Welcome to the Systems of Power Working Board
April 2024
The purpose of this Systems of Power board is to build confidence for community and grassroots led advocacy in health justice issues as they navigate political and governmental systems and their layers of entrenched power.
British institutions are hundreds of years old, arguably nearly 1000 years old, and as such their foundations and epistemological framings are of different and often shameful eras. As such there are entrenched systems of power that advantage those continuing the within legacy structures of colonial, hierarchical, industrial era Britain.
The “organic” growth of these systems overlap with one another meaning that it’s often quite challenging to seek insights, answers, and justice from a system not designed for transparency and “the public”. When advocating for justice we must ask ourselves some critical questions: Who does what, are they right for me; How do I influence the right people; where should I be focusing “my” energies?
In many legacy systems we can find ourselves treated as the cabaret; brought in to entertain with illusions of change but rarely can we make that change. We can be used by others with hidden interests like pawns on a chess board and find ourselves having invested high amounts of time in the wrong place. This means that to safeguard ourselves from further oppression and marginalisation we must ensure we’re working with the right people, in the right spaces, trying to do the same thing, with the agreed goals.
Once learning a system we can also develop the capacities to advocate for new systems that abolish harmful legacy infrastructure.
This work has been inspired by the writings of Olúfémi O Táíwò in Elite Capture (2022) about the People of Flint, Michigan (USA).
INTRODUCTION
“So they got to work. The first step was to develop epistemic authority. To achieve this, they built a new room, one that put Flint residents and activists in active collaboration with scientists who had the laboratories to run the relevant tests and prove MDEQ’s report was fraudulent. Flint residents' outcry about the poisonings helped recruit scientists to their cause. The new roommates ran a citizen science campaign, further rating the alarm about the water quality and distributing sample kits to neighbors so that they could submit their water for testing. The alliance of residents and scientists won. And the poisoning of the children of Flint emerged as a national scandal.”
The Interactive Miro
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