Abstract
The Marxist roots of critical methodology envision method as anchor to an emancipatory politics that seeks structural transformation. Drawing on our negotiations of carrying out culture-centered health communication projects amidst neoliberal authoritarianism, we explore the nature of academic-activist-community collaborations in envisioning democratic infrastructures for socialist organizing of health. Method is thus inverted from the hegemonic structures of Whiteness that construct extractive relationships perpetuating existing and entrenched health inequities to partnerships of solidarity with subaltern communities committed to a politics of “placing the body on the line.” We work through the concept of “placing the body on the line” to depict the ways in which the body of the academic, turned vulnerable and weaponized in active resistance to neocolonial/capitalist structures, disrupts the hegemonic logics of power and control that shape health within these structures. Examples of culture-centered projects at the global margins offer conceptual bases for theorizing embodied practice as resistance to state-market structures that produce health injustices. The body of the academic as a methodological site decolonizes the capitalist framework of knowledge production through its voicing of an openly resistive politics that stands in defiance to the neoliberal structures that produce health inequities. We challenge the communication literature on micro-practices of resistance, interrogating concepts such as “strategic ambiguity,” “pragmatic interventionism” and “practical engagement” to offer method as embodied practice of open/public resistance, as direct antagonism to state-market structures. Through the re-working of method as embodied resistance that is explicitly socialist in its commitment to imagining health, culture-centered interventions imagine and practice Marxist advocacy and activist interventions that disrupt the intertwined hegemonic logics of capital and empire.
Highlights
After 6 years of creating interventions that challenged healththreatening neoliberal policies across Asia’s margins, the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) moved its home out of the authoritarian context of Singapore. This movement tells the story of complex negotiations of the body, the body of the academic and the body of a collective committed to building infrastructures for subaltern voices, constituted amidst the authoritarian workings of institutional, bureaucratic, and state power
As the Center continued/s its work in Singapore, China, and in increasingly authoritarian contexts, various partnerships with communities and community organizers, civil society groups, and activists enable the ongoing work of cocreating communicative infrastructures for subaltern voices
While the interrogation of the politics embodied in hegemonic texts can offer an entry point into struggles for counter-hegemonic formations (Lupton, 1994; Dutta, 2005), we argue that such textual analysis of hegemony is only a starting point for culture-centered interventions into health communication (Zoller and Dutta, 2009), with the actual work of structural transformation realized through questions of what it takes to co-create infrastructures for subaltern voices
Summary
After 6 years of creating interventions that challenged healththreatening neoliberal policies across Asia’s margins, the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) moved its home out of the authoritarian context of Singapore (see Dutta interview in Today 1,2) This movement tells the story of complex negotiations of the body, the body of the academic and the body of a collective committed to building infrastructures for subaltern voices, constituted amidst the authoritarian workings of institutional, bureaucratic, and state power. Authenticity formed the basis of the solidarity with the subaltern advisory board members, which in turn, served as the basis for embodied actions, building networks of interventions created by FDWs. The “Respect our Rights” campaign remains a key intervention that adopted culture-centered participatory strategies to support the crux of designing culture-centered campaigns, where agentic possibilities are realized by disenfranchised communities through their ownership of decision-making processes. The work of the Millet Network in placing millet as a sustainable crop and as the basis of health (of the human body as well as the ecosystem) works through embodied partnerships (Thaker and Dutta, 2016), with the everyday work of academics in the middle classes in interrogating academic privilege to generate knowledge claims from the global South, from indigenous communities in the global South
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