University's latest Alfred Deakin Professor shapes racism debate

If you’ve heard of the “Racism It Stops With Me” and “Nobody Should be Made to Feel like Crap Just for Being Who They Are" campaigns, then you are seeing Deakin University’s latest Alfred Deakin Professor, Yin Paradies’ research in action.

The prestigious title of Alfred Deakin Professor is the highest honour the University can award its academic staff and recognises those who have made a significant contribution to its research goals.

“It’s good to be recognised by the University and to have my work into racism and its impacts, particularly in health, policy and society, acknowledged,” Professor Paradies said.

Professor Paradies is a Deputy Director of the University’s strategic research centre, The Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. His pioneering work in racism started in the Northern Territory when he left university with a science degree, majoring in mathematics and computer science, and obtained an Indigenous cadetship with the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

“At the time there wasn’t a huge demand for a science cadet in Darwin and the best thing they had with numbers was working with the ABS, so I started there and joined the National Centre for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Statistics, working in Indigenous Health and Welfare.

“I found Indigenous Health interesting. My boss was an academic, trained at Harvard, whose work focused on the social determinants of health and I became interested in this area.

“I was reading Nancy Krieger’s paper (Epidemiology and the web of causation: has anyone seen the spider?) for my Masters in Medical Statistics and was interested by her point that no one had looked at racism as a determinant of health, so I developed a research protocol around this topic and it went from there.”

Professor Paradies is now the current holder of a prestigious ARC Future Fellowship looking at Understanding and Addressing Racism in Australia. He is also working on two ARC Linkage projects, looking at racism and racial bullying among Australian school students, and is part of another ARC research team investigating the biological and social determinants of indigeneity.

Apart from the Beyond Blue #BeTheChange and Racism Stops with Me campaigns, Professor Paradies has worked with Vic Health’s See Beyond Race Campaign, with museums, and with local councils on cultural competency programs.

“To be honest, I just feel happy people use my work to do good things in the world,” he said.

“Ultimately, I’m happy with the fact that I have influenced and shaped the National Anti-Racism Strategy and campaigns such as those run by 'All Together Now.'”

Professor Paradies said fighting racism was an ongoing challenge.

“Like world poverty, racism is one of those wicked social problems that you chip away at,” he said.

“It has many facets and a complexity which excites my intellectual curiosity.

“People’s experience of racism waxes and wanes, but we’re always looking at how we can best tackle the problem.

“Race relations around the world is under pressure in an increasingly unstable world, and so we aim for small wins and hope to influence people and systems over time.”