Abstract

The culture-centered approach (CCA) foregrounds the organizing role of communities at the "margins of the margins" of the globe as the spaces for identifying the structural challenges to health and wellbeing and for co-creating community-anchored solutions to these challenges. Pandemics such as COVID19 render visible the deep-rooted inequalities across and within societies, seeded and catalysed by over three decades of variegated neoliberal reforms (Dutta, 2016). The trajectories of COVID19 outbreaks as well as the effects of COVID19-related policies render visible the inequalities that are written into the neoliberal organizing of political economy. Community participation is scripted into the neoliberal framework as an instrument for depoliticizing community and utilizing it as a channel for disseminating top-down indivdiual behavior change messages. Drawing on the examples of community organizing in Kerala where the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has actively co-created an infrastructure for socialist organizing, and iwi-led Maori checkpoints in Aotearoa New Zealand, we delineate the features of transformative community organizing. Community organizing in the CCA is political, foregrounding community sovereignty as the basis for resisting neoliberal health structures. Community struggles for communication equality thus point to alternative forms of organizing health and wellbeing that challenge and seek to dismantle neoliberal governmentality.

Highlights

  • Drawing on the examples of community organizing in Kerala where the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has actively co-created an infrastructure for socialist organizing, and Iwi-led Maori checkpoints in Aotearoa New Zealand, we delineate the features of transformative community organizing

  • One of the key threads that emerges from the community organizing in response to COVID-19 is the nature of organizing work as political

  • Interrogating and disrupting the depoliticization of communities to be incorporated into community-based participatory projects serving the agendas of capital, community organizing at the margins in the Global South/South in the North foreground the concept of community sovereignty

Read more

Summary

A People-Centric Route to Rebuild the World From the Global South

This paper explores Iwi-led checkpoints as a humanitarian, cultural and community response to COVID-19 against the backdrop of the colonial settler state and amidst the politics, police and power structures in Aotearoa, New Zealand. The Iwi-led checkpoints continued to be emphatically discussed in the Epidemic Response Committee’s live online daily meetings, led by the leader of the National Party, Simon Bridges This committee was set up by the government to scrutinize its national COVID-19 pandemic response. The PM’s response carefully sidestepped referencing “Iwi-led checkpoints,” referring instead to her communication with local MPs from the Iwi area regarding the local establishment of roadblocks (New Zealand Government, 2020b). Obtained via public official information requests, thousands of official COVID-19 government papers were released on 8 May 2020 revealing the basis for the government’s COVID19 decisions (Walls and Cheng, 2020), except for the legal advice documents

DISCUSSION
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call