Culture-centered Approach Research Articles

“Water is life … the problem is there’s only one tap”: A culture-centered and necrocapitalist inquiry to communicating health and water

ABSTRACT This paper records knowledge from below around the overlaps between health, water, and health interventions emerging from rural communities located in North 24 Parganas and Purulia in West Bengal. Using the culture-centered approach and necrocapitalism, this essay documents the localocentric stories from the subaltern communities disproportionately impacted by water insecurity. Based on data collected during a seven-week field study, a critical thematic analysis of the data reveals how research participants with minoritized caste and low-income backgrounds routinely challenge, disrupt, and re-organize the dominant frames of health, water, and health interventions as articulated by local–global organizational actors. Additionally, research participant narratives make visible how they navigate social, cultural, institutional, and capitalist structures that adversely affect water security and their health.

‘There is so much we can learn from the mistakes of Covid-19’: service provider recommendations for more accessible crisis communication in multicultural Australia

ABSTRACT This paper presents the findings of a qualitative, reflexive investigation into the challenges facing Australia’s migrant and refugee communities when engaging with mediated communication during global crisis events. Informed through a Culture-Centred Approach, I present an interpretive thematic analysis of interview and focus group discussion with 16 service providers and community leaders who supported migrant and refugee communities during the Covid-19 pandemic in Melbourne, Australia. Participants discussed significant problems concerning the accessibility of Covid-related communication, noting numerous health equity implications, which many described as heightened for migrant and/or refugee communities with disabilities. These findings lend further credence to calls for more intersectional and participatory research and practice approaches, with participants advocating strategies that centre the embodied expertise of people with direct experience of both racialised exclusion and health inequity. I discuss these recommendations with careful consideration of documented challenges in global efforts to inform crisis communication scholarship, policy, and practice.

Stories for Us, or for Others: Digital Storytelling with a Harm Reduction Organization as Culture-Centered Health Communication

ABSTRACT Digital storytelling is a participatory media creation process. To illustrate how digital storytelling may be used as a method within the culture-centered approach to health communication, this paper presents a case study analysis of two 2-day digital storytelling workshops in collaboration with a local harm reduction organization that supports people who use drugs. Storytellers used the communicative space of digital storytelling to confront stigmatizing cultural and institutional narratives related to substance use. Storytellers also demonstrated how harm reduction work engendered a sense of purpose and an alternative to punitive drug policies. However, storytellers felt that stories produced for the harm reduction community could be misunderstood by outsiders, limiting the potential of the stories for advocacy communication. Overall, we find that digital storytelling as a method within the culture-centered approach has potential to elevate the experiences, understanding, expertise, and goals of communities that have been excluded from health communication. The digital storytelling method will have the most value as a critical narrative intervention if the principles and reflexivity of the culture-centered approach are foundational to the process.

“The Lung Disease as an Evanescent Rainbow”: Indigenous Languages as Agency in Communicating COVID-19 in Multilingual Kham Tibetan Region in China

The role of language is one of the most critical elements in communicating COVID-19 public health mandates globally. This study aims to explore how Tibetans in the multilingual Kham region came to understand COVID-19 and develop health choices. To accomplish this goal, we used a culture-centered approach to examine how the words/phrases of COVID-19 influence Kham Tibetans’ agency [the ability to develop actions (or lack thereof)] to work on the infectious disease and the pandemic management policy in China. This analysis explores the interactions among social structure, culture, and agency in the creation of transformative practices for negotiating the digital biomedical environment. Based on 30 in-depth interviews with Tibetans in the Kham region, we illustrate that the dialogical praxis to co-construct languages significantly impacts Tibetans’ deliberate agency, the capacity to act that is conscious or intended, to work on COVID-19 and the pandemic-control policy.

Theorising Māori Health and Wellbeing in a Whakapapa Paradigm: Voices from the Margins

ABSTRACT Whakapapa is an Indigenous metatheoretical framework; a phenomenon of metaphysical and social connections embedded in Indigenous epistemology unique to Aotearoa New Zealand (Aotearoa NZ). This research foregrounds the innate connection between Māori, land, health, and wellbeing as an expression of Whakapapa, nuanced through the layering of lived experience and sensemaking of 30 Māori participants, situated in dialogue with the culture-centered approach (CCA). Noting the erasure of Māori voices from the hegemonic frame of health communication in the settler colonial state, we sought to understand health and wellbeing meanings, challenges and solutions as articulated by Māori participants at the margins of Indigeneity. Drawing on the CCA approach to health communication, the manuscript highlights the relationship between Whakapapa and voice. The dialogs emergent from in-depth interviews place the CCA in dialogue with the Whakapapa paradigm, foregrounding the role of voice democracy in creating anchors to health and wellbeing among Māori, rooted in tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty). The articulations of Māori health voiced from/at the margins are offered as interventions into the large-scale health inequities experienced by Māori in Aotearoa NZ.

Culture-centered reflexivity as critical assessment

ABSTRACT In this short piece, we argue that, in light of issues with traditional grading practices, critical assessment activities, particularly through guided reflexivity, can support equitable and social justice–oriented education in communication and beyond. The article posits that a culture-centered critically reflexive self-assessment empowers learners to use communication as an inquiry into and as a challenge to taken-for-granted dominant ideologies. We present prism visualizations as an assessment practice of critical reflexivity informed by the culture-centered approach (Dutta, M. J., Moana-Johnson, G., & Elers, C. 2020. COVID 19 and the pedagogy of culture-centered community radical democracy: A response from aotearoa New Zealand. Journal of Communication Pedagogy, 3, 11–19. https://doi.org/10.31446/JCP.2020.03) and consider lessons from the implementation of this practice in an interdisciplinary graduate course on relationship-centered teaching.

Preventive Health Practices and Stress Management Among Bangladeshi Immigrants During COVID-19: A Culture-Centered Approach

Underrepresented communities were disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic across all states in America. Since immigrants have diverse ethnic backgrounds, their health behaviors and coping mechanisms might vary during the pandemic. Therefore, this study investigates the health behaviors of low-income Bangladeshi immigrants in the USA to understand their preventive health practices and stress-buffering processes during COVID-19. Using a culture-centered approach for data analysis, a total of 15 participants, including undocumented immigrants, were recruited for the study. The results show that the immigrants’ health behaviors concerning COVID-19 were heavily influenced by their cultural beliefs, which determined whether they perceived the COVID-19 virus as dangerous or not. Their preventive health practices and stress-buffering processes were predominantly shaped by traditional home remedies, common preventive measures, and prayers. Additionally, it was found that structural barriers made it difficult for them to maintain a healthier life, as they could not afford regular food or medicine delivery services during COVID-19. Not only did affordability pose challenges, but the lack of language and computer skills restricted their online access to purchasing food or other necessities as well. Future research directions and limitations of the study are also discussed.

Safe water as empowerment, structural dilemma, and savior: conflicting discourses about arsenic groundwater contamination in West Bengal

ABSTRACT This essay explores the conflicting discourses circulated ‘on the ground’ in rural West Bengal regarding blame, water, and health. We take a culture-centered approach that builds on environmental health communication literature through qualitative research with health workers and rural community members living with arsenicosis. Local discourses about structural dilemmas and water as savior/medicine reveal important practical and cultural considerations to water contamination solutions in West Bengal. This study makes three key contributions. First, we illuminate how empowerment discourses reinforce neoliberal and lifestyle theories of health while concealing important realities connected to water contamination and water access. Second, we demonstrate how cultural discourses of water as a savior disrupt Eurocentric health narratives and argue for free, decommodified water. Third, we argue that the narratives based on people’s lived illness experiences could be used to foster solidarity with healthcare workers and should be the basis of practical solutions to create water access.

Decolonizing Impact Through the Culture-Centered Approach to Health Communication: Mobilizing Communities to Transform the Structural Determinants of Health

ABSTRACT In this issue, we outline the central tenets of the culture-centered approach to health communication. What does the culture-centered approach address when suggesting the co-creation of voice infrastructures? What is the theory’s methodological emphasis for mobilizing and transforming structures that shape health inequalities for communities at the margins? Drawing on examples of culture-centered interventions in over fifty communities spread across 17 countries and three continents, a large number of them housed under the umbrella of the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) at Massey University in Aotearoa, New Zealand, we articulate the communicative processes (referring to actionable sources and targets of communicative action) that shape the building of voice infrastructures mobilizing toward structural transformation. For instance, African American communities organizing under the framework of the culture-centered approach, documented in Dutta, Collins, and colleagues study in 2019, discuss the building of voice infrastructures where community members participate in co-creating heart health information based on comparative effectiveness research, building an African American media ecosystem disseminating the information alongside community-led initiatives growing healthy food, community-led youth activities, and activism addressing the racist structural drivers that adversely impact African American heart health. In this essay, we describe the impact of culture-centered interventions reflected in the voice infrastructures within communities that witness and articulate the oppressions that threaten human health at the margins and in the transformations of these structures that organize various facets of life and livelihood at the global margins linked to health.

Preventing Violence in the Raced Margins: Alternate Rationalities, Possibilities, and Imaginaries

The organizational communication discipline has been criticized for not centering the voices of ethnic minority communities. This can be witnessed in the prevention of violence, where migrant communities are more vulnerable to the effects of violence but are underserved by Western models of violence prevention. Grounded in the culture-centered approach, the present study—drawing from interviews with 67 new migrants and 31 service providers—explores how organizations can assist in preventing violence among new migrant communities. The findings reveal how communication inequality reduces agency and can create an environment conducive to violence and how the current individualized model of service delivery does not attend to the cultural norms and needs of community members. Engaging with new migrant communities and addressing violence involves creating communicative avenues of dialogue and leveraging community agency in codeveloping infrastructures for transformation.

Resisting an unfolding genocide: reflections from radical struggles in the Global South

ABSTRACT This essay theorizes radical struggles at the world’s end, emergent from registers of organizing against colonial–imperial–capitalist violence in the Global South. Working through the ongoing genocidal violence carried out by Israel in Gaza, I explore the role of voice infrastructures in the Global South as the spaces where Global South theories are imagined, tested, and continually transformed. The tenets of the culture-centered approach (CCA), reflected in the everyday organizing work of the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), guide the conceptualization of the relationship between theorizing and struggle as embodied practice. For radical organizing to materialize at the world’s end, I argue the urgency of reorganizing the relationship between struggles and theorizing, cultivating a rhetoric and politics of suspicion, enacting sovereignty, forging connections, and sustaining a politics of preparation.

Recapturing Communicative Erasure: Black Women Farmers’ Lived Experience, Political Voice and Cultural Knowledge as Critical Health Communication Praxis

ABSTRACT In this paper, we conduct a case study analysis of the National Women in Agriculture Association (NWIAA), an international, Black women-led farm assistance organization founded in 2008 and based in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Drawing on the Culture-Centered Approach (CCA) and grounded in interviews and observational fieldwork, we center the perspectives of NWIAA chapter leaders (n = 16) to examine how they describe motivations for farming, challenge power inequities, engage with intersectional barriers, and develop locally situated solutions across agricultural and community health contexts. The analysis argues that Black women farmer’s historical lived experiences, political voice, and shared deep-rooted agricultural knowledge provide an innovative and emancipatory praxis for rethinking health communication intervention approaches that address food system-generated disparities. This study contributes important takeaways for health communication practitioners, policymakers, and advocates addressing food inequities. It extends the CCA as a first step in developing community-driven, context-specific food insecurity health communication interventions within marginalized communities across the United States and beyond.

All Pandemics are Local: The Importance of a Culture-Centered Approach to Risk and Crisis Communication for Laboratory Research on Zoonotic Diseases.

Continuing laboratory research into zoonotic diseases is necessary for public health preparedness. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has elevated existing concerns about the risks BSL-4 research facilities can pose to the surrounding community. This study places such concerns in the context of previous research regarding the construction of biosafety labs, as well as policy discussions related to other scientific controversies like gain of function research. Building on this prior knowledge as well as established theories in the field of communication, we propose using a Culture-Centered Approach paired with a Communication Complex approach to facilitate more meaningful and effective communication between researchers and community members, particularly those who tend to be marginalized in such conversations. The commentary concludes by outlining a risk assessment process using the CCA-Communication Complex Approach.

Subaltern perspectives of developing communication campaigns: Re-examining the culture-centered approach in addressing health disparities

ABSTRACT A central component of the culture-centered approach is the co-development of communication infrastructures for health and wellbeing within subaltern communities. However, there is an absence in the representation of these infrastructures in esteemed journals. This is problematic for illuminating the tensions and complexities in bringing theory into practice from the perspective of community members. This study draws from two culture-centered projects to explore how communities make sense of the process of participating in building interventions, comprising 119 initial in-depth interviews with residents, 10 community advisory board focus groups, and 21 evaluative interviews. The residents’ narratives reveal a relationship between subalternity and distrust toward interventions delivered by providers outside of their community, emphasizing the need to create spaces of listening that anchor community relationships. The formation of relationships was crucial to the development of communication infrastructures, which continued beyond the study. The contributions to intercultural and international communication are discussed.

The CODE^SHIFT model: a data justice framework for collective impact and social transformation

Abstract In this article, we present an alternative framework that resists hegemonic social sciences within data-driven communication theorizing through a culture-centered approach (CCA). Building on the CCA in co-creating voice infrastructures at the margins, we argue that data justice requires transforming interpretive data framings, disrupting the hegemonic registers of knowledge production constituted around data, and working with/through data to challenge the structures of capitalism and colonialism that circulate the practices of exploitation and extraction. We build upon community-engaged projects emergent from the CCA in/with/from the Global South to propose the CODE^SHIFT Model, grounded in principles of equity-mindedness, collective impact, purposiveness, and systemic change. It highlights what data justice looks like in various stages of community-led transformation: identifying pressing social problems; bridging cross-sector coalitions and partnerships; organizing for collective impact activities; and sustaining capacity building. We reframe data as pluriversal, embodied, sacred, sovereign, disruptive, solidarity, and impossibility.

Сравнительный анализ подходов Л.С. Выготского и Дж. Боулби к развитию ребенка на первом году жизни

<p>Objective: To compare the positions of L.S. Vygotsky and J. Bowlby regarding three critical aspects of mental development of a child: the characteristics of newborn perception, the extent of an infant's engagement in early social interaction, and the psychological nature of the bond between an infant and its mother. Method: a comparative analysis. Results. The authors' viewpoints share common ground in acknowledging the child's immediate engagement in social relationships following birth and the pivotal role of a primary caregiver figure in the child's development. Nevertheless, disparities in the interpretation of “primordial we" and "attachment" concepts, employed by the authors to elucidate the specifics of the child's connection with the mother or a caregiver, are explored. The study reveals a divergence between L.S. Vygotsky's postulate of infant helplessness, forming the foundation of the developmental social context at this stage, and J. Bowlby's perspective, emphasizing the presence of highly effective inborn forms of social perception and behavior in infants. Conclusions. These disparities in the authors' viewpoints may be attributed to their reliance on different research paradigms, with one emphasizing culture-centred approach and the other adopting an evolution-centred approach. L.S. Vygotsky's assertion about infant helplessness, though lacking empirical validation, maintains its theoretical importance as a direction in the search for the unique course of human development. Keywords: cultural-historical theory, attachment theory, newborn, childhood, infancy.</p>

Local government engagement practices and Indigenous interventions: Learning to listen to Indigenous voices

Abstract This article examines the Māori consultation and engagement processes in a development project framed as climate adaptation and carried out by a local council that sought to expel Māori from ancestral land. Drawing on a dialogue between Kaupapa Māori (KM) theory and the culture-centered approach (CCA), land is centered as the basis for everyday meanings of health. We depict the processes of culture-centered organizing in co-creating voice infrastructures at the “margins of the margins” of the community, which serve as the spaces for voicing Indigenous knowledge to resist the modern-day confiscation of ancestral Māori land. The dialogue between KM theory and the CCA foregrounds communicative inequalities within community spaces, working with the concept “margins of the margins” to center Māori voices that have historically been silenced.

Women in the Margins: A Culture-Centered Interrogation of Hunger and “Food Apartheid” in the United States

ABSTRACT Guided by the culture-centered approach to health communication (CCA), this study explores how marginalized US women understand and negotiate meanings related to hunger and health. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with 23 women experiencing deep structural vulnerability. Findings revealed three paradoxical meanings related to hunger: (a) the “abundance versus scarcity” paradox where even though women were consistently short of food, industrially processed food was amply available to them through charitable food venues, (b) the “good food” versus “bad food” paradox, which showed that while women sometimes consumed whatever food was available, taste, healthfulness, and desirability of food were equally important factors, and (c) the “not-eating versus overeating” paradox, which showed how women experienced anxieties around both hunger and obesity; women experienced physiological hunger pangs, but were also concerned about weight-gain and obesity because of the abundance of processed food in their foodscapes. Overall, despite their best attempts at being good health citizens, women were not able choose the foods they wanted to eat because of inadequate government benefits and a lack of “good food” options in food charity settings. These paradoxical meanings reflect contradictions inherent in the neoliberal model of health citizenship, where the focus is on individual behavior change, while the role of governments in facilitating healthy foodscapes is overlooked.

Subliminal voices: barriers to healthcare and proposed interventions by international students and their families at a large research university in the Midwest

Despite the vast numbers of international students in the U.S. as well as their contribution to the economy, their voices are rarely heard within the discursive spaces of the American academe. This study takes a step toward filling that gap and seeks to open up a platform where married, international graduate students at a large Midwestern university could communicate, in particular, the barriers they faced while accessing healthcare facilities for their families. Using a culture-centered approach to health communication, through focus groups and in-depth interviews, this study provides a discursive space where 22 international students and spouses articulate vivid narratives of the problems they encountered while negotiating the American healthcare system, revealing a basic issue of unaffordability of students' spousal health insurance, accompanied by a dire need for better communication between international students and the university, with there being a need for the latter to better explain to international students a healthcare system that is new to them, as well as communicating with them, with better clarity, the available healthcare options for them and their spouses. The participants also proposed interventions to redress the problems, including the need for better dissemination of information regarding healthcare.

Academic-community solidarities in land occupation as an Indigenous claim to health: culturally centered solidarity through voice infrastructures

In this work, we explore the role of land in Indigenous theorizing about health, embodied in a land occupation that resisted a climate-adaptive development project imposed on the community from the top down by the local government. The proposed development project of building a stop bank on the Oroua River sought to alienate Māori from the remnants of the land. Embedded in and emerging from a culture-centered academic-community-activist partnership, an advisory group of Māori community members om the “margins of the margins” came together to participate in the occupation of the land to claim it as the basis for securing their health. This study describes the occupation and the role of our academic-activist intervention in it, theorizing land occupation as the root of decolonizing health emerging from Indigenous struggles for sovereignty (Tino rangatiratanga). The community advisory group members brought together in a culture-centered intervention, collaborated in partnership with the academic team, generated video narratives that resisted and dismantled the communicative inversions produced by the settler colonial state to perpetuate its extractive interests and produced communicative resources that supported the land occupation led by the broader Whānau. This study concludes by arguing that the culture-centered approach offers a meta-theory for decolonizing health communication by building voice infrastructures that support Indigenous land struggles.