Deficit discourse and Indigenous health: How narrative framings of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are reproduced in policy

Deficit discourse and Indigenous health: How narrative framings of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are reproduced in policy Report

• Author(s): Fogarty, Will, Bulloch, Hannah, McDonnell, Siobhan, Davis, Michael
• Published: 2018
• Publisher: The Lowitja Institute

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Abstract: This report explores ‘deficit discourse’ in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health policy. ‘Discourse’, in this context, encompasses thought represented in written and spoken communication and/or expressed through practices. The term draws attention to the circulation of ideas, the processes by which these ideas shape conceptual and material realities, and the power inequalities that contribute to and result from these processes. ‘Deficit discourse’ refers to discourse that represents people or groups in terms of deficiency – absence, lack or failure. Our aim with this report is to provide the groundwork both for further analysis in this area, and for challenging and ‘changing the conversation’ about the health and wellbeing of Australia’s First Peoples. The main analytical method used was critical discourse analysis – a form of linguistic deconstruction that aims to reveal the interconnections between language, power and ideology. This method highlights the role of language and associated thought in producing and challenging social inequality. The discussion in this report draws attention to the role of discourse in shaping how we imagine ourselves and others, and the relations between us, and in defining what can be thought, said and acted upon. It appears likely that deficit discourse impacts on the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in multiple ways. It contributes to forms of external and internalised racism, and shades out solutions that recognise strengths, capabilities and rightsI. n this report we have paid particular attention to deficit statistics, such as in the Closing the Gap agenda. We argue that deficit data has been used for politically diverse purposes, including by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advocates to highlight injustice and hold governments to account. However, divorced from context and frequently reiterated, such statistics can also form a narrative that homogenises and dehumanises Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people into an intractable ‘problem’ to be ‘dealt’ with. Worse, they can form part of a narrative that situates responsibility for inequalities wholly with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people themselves, obscuring the ways entrenched structural inequalities are affecting health. At the same time, policy itself is far from monolithic: it incorporates a range of views, is often ‘discursively aware’, and exists in a state of flux and contestation. It demonstrates a tension between a desire to ‘fix’ the ‘Indigenous other’ according to a normative non-Indigenous ideal, and more sophisticated understandings of the roles that factors such as language, country and community control play in health outcomes.

• Urls: https://www.lowitja.org.au/page/services/resources/Cultural-and-social-determinants/racism/Deficit-Discourse-and-Indigenous-Health, https://www.lowitja.org.au/content/Document/Lowitja-Publishing/deficit-discourse.pdf
• Publisher Location: Melbourne