Sunday, 5 January 2025

Have you started working on your New Year's resolutions, Reader?
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Or don’t you have any for this year? Or you might not believe in the whole concept of resolutions, that’s possible too. My resolutions for Inclusive Journalism are:

• Deepening current projects.
• Expanding this community.
• Improving collaborations.

Without you, my subscribers, I’m nothing! So please take a few minutes to help me further develop Inclusive Journalism.

New Year, New Strategy

For this newsletter, I will follow a new structure of picking one topic each month to write more about, starting in January with well-being in the context of decolonial theory and constructive storytelling. Some of you know that I’ve studied holistic lifestyle coaching and work as a coach and mentor, I did yoga teacher training and meditation silent retreats and use those practices in the (online) courses and retreats that I offer.

There was a time when I was too embarrassed to admit that I was teaching yoga next to my job in journalism. When I started the coaching study, I didn’t dare to share about it during lunch with my colleagues working on investigative journalism stories. Even though the yoga and coaching training I’ve done have been based on scientific approaches, they also opened up parts of knowledge I had never heard of or learned about before. And I was afraid of being seen as “too spiritual” or “irrational” by bringing some of the learnings to the newsroom tables. Little did I know that journalism needs more well-being knowledge instead of less.

One of the Nieman Lab Predictions for Journalism in 2023 by Valérie Bélair- Gagnon was titled “Well-being will become a core tenet of journalism”. It describes all the challenges journalists face nowadays and points out small steps towards solutions. Luckily, well-being is been taken more seriously than before, and the approach is broadened from seeing it as an individual’s problem to a systemic issue in the industry.

Sanne

DEEP DIVE

Decolonizing Global Health

Researcher in the Sociology of Health and Illness Kara Smythe was one of the speakers in the summer school on Decolonization of Global Health in 2022. She first raised the question of what it means to decolonize global health and - as common in decolonial theory - more questions are raised from there:

• How do we define health?
• What does it mean to be unwell?
• How is health research carried out?
• What are the priorities based on? And how sets the priorities?
• How do we make decisions?
• What sources of knowledge matter most?
• And how does the current practice maintain colonial power structures?

Facts are that what we know about the health of the global community comes from research institutions in High-Income Countries in the Minority World or the Global North. It means the research is predominantly based on quantitative data with a lack of knowledge about human experience. Experiential, embodied, and ancestral knowledge is not necessarily part of the research, Smythe says.

She pleads for a holistic and intersectional way of looking at someone’s health and the state of the healthcare system itself and wants to be mindful of how health research is being done.

Health equity numbers

The lack of diversity also seeps through in academic publishing where editorial teams are homogenous and there is huge pressure on publishing in high-impact journals. Epistemic injustice (epistemic means "related to knowledge") is about who controls what works get published and who can access and engage. By taking English as the main language, it causes already exclusion of non-English work.

​Global Health 50/50 is an independent research initiative that informs, inspires, and incites action and accountability for gender equality and health equity. Their report shows that just 2% of nonprofit board seats are held by women from low-income countries. Global Health governing boards are not globally representative and only a fraction of the organisations have transparent policies for board diversity. There is progress in representation though, with increased gender equality commitments and policies.

The gap between media and holistic health

The context Smythe gives to the topic of health shows the dominance of Western science in global health and how it comes with blindspots to other perspectives. It makes sense then that more and more people are looking for these other knowledges because we found the limits of what is working.

Since I studied holistic lifestyle coaching from 2016-2018 I’ve seen the debates about well-being going in all sorts of directions. The COVID-19 pandemic was a fascinating time, in that sense, when people near me who believe in a holistic view of health also sometimes lost themselves in conspiracy theories, and others close to me in the journalism profession took a derogatory stance against that group, resulting in a growing gap between media and public about this topic. Naomi Klein describes the process strikingly in her book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.

In a previous newsletter about the book, I wrote that journalists have too often pushed conspiracy theorists into the ‘crazy’ corner, which has created a vacuum in which people like Steve Bannon, former president Trump’s campaigner, can flourish as media makers in what Klein calls the mirror world:

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed tensions between holistic health advocates and mainstream media narratives, as detailed in Naomi Klein's Doppelganger. This gap underscores the need for nuanced, inclusive storytelling.

What can you do?

As always in decolonial theory, praxis is important. It’s not just about becoming aware or pointing out where things don’t work, it’s also about taking action to change it.

According to Smythe, these actions are necessary to change something:

• Epistemic disobedience.
• Embracing new ways of knowing, and understanding health.
• Engaging with scholarly communication from the Majority World.
• An intersectional approach to health.

Smythe is critical of institutions in the Minority World/ Global North dedicated to decolonizing within a neo-colonial structure. Decolonization gets conflated with anti-racism, she says, and it’s being relegated to inclusion and diversity.

I understand what she means: too often the practices of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DEI) are executed superficially. There is a focus on creating a more diverse team to work with but not changing the foundation the work is built from and leaning on.

One participant in the summer school responded to Smythe’s lecture by sharing her anger. She noticed how primarily people of color and women were participating in the course, exactly the group that is hurt most by inequality. She wondered what it would take to get those in power engaged. A fair question.

Solution stories about how the system works

I grapple with the question of who should be involved often in the context of my work. And I also found ways of doing - praxis - that give a satisfactory answer. One of them is applying Solutions Journalism as a storytelling method to report on systemic issues.

When I started to conduct training in Solutions Journalism I noticed how a constructive storytelling approach helps journalists and storytellers to feel better themselves. Solutions Journalism is described as thoroughly reporting on responses to social problems and often leads to a better understanding of root causes. Working on problems without knowing what’s been done already to try and solve it, is draining at some point, not just for audiences who read them but also for the creators of the stories.

Solutions Journalism as a method works holistically. It doesn’t just benefit the actors in a story from being victims to becoming actors, it also takes anecdotal evidence seriously and automatically pushes storytellers to connect with communities, hence that’s where the responses to problems occur.

I was a co-trainer in the recent Train-the-Trainer program of the Solutions Journalism Network and I noticed again the mindful way of teaching. As trainers, we apply adult learning techniques in which all participants are seen as experts in their own right. There are multiple breaks during the three-hour sessions and most of the assignments are being done communally. So much of that links to decolonial theory and I’ve learned to apply the frameworks in the Inclusive Journalism courses.

By prioritizing community voices and holistic perspectives, Solutions Journalism offers a practical framework for storytelling, making it a tool to dismantle epistemic injustice.

Decolonization is unsettling and supposed to be unsettling. It’s about unlearning and finding new ways of doing. It can’t be done if you don’t prioritize your well-being. How do you see colonial structures shaping health in your community? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

A course on well-being, with practical tools and a supporting community This is the soft launch, especially for newsletter subscribers. Sign up here!

INDEPENDENT MEDIA

Media of the week

Geneva Health Files' mission is to advance accountability in international health policymaking through independent and critical journalism. The Substack newsletter tracks international health policy as it unfolds in the capital of global health: Geneva, Switzerland. It provides rigorous critical analysis and insights by illuminating the actors and processes behind global health policies.

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See you next week!

Sanne