Monthly Archives: July 2018

Resistance, change, and development: The story of Jangalmahal

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My work in Santali communities in what is now described as Jangalmahal started in the mid-1990s, attempting to understand the communicative production of marginalization. This work was driven by the questions: What is the role of communication in producing material marginalizations of Santalis? How does communication work to reproduce these forms of marginalization? What are the imaginaries of resistance articulated in the backdrop of such marginalization?

These questions and the emerging ideas formed the bases of the culture-centered approach (CCA), attending to the role of communication as an instrument for perpetuating power and for reproducing the marginalization of indigenous communities. The communicative disenfranchisement of indigenous communities is deeply intertwined with their material disenfranchisement. The struggles against displacement, exploitation, and erasure from sites of access to resources mirror the indignities, stigmas, and erasures experienced by Santalis.

Between 2008 and 2012, Jangalmahal witnessed resistance organizing across various spaces. Our community-engaged work of building infrastructures for democratic participation took the form of witnessing the violence, the role of the state, and the many ways in which resistance emerged in this backdrop. While the resistance was narrativized in an essentialized story of Maoist violence, the ongoing fieldwork of CARE points to a much more complex story, with multiple sites of voice making and story telling.

In the post-2012 work of CARE in Jangalmahal, we have been collaborating with Santali communities in building communicative infrastructures for voice. The struggles for voice and democratic opportunities for participation present ongoing challenges in the backdrop of a development model that is targeted specifically at the margins of Jangalmahal.

The following piece co-authored with Dr. Subhasish Ray outlines this ongoing struggle for voice in the backdrop of the state-driven development model.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14672715.2017.1415762

On “closed door meetings” and totality of control

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One of the forms of totalitarian control is the control over discursive spaces and sites of knowledge production.

The totality of control is achieved through the tools of surveillance, systematic management, and manipulation of academic spaces, constructed within the logics of state and market power.

The market reigns precisely through the arms of the state that give legitimacy to forms of resource extraction in the hands of private capital. The state, thus reorganized as a capitalist tool, legitimizes various forms of control through explicit communicative tools such as policies as well as implicit tools that set the expectations of communication.

One such tool of totalitarian control exerted over knowledge production is research calibration. Research calibration works as a method for aligning academic work with the agendas of the state, setting implicitly the limit imposed on what can be studied, how studies are conducted, and the ways in which studies are circulated.

For instance, “closed door meetings” are legitimized as informal processes through which academics can contribute to policy and lend their work to social change. However, the very formulation of “closed door policies” is situated within the ambits of power, legitimizing various forms of state control as the necessary tools for managing the generation and reproduction of knowledge. The closing of the door on the findings and how they are shared offers the state the tool for deploying knowledge to fulfil its agenda of totalitarian control. This is further complicated when public funds are deployed toward the funding of the academic work.

Knowledge thus formulated achieves the totality of control, albeit under the guise of social change.

Activist-in-Residence at CARE: A collaboration with Braema Mathi

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CARE is delighted to host the veteran Singaporean activist Ms. Braema Mathi (Mathiaparanam) as the Center’s inaugural activist-in-residence.

That structural conditions that constitute health need to be systematically challenged and transformed is a key principle of the culture-centered approach (CCA), and forms the basis of the activist-in-residence program. The conceptualization of health as a key node for struggles for social justice offers the basis for participatory projects at the grassroots and of movements that seek to build health sustaining structures. The projects at CARE therefore seek to create spaces and sites for structural transformation through partnerships with communities and activists.

The activist-in-residence program at CARE brings in an activist to spend a few months (between 1 and 6 months) in conversation with a specific project or a series of projects at CARE, resulting in publications of white papers, policy briefs, media interventions, and advocacy strategies. In addition, the activist-in-residence offers workshops and interaction sessions on communication strategies for creating social justice anchors. The community of activists-in-residence return for dialogues on sustainable strategies for structural transformation, methods of community organizing, and tactics of communication interventions that resist structures.

Drawing on CARE projects across Asia-Pacific and the US, the activist-in-residence program seeks to create an infrastructure for global networks of transformative activist politics that imagines a socially just world based on the fundamental tenets of human rights.

A stalwart of Singapore activism, Braema defines the landscape of communication for social change in Singapore through her tireless advocacy for human rights in Singapore and across Southeast Asia.

Her interest in social justice from early years led Braema to become involved in issues related to women, migrants and HIV. She has led AWARE, founded and led Transient Workers Count Too, was the Vice-President of Action for Aids, and also founded and led MARUAH (Singapore Working Group for ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism). She is also the Singapore focal Point for MARUAH in ASEAN and also on the Southeast Women’s Caucus. She was also the Regional President (Southeast Asia and Pacific) of the International Council of Social Welfare and AWARE‘s first Director of Research and Advocacy.

Her areas of expertise include advocacy strategies, communications toolkits, partnerships with the media, and networked platforms for change. She has published book chapters, articles and also written reports to and for organisations that include think-tanks in Southeast Asia and to the United Nations.

As activist-in-residence, Braema will lead CARE’s capacity building work in human rights and communication for social change, fostering a network of community organizations and academics across the Asia-pacific, offering guidance to the development of platforms of resistance to the neoliberal order, and participating in collaborations in thinking through ideas of health as a human right. She is currently collaborating with Professor Mohan Dutta on white papers on key areas of social change communication, which will lead to a book on Communication and Social Change.