Culture-centered Approach in Addressing Health Disparities: Communication Infrastructures for Subaltern Voices

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article offers a conceptual overview of the key principles of the culture-centered approach (CCA) as a meta-theoretical framework for addressing health inequalities by building communicative infrastructures for listening to the voices of subaltern communities that are hitherto erased from dominant discursive spaces. Complementing a growing body of scholarship that draws on the CCA to address the structural contexts of health in the subaltern margins across the globe, this article lays out the methodological framework of the CCA. It highlights the key conceptual anchors that serve as foundations of the approach, suggesting that participation, partnerships, communication, dialogue, and reflexivity offer methodological tools that interrogate the reproduction of erasures within dominant structures, and create entry points for subaltern voices to arrive into hegemony. The essay wraps up by offering specific strategies and tools for designing culture-centered projects that may be adopted by activists, community advocates and organizers, and academics working in academic-community partnerships in the backdrop of health disparities.