Sound research
My last post was perhaps something of a rant, so this one will be more positive. One need only the barest acquaintance with me to know my enthusiasm for radio. I’ve recently heard two excellent radio pieces on topics that touch on my research and (to coin a phrase) my research-in-law.
First is Alix Spiegel’s amazing, haunting, and horrifying piece on All Things Considered Wednesday night about mental health in a a post-Katrina trailer park. There’s nothing in it that should be rationally surprising–especially not if you’ve read Kai Erikson’s classic Everything in its Path, which shows how moving people into trailer parks without their pre-disaster social networks is has disastrous consequences for mental health. Disasters like Katrina are terrible for lots of reasons, but prime among them is the way it disrupts peoples lives–often permanently–and destroys their everyday patterns of support and solidarity. But the point is not that Erickson said this in 1978 (no one listens to sociologists of disaster, anyway)–it’s how well Alix Spiegel tells the story here. This shouldn’t be a surprise either, if you’ve heard her work on This American Life or All Things Considered. But this piece is the sort that will make you stop whatever you’re doing and just listen, carefully.
On a related note, I found this article in the Times today about criticisms of the Red Cross from Katrina survivors remarkable. Change the dollar amounts (by several orders of magnitude) and the location, and the article could be describing the Halifax Relief Commission.
The second piece of radio I want to highlight is a two-part documentary from the CBC program Ideas about the Gates Foundation and its drive for vaccinations in Africa. While it doesn’t raise the questions that Mari’s research does, it touches on lots of questions that are often not addressed in the generally laudatory coverage that it gets in most media. Are vaccinations necessarily the best way to spend money to improve health in poor countries, or would it be better to emphasize clean water and nutrition? What happens when rich whites come in and tell poorer, darker-skinned people what to do to improve their countries? What about the brain-drain of doctors and nurses from the global south to the global north? If you’ve got two hours to spare, I really recommend downloading and listening to this. (Download it soon, because part one will disappear in a week, I think.) Part one is here. Part two is here.
-jacob
