
my education in Canada, doing a BA in Saskatchewan and
an maphd at Toronto and teaching for twenty two years
in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. And then at that stage in
(03:30):
twenty thirteen, Penn state maybe an offer I couldn't refuse,
which was a Chair of Human Rights.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
And then your bio mentions that you have a keen
interest in the ways in which representations of violence and
reconciliation affect inner community and interpersonal relations in contexts of conflict.
That's a mouthful there, but I think I have a
sense of it, and I think it's important and it's
(03:58):
something that it would be great if you could tell
our listeners what that means and how you focused in
on that in your life.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
I have developed an expertise in working with communities who
were experiencing extreme violence. So one of the first ones
I worked with was a very highly abused women in Soweto.
One of the second ones I worked with was the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission Victim Survivors victim survivors of state
(04:26):
sponsored torture under their Aparthech regime. I continued after that
to work with gender based violence and HIV doing prevention work.
So a very sort of clear example is the best
way to demonstrate this, which is that if you're working
in a community that is really rife with violence and
(04:47):
you're trying to support women, and then you have a
public and national set of images on media that keep
on producing women who have been sexually assault as victims,
it becomes very difficult to engender a culture of self
(05:09):
esteem in victim survivors. And I would say that that's
true for the US as well. For example, it seems
in many representations by news and other media that try
to represent women who have been sexually assaulted, it seems
to me that they suggest that they're victims with our brains,
as though women who when they are sexually assaulted suddenly
(05:32):
lose their entire ability to think, which, if you think
about it, is really crazy. I mean, obviously they're distressed,
obviously they need support, but obviously they have the ability
to self determine their own needs, and so that would
be an example of the ways in which representation of
victims can actually negatively affect people on the ground in
(05:54):
a community.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
And beyond women, that could be the case for a
lot of different groups.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Case. For example, the kinds of groups I've worked with
that have been highly stigmatized are white gay men in
South Africa who have AIDS because it's predominantly a heterosexual
epidemic in South Africa. The other ones I've worked with
are Indigenous people in Toronto who are HIV positive. The
(06:21):
other highly highly stigmatized communities are immigrants who are not
registered as legal in their countries and happen to need
to access care for HIV, AIDS and or gender based violence.
So there's a huge profile of stigmatized conditions that come
(06:42):
to the four in violent communities when you're doing this
kind of work.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
I remember a while ago I had a conversation and
it was with a group of It was a mixed
race group, people of color there and also white people
like me, But we were talking about some of the solutions,
especially when it comes to poverty and some of the issues,
these inherent issues that have been in some of these
(07:08):
underresource groups. And I said what might a solution be,
and someone looked at me and said decolonize, And so
I thought that was an interesting commonist probably the first
time anybody ever said that to me, And since then
I've heard the term used in a variety of different ways.
But in your experience, how do people react to that?
I think it's self explained to it, but maybe just
(07:29):
a little explanation of what the term means, and then
how do people generally react to it when they're faced
with that.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
So decolonization is really a move, as to define it,
a move to understand how colonization and after and alongside
of it, colonial capitalism have developed structures of inequity. And
that sounds really you know, colonial capitalism sounds like a
(08:00):
terrible term, too clunky, But what it really means is
if you look at their history. For example of capitalism
in the US, capitalism didn't get going without some ventions
from slavery. So even locally here, that's one way in
which it's never generated equality. The idea of what you
do with decoloniality in the situations where communities are under
(08:21):
enormous stress, impoverishment, inadequate access to healthcare, racialized empowerverishment, and
so on. Is one that's very alien to many people,
which is that the best way to do it is
to go in and facilitate how the communities self determine
(08:42):
their needs and how one can then best organize and
have them organized resources to meet their needs. So one
of the things that I have tried never to do
in my work with poor communities is to say this
is what you need. That's a non starter to begin with,
(09:03):
so decolonize. Decolonizing would mean say, for example, I'm trying
to help women of color access reproductive rights in Baltimore.
Baltimore has a very long history of women for very
good reasons, Black women and biracial women not accessing reproductive
healthcare because of fear. So how do we change those things?
(09:24):
I mean, the first thing is going in and doing
and asking the community who do they want working for them?
How do they self identify their needs? So, for example,
when I was working in gender based violence and working
with women and children that were being sexually harassed and
so on by the community or other family members, I
(09:47):
would go in and I would say, what is it
that you think you need? And they would say, well,
the first thing we need is food, right, and you
would go, okay, so let and what kind of food?
So then you'd start to work on that solution. But
it wasn't a preimposed idea for the from the outside
that the first thing the family wants this self esteem.
(10:07):
They have a hierarchy of needs and they're telling you
what their needs are, and you need to respect them
and then work with them to provide those needs and
also work with them to make sure that the community
knowledge and the services that are provided are sustainable. I
think that there's a very long history, as far as
I can tell in North America of the strope of
(10:31):
the hero and the victim. So at the end of newsclips,
you'll often see, you know, the usually male firefighter who
saved the helpless child or somebody who saved a dog,
and it's usually this juxtaposition between a hero and a victim.
And I think that that's not very helpful at all
mindset for working with community with respect for the community
(10:55):
and with an understanding that they know how they've been victimized,
and why better than you being the person who's coming
in from the outside with potentially a set of professional skills,
but not necessarily deep knowledge of the community.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Yeah, that makes complete sense. So when we talk about
human rights, is there a standard for that term? I
mean people use that term all the time, human rights,
and you use it a lot in your book and
in a lot of other areas. But what is a
standard that we might be thinking about.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
So the basic standard is the one which I mean,
this is a great irony because Eleanor Roosevelt really sorry,
I'm pronouncing her name in an Afrikaans Wait. Roosevelt was
very much involved in drawing up the Human Rights of
the Human Rights and the United Nations Decoration on Human
Rights the un d HR. And it was done in
(11:50):
order that something like World War two would never happen again.
And I have a pretty deep investment in that because
apart from being South African, I'm Jewish. But the issue
you there is it was drawn up with a Western
framework in mind. So there is a set of human
rights like you have the right to associate with whom
(12:11):
you please, you have the right to access health, you
have the right to have a family life, you have
all kinds of rights. Those are in the United Nations
Decoration on Human Rights, and if anybody wants to access that,
they can just type them in and they will come
up on the Internet immediately. Two things to say first
(12:33):
is the United States is not actually a signer of
the United Nations Decoration on Human Rights because they believe
that national sovereignty should bump human rights, okay, so that
if they want to potentially break somebody's human rights in
order to protect the country as they see fit, they
will do that, and so the US is not a
(12:54):
signatory to that convention. That does not mean that we
don't have organizations in the United States States that do
work for those rights. We do indeed have those, but
they were not adopted the same way they were in
many other Western countries and signed into law. The second
thing I would say about them is something that Hannah
Aren't said many years ago, which is that if you
(13:16):
need human rights, you don't have them, and if you
have human rights, you don't need them. That is to
say that the people who want and need human rights
are those who are most unlikely to be able to
get them. Because if you are impoverished, illegal working on
a farm somewhere, your ability to be able to ensure
(13:38):
your rights is going to require legal help and resources
which are not part of your world to begin with.
So the contradiction in human rights is, like I say,
if you have them, you don't need to access them
in any kind of formal way. If you don't have them,
it's the very rare person who is able to access
them through the law normally adopted by some news agency
(14:04):
or some cause in order to be able to put
them up to the level where they can fight for
their human rights in court. So one of the points
of my book is we really need to think differently
about human rights because accessing them or thinking that people
can the people who need them can access them, is
really not a solution. We need to be way more
involved than that.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
You use the word affluent I in the title of
your book, it's the affluent eye Narratives for decolonial right making.
What do you mean by that term the affluent because
I think of affluent as run off wastewater things like
that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
And I thought about the title because I grew up
in communities that were rife with tuberculosis and water born diseases,
and you know, sub Saharan Africa is always being visited
by plagues like cholera, and so i'm things that really
that you really have to have clean water to get
away from. And the reason I picked that term is
because it became very clear to me that not that
(15:09):
there are groups of people that are treated as waste
product by other humans, as what I would call a
kind of disposable populations, right where we say that we
care about all humans equally, but we don't really. So,
for example, I'm quite pleased and this is a positive
(15:30):
development that we now have another pandemic running rife in
Central Africa, and that would be monkey pocks. And instead
of saying we don't have to worry about that it's
too far away and it's only Africans, there's at least
going to be in the first instance, a meeting between
health officers in Africa and the African CDCAS and for
(15:53):
Diseases Control and folks over here, because there's been a
strong recognition in recent years that it brought break broke
out in nineteen seventy six and we didn't have a
vaccine for it until the twenty fourteen pandemic October, and
that was because it was thought that we don't need
something like that because the eball is never going to
(16:13):
make its way to the western and developed world. So
if you think about that, that means that we are
deciding when we do that, when we say it's not
going to hit us directly, so we don't need to
bring our technologies to bear on it. We're basically making
a decision that those people are affluent as indisposable. So
(16:34):
the other part of the affluent that is not negative
is that a lot of times these wasted and wasting
communities have amazing resources for figuring out how to live
in a diminished planet. So, for example, the sun who
are colloquially known negatively as derogatorily as the bushmen in
(16:59):
the Kalahara very game reserve, go to pick particular herbs
that are extremely good for various conditions, which is where
most of our herbs come from. When they take certain
herbs out of the ground, they are duty bound to
thank the earth and to make sure that they leave
the root, or if they have to pull out the root,
(17:20):
that they plant another one later on, because you can't
keep just extracting without having a reciprocal responsibility towards the earth.
Of course, in Western cultures, we don't have that, but
we're also we also need to recognize that that's a
resource or a gift or even a necessity, because when
(17:44):
you work on bugs and epidemics the way I do,
you do realize that if you kill the host i e.
Your planet, humans aren't going to survive. So the good
part of the affluent is that people who are thrown
away or sidelined have kinds of knowledge has developed out
of their circumstances that we can learn from but often don't.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Yeah, I think that's a great point, is taking that
perspective of the indigenous people and incorporating it into the
way that you.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Look at this.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
And it's almost like the Native American concept of the
making a decision based on how it's going to impact
the seven generations from now fact.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
And that's very very similar to what I have been
grown up in and brought up in, which is Ubuntu,
where you have to have relations of respect and duty
between the unborn, the living, and the ancestors. Very similar.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Yeah, And unfortunately our world is based on short term
decisions for short term gain. I'm not sure how we
change that. Yeah, that momentum has been there for a
long time ago ahead I think.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
That your listeners might be interested in is I keep
on telling people, you know, we don't recognize harm reduction enough.
So harm reduction is a term that comes from substance abuse.
And if you ask me, while we have so much
substance abuse in certain areas of the world, I will
tell you that it's not it's because we don't live
(19:15):
in ways that satisfy what humans need. So the idea
in capitalism is that you accrue and you need all
these things, and you have to keep on needing and
wanting them for the whole system to work. So that
whole idea is in and of itself a form of addiction.
And so it's a model that we are imprinted into,
you know, in the world. But I do think that
(19:38):
harm reduction can work. Now, harm reduction originally comes from,
you know, you've got X in the family who is
addicted to let's say alcohol and gets really really drunk
and tends to fall over and becomes very dangerous to themselves.
So then a harm reduction plan would go, Okay, we
know this is going to happen, but how can we
(20:00):
make sure that that particular family member does not hurt
themselves in this situation. Can we have somebody there, what
can we remove? What is the plan to limit the harm?
So if we recycle, for example, and I can just
see myself going out to the recycling backet going why
am I bothering? It doesn't look like it's ever going
(20:21):
to make a difference. I think that that's very disincentivizing
and not very self supportive, and so I think having
a much more communal idea of I don't have to
save the planet. I need to do what I'm capable
of doing, for sure, but I'm never going to do
it on my own. I think having that kind of
(20:41):
more modest proposal about what we do and really recognizing
the everyday ways in which many of us do harm
reduction is very very important.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
I think that's a great point. That's almost the definition
of collaboration. You give a little, you get a little,
and you don't have to think about trying to solve
all the world's problems by yourself.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
No question.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
You've used a mix of quantitative and qualitative methodologies for
your work. Does that make it more embraced by the
academic community. What's been the impact of doing it that way?
So I know it's not completely unique to your work.
But how do you feel that's benefited communication of your work.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
I think it's really important. I mean a lot of
the work that I've done in quantitative and qualitative, So
just to define them. Quantitative is basically statistics, right, how
many people in a particular community, What is the difference
between the prevalence of a disease and an incidence of
a disease? You know, all kinds of work like that,
But basically it's using numbers to tell you what's going
(21:43):
on the weakness of numbers and where you need qualitative is.
I remember when I first started working on gender based
violence and we knew that one in three women in
South Africa had experienced gender based violence and coercion. And
people were saying to me, well, you can't work on
that because you don't know the exact statistic, and I
(22:05):
was going, well, that's a bit rubbishy because we will
never know the exact statistic of certain kinds of stigmatized conditions.
But it's dan big enough that you know you need
to work on it. How do you get people involved
then in working on those issues. Well, a lot of
that is through qualitative research, you know. I remember I
was working with a woman and I was looking at
(22:26):
the transcripts and I speak some Zulu, very little but enough,
and I kept on seeing this phrase that the woman
kept on repeating, when my husband beats me, I lose respect.
And I had a pretty good idea of what it was,
but I went and checked. And you really need qualitative
and language language ability to do this, because it turned
(22:47):
out she was talking about cronepa, which is a system
of ways in which you're not allowed to say your
mother in law or your father in law's name directly.
You have to use this incredible set of puns and
circumlocutions and so on to say their name without saying
their name. When I went to go see that, I
(23:09):
saw what she was doing, which is that she was
taking the risk of breaking a taboo, which was that
when her husband beats her, she refuses to speak respectfully
to him or his family. Now, you would never you
wouldn't understand that if you just took it at the
level of she loses respect, you need to actually go
(23:32):
and look at the Zulu word and see what it means.
And so those are the ways in which using you know,
I happened to come out of a comparative literature department,
among other departments, and that's the way that you can
really understand how people understand their own conditions on their
own terms.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
That's a great example. I think all of us can
learn a lot from that because we make so many
inferences and assumptions about what we hear and people that
we're talking to not necessarily taking into regard their background,
their culture, their more's, where they come from. It's a
really good point. Well, one last question. Did you ever
(24:12):
envision yourself doing this type of work for a lifetime.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Absolutely not. My father's a doctor. I grew up amongst doctors.
The other side of my family has a huge swath
of doctors, and I swore that I would never work
in health, and I ended up working very much in
public health. So no, I did not expect that. I
have a degree from the University of Toronto in English,
(24:39):
and I taught myself what I needed to know, and
I came at it through the fact that I was
looking at narratives from people who were either incarcerated or
otherwise and came to just realize that there were a
set of skills that reading literature that were not that
different from the skills you need to read literature. You
just need to acknowledge that the narratives you're working with
(25:00):
our real narratives, and there are real people behind them,
and they thought there are things that you can do
to help them. And that's been a really a driving
factor in my reading of these kinds of stories.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
We've been speaking with Rosemary Jolly, the author of The
Affluent I Narratives for Decolonial Rite Making. Rosemary, thank you
so much. Really appreciated your insights.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Thank you. I really enjoyed myself.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Well, that's all for this week. I'm Mike Christian, inviting
you to join us again next week on What's at Risk.
Also check out our podcast at Wbznewsradio dot iHeart dot
com What's on your Mind? Send us your thoughts, comments
and questions to What's at Risk at gmail dot com.
(26:02):
That's one word, What's at Risk at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Thank you big.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Thank you to our producer Ken Carberry of Chart Productions.
(27:01):
In day
Speaker 2 (27:09):
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