Communication and the politics of inequality: Notes from Jangalmahal

The fieldwork in May 2013 focused on developing frameworks around the key problems faced by community members in the villages and the corresponding solutions the community members envisioned.

This round of culture-centered fieldwork worked on the scope of the problems that the community would begin its work on. The community had already decided the broad scope of problems.

Our role, my role, as a researcher and the role of the community organizer, are tied to developing the scope of solutions to be implemented in the community as identified by community members.

In this round of conversations, the community members identified the problem of water for irrigation as the key problem facing the community. This was also identified through the in-depth interviews and earlier ethnographic work as the primary problem in the community, connected to the experiences of food insecurity and the struggles with poverty. Community members identified the need to build (a) deep tube well, and (b) a localized high dam (বড় বাঁধ)  in the community as solutions to the problem of water scarcity.

As we worked on identifying solutions, the local community organizers suggested the need to engage the Block Development Officer. They felt that having a dialogue with the BDO would be very helpful, especially in my presence.

One of them noted, "Babu, you go and talk, and things will happen." That my speaking position is tied to securing entry points into discursive spaces is something that I am deeply aware of from past fieldwork. And this experience was another example of culture-centered fieldwork that must grapple the privilege that is tied to the politics of re-presentation, thus becoming aware of the politics that is tied to representation and voice.

The question of authority that is connected with my presence in the field is something that came up in our conversation, and our community organizers suggested that we ought to leverage this authority, as a way to get things moving.

So after the community dialogues, we travelled to the office of the BDO.

After sitting on a bench in front of the BDO Office to wait our turn, we finally had a meeting with the BDO. We had sent in my NUS business card, and the card worked as a resource for us. It symbolically turned into a material enabler, fostering access to a discursive space that is otherwise in the words of community members, "difficult to reach."

It turns out the BDO was very helpful throughout our conversation.

He wanted to collaborate in whatever way possible and also pointed out that most of the questions related to irrigation are handled by the Irrigation Department. He pointed us toward appropriate resources in the Irrigation Department to converse with. During our conversation, he picked up the phone and made a number of calls.

I was glad that being there with community members in the office of the BDO pointed us toward directions of engagement as we move further toward implementation. We will continue next our exploration with the irrigation department and in the meanwhile write up a brief white paper that outlines the question of lack of access to water in the community.

My presence enabled our community-academic partnership with communicative access. I could communicate in the language of the BDO, converse about possible funding sources, and discuss granting mechanisms.

My access here is tied to my position of privilege as an academic, trained in the US, with a PhD, and coming from a leading University in Singapore. Most importantly, my privilege is tied to the bourgeoisie middle class requirements of participation and literacy that hold the gateways of communicative access.

Reflecting on this question of communicative access, I remember how after walking into the BDO Office, as if by some un-spelt rule, when I sat in the front row, Indranil (community organizer) and Sunil (Santali community organizer) took the second row seats. As and when I continued to ask them questions in response to questions asked to me by the BDO, they looked perplexed. In multiple occasions, Sunil's voice was muffled, silenced by the sound of the AC.

When I asked this question about voice and silence to them, I was told that this is possibly the first time, Sunil is sitting in front of the BDO in a Chair to explain the problems and to discuss solutions.

Even as this interaction was powerful in fostering access, it also replicated the patterns of inequality that we inherently bring to our relationships, constituted amid power and material access to resources. Even as I work on projects that work to foster access to material resources among the poor and the disenfranchised, I do so from a position of privilege and I benefit from a power relationship that operates on this inequality.


 

"How is your research relevant to the US?" The taken-for-granted assumptions of Whiteness

Rotin, a student from a moffusil town of Bengal, once came to work with me as a student.

He wanted to make change in the world, make a real difference in the rural Bengal that he had seen around him growing up.

Growing up in moffusil Bengal, he had seen a lot of poverty all around him. He had grown up amidst the poverty.

He wanted to earn a PhD because he wanted to make a difference in the world.

He felt that learning the tools of communication would equip him with the tools that he needed to work on grassroots change.

He didn't talk much, usually just smiled at me when I pushed him to work harder or become more confident in his ways.

When I shared with him my journeys of fighting back and shared why I felt he needed to express his convictions boldly, he just smiled back at me. I wanted him to share the anger that we experienced as academics of color in an academe so ensconced in its expectations of Whiteness.

And Rotin just smiled in silence.

In his silence, I saw the conviction of carrying out the work that he was here to do.

In the years we shared together as an advisor and advisee, I learnt so much from the ways of his silence.

From the many trips that he made back to India, working on projects, building infrastructures, working alongside communities. I learned about the quite conviction of silence.

He did the things that I armchaired about.

He built medicine supplies, developed hospital infrastructures, figured out  ways to protect local trees with medicinal powers, working hand-in-hand with communities that have been exploited historically and in the contemporary politics of modern India.

I felt very proud of Rotin, at the thought that I had the privilege of advising him.

When Rotin was preparing for the job market, I felt confident about the work he did.

But what about how he would express himself? Would he communicate with conviction and the certain degree of certainty that seems so necessary for survival in US academe?

Would he be able to secure a job that enabled him to do the work that he was already doing? making a difference in the landscape of rural Bengal?

When preparing for his job talk, Rotin thought it would serve him well to do a practice job talk, and he openly invited a number of faculty to his talk.

As is most often the case, the amount of wonderful feedback he received from his Professors helped him polish his presentation, think through the organizing of his presentation, and craft carefully the arguments he would present.

But one feedback stayed with him. A faculty member noted in the talk, "How is your work relevant to the US? You will not get a job here with this."

This shook Rotin.

Over the weekend when we chatted, he shared with me his experience and told me that he felt very uncertain now about the value of his work.

At first, I was angry with him. I was angry that he invited this faculty member and did not ask me. In my desire to protect him, I shared with him that I could predict that this would be the kind of feedback if he invited this specific faculty member to his talk.

I shared that I wish he took my advise before setting this up because I would not let him subject himself to abuse in the hands of White ignorance!

And then I spent time talking to him about the value of his work, about how much we all have to learn from what he did, about how much he has taught me.

Over the months, as Rotin and I worked through his talk, I remember the main issue we worked on was getting him to talk more about the work he did.

In his humility, he did not want to talk much about the work he did. He felt that the work would show through by itself.

In those conversations, I learned from him again, about the power of humility and silence, where works carry on their value in simply being what they are, transformative projects of social change and social justice.

And like many things I learned from Rotin, I also sit back now and think, the experience in the practice interview was perhaps meant to be.

It was perhaps meant to be as a reference point for the racism of Whiteness that remains hidden in its assumptions and yet becomes visible in its ugly insistence that our research be relevant to the US.

The experience sheds light on the biases that are inherent in notions of relevance when a White American mainstream which constitutes most of the communication discipline judges the artifacts of research on the principles of relevance, albeit mired in the inherent assumptions of Whiteness.

The experience also makes me reflect on my participation in the same form of violence when I insist as a Department Head of a Communication Department in Asia that my faculty colleagues publish at least some of their work in mainstream communication journals because these journals are the ones that are recognized by metrics of quality (impact factor, h-index, so on and so forth).

What I do now with this reflection and how I work through it, how I mentor my junior colleagues, how I mentor my advisees are the challenges that lie ahead of me and my academic journey.

 

With due apologies if I have interrupted your grief!

I cry in our sadness
In the loss
of a little child
in the hills and plains of
Pakistan, US, Somalia, Afghanistan.
I weep in pain
in the suffering
in our suffering.

My grief
like yours
hurts.
My loss
like yours
is loss.
Our grief, here and there
is grief.
My body
like yours hurts.

But it is I
who has to do the explaining
It is I
who has to be interrogated
It is I
whose motives have to be questioned
It is I
who will be accused of interrupting
your grief
It is I
who will be lectured
on civility
the appropriateness of time, place, context.

And I must go on
Because
grief must be interrupted.
Lest it be used
for more violence.
I must go on
Because
Grief must be interrupted.
Mine, yours, ours.
Stories must be told,
Imaginations must be engaged,
questions must be raised,
here, now, there
Everywhere.

 

Violence, death and the racist tropes of discourse

Facebook today is inundated with accounts of pain, empathy, and outpouring of support for Boston. Headlines and posts such as "terror strikes again" have caught our attention once again.

The show of emotion expresses itself in the act of reaching out, in finding a common point of emotional sharing with the people in Boston.

Stories emerge that seek to respect the dignity of the lives lived.

Our attention is drawn to the observations that this is one of the oldest marathons and that the race was taking place on a special day, symbolizing all the good things about freedom, liberty, and independence.

The stories of heroism emerge on this backdrop to narrate the courage of the American people.

The expressed emotions on social media ranging from pain to anger remind me of the range of emotions I was immersed in after the 9/11 attacks. The inherent goodness and strength of Boston residents is juxtaposed in the backdrop of the imagined perpetrator of terror. Along the lines of the 9/11 coverage, conversations move toward finding the perpetrator and holding him/her to justice. President Obama, much like his predecessor, promises to bring to justice the perpetrators of the crime.

We feel these emotions with our American friends, and the number of "likes," "commentaries," and "posts" from across the globe depict this sense of empathy and connection.

In this instance, our expressions of emapthy are closely tied to events localized in the US and are turned into sites of global solidarity. I witness on social media the outpouring of emotions, netizens standing by the people of Boston.

And yet, why is it, I wonder, that these emotions among us across the globe seem reserved for the Americans?

Why is it that the same emotions of empathy and anger are denied to the many children and civilians who are killed in the US-orchestrated attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan? What stops us from feeling the same kind of pain for the innocent children in Pakistan who are victims of targeted drone attacks carried out by the US?

Why is it that when I post the link to the accounting of the drone attacks below, the post remains ignored.

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/

What happens to our sense of dignity, civility, and global citizenship when it comes to expressing our love for the many innocent victims of the US-led drone attacks in the global South? Are these bodies of children not to be counted? Are these losses to violence not to be mourned?

You might say to this, we are desensitized to the images of violence in the Middle East.

You might say that the drone attacks are a strategic response to end terror and therefore are likely to produce collaterals.

Or else, you may say, this is not the right time or place to discuour ss these attacks.

To these responses, I will ask you to dig deeper, to consider your values that remain unchallenged in your sense of civility and your normative ideals of expression of support. I will ask you to ask just as I will ask myself, what are the discursive moves through which the language of civility, empathy, and dignity persuade us into believing that empathy and solidarity are only reserved for our colonial masters while we turn away from the suffering amid us in the global South?

The oppressions in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo will continue to carry on until we recognize the ways in which our emotions are manipulated by the hegemony of American exceptionalism.

Even more, the oppressions in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo will carry on unless we recognize our own participation in American exceptionalism. Unless we start counting all violent deaths as great loss to humanity, we will continue to lend our suffering to the recirculation of more suffering.

Let's talk about data!

A Planned Parenthood activist who labels herself as feminist surprisingly uses the argument that "family planning interventions work and have effectively empowered women in the global South."

She apparently draws on the rhetoric of gender empowerment to advocate for Planned Parenthood.

What surprises me about the position articulated in the advocacy statement above is its uncritical celebration of the language of empowerment without interrogating the questions of power that are tied to the interpretive frames circulated in family planning interventions. I am also surprised by the erasure of the historic complicity of Planned Parenthood in racist population control programs in the early years, working closely with eugenicists to shape population control programs directed at poor, black and colored recipients of the Third World.

The lack of historical familiarity with the context within which family planning interventions developed demonstrates the fluidity of human rights discourses originating in the global North, working to reconfigure forms of oppression as manifestations of empowerment. The sort of heuristic labeling that is at work here obfuscates the need to critically examine information, ask questions, and engage deeply with the position being advocated. And it is precisely this lack of critical interrogation that serves as the basis for global interventions originating in the North and serving the functions of colonizing the global South through the circulation of secular-sounding phrases.

Absent from the narratives of doing good are actual examination of data to consider what the impacts are. In the instance above, when I asked this colleague for data, she reiterated that this is an already established fact, something that most reserachers in the area take-for-granted. Now because my research in the area suggests otherwise, I presented her with some evidence and asked her to offer some evidence to me to show that family planning interventions work. To this request, she noted that most of the community of activists already knew this to be the case, drawing upon the literature although she was unable to draw from the literature. The callous attitude toward data or empirical evidence speaks to the hegemoy of the population control trope. The so-called science behind it is already established through assumptions and heuritics, without data and without conjectures and refutations that challenge the assumptions.

Also absent are interrogations of the workings of power and control in circulating specific discourses as universal markers of human rights. Who for instance gets to define what empowerment is, develop programs around it, and then measure the level of empowerment through evaluation programs. What are the measures of the objectives? How are these objectives evaluated? What does it mean to claim that a family planning campaign works?

The framing of family planning as gender empowerment remains oblivious to the politics of power and control within which the global North actively works to frame the question of population control as a solution to global poverty. One slips into the language of empowerment as it sounds pretty good in establishing the solution being planned out for women in the global South. Simultaneously absent are necessities for actual engagement with the data and the context such that empty claims such as the one above can be circulated without the need to consider data. The framing of feel good terms such as empowerment within a seemingly postmodern turn in activist/academic discourse also means that any request for data can also be framed as masculinist or patriarchal, and this can then become a perfect framework for establishing the hegemony of family planning programs based on the circulation of false or at best unsupported claims.

Closer examination of the claims such as the one above would push academics and activists to ask for evidence and to carefully consider what counts as evidence. This would mean thorough examination of the data and a commitment to work through the data rather than the practice of careless generalizations that usurp the agency of the global South in convenient frames. For example, what is the meaning of empowerment for the women in the global South? What is the metric of effectiveness? What is the evidence for what works? What is the connection of empowerment to family planning, and who defines this specific linkage? What hideden agendas remain implicit in the broader framework of family planning? My close reading of the evidence base in the family planning literature raises a large number of questions for me regarding the effectiveness of family planning, leading me to also question the poor science behind large claims that also often deploy large sums of resources. You see, the hegemony of the population control regime can work pretty well by portraying any calls for quantitative data as inherently oppressive and symptomatic of patriarchy.

This is where I do believe that CCA foregrounds the necessity of engaging with structures and the materialities that are constituted in these structures. Critical engagement with quetsions of evidence is an entry point to the politics of change. In other words, the impetus for asking such questions about data, the quality of the arguments being made, and the measures of effectiveness being examined calls for a spirit of critical interrogation that simply does not parrot that which has already been claimed. Through data and through interrogation of the methods through which data are gathered and interpreted, opportunities are created for interrogating hegemony. Such forms of thorough engagement call for the willingness to carefully consider information and engage in debate rather than making claims heuristically. Such forms of engagement also threaten to disrupt the hegemony of the human rights regime that often operates on the basis of unquestioned/unchallenged hypocrisies.

Close examination of family planning programs raises important questions about race, politics, gender and imperialism? Close examination also pushes us to carefully consider what we count as evidence. More importantly, close examination invited us to engage critically, asking for more data and accountability, and simultaneously interrogating the processes, methods, and design through which such data are gathered.

Voices of hunger: Interrogating inequality

The "Voices of Hunger" project, a narrative co-construction grounded in the CCA with the food insecure in Indiana, depicts the everyday struggles with the absence of food among the food insecure. At the time that the project was taking its roots, inequality in the US was on the rise, and there were a growing section of the middle class who had been "thrown to the streets."

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcom.12009/abstract

A theme that continued to reiterate through the stories of hunger was the uncertainty around it and the suddenness with which community members experienced it.

http://www.care-cca.com/about/cca-video-series/voices-of-hunger/

The transition from a life of plenty to a life of hunger was often unexpected and sudden.

It all happened overnight.

The two storey home; the car; the fenced back yard. The signs of middle class comfort that depicted the life a large majority of Americans were soon disappearing, and for most of the community members in our journey, had disappeared without much warning.

Families were on the streets because of their inability to pay the high mortgage loans. Homes were being foreclosed, and jobs were being downsized.

As we continued our in-depth interviews in the early parts of the project, we were struck by the sense "this could happen to any of us." Our vulnerability worked hand-in-hand with the vulnerability of the community members we worked with.

Through the interviews, we were also often reminded of how lucky we were, to afford food, to put food on the table.

Time and again, we were reminded through the stories that the economic downturn was hitting the middle classes, and there were no safety nets for most of the community members we were working with.

Amid these experiences, our co-constructions with the food insecure often highlighted the concept of dignity. That people who were experiencing food insecurity had dignity was seen by community members as being most fundamental to solving the problem of food insecurity. In driving this point home, the food insecure asked for empathy, a moment of connection, because the transition from having plenty to not having anything could happen to anyone.


 

The question of entitlement!

Mediocrity is often built into the everyday practices of academe under the guise of civility.

Civility becomes the trope that manages our academic relationships.

I see this for example in how teacher student relationships are constructed. The value of such relationships measured in the form of student evaluations works well to reify the status quo. Teachers are prompted by the lowest common denominator under such systems of measurement.

Learning takes the backseat as teachers work on minimizing assignments, making lectures entertaining etc. so that teaching evaluations can be higher.

Minimizing expectations then works to reify the mediocrity of the status quo.

As teachers, we pay more attention to making nice than to caring about our students learning. We are also trained to be inauthentic, managing our teaching by norms of civility in the mainstream, learning to stage a face.

The neoliberal organizing of knowledge works precisely through the organizing of teaching under a framework of customer satisfaction. The more satisfied our customers are, the more effective we are considered to be as teachers. Students as a result learn to be entitled.

Their egos are fragile and they expect to be handled with an appearance of care.

All this would be just fine if our expectations of caring were not so muddled by facetious demonstrations of emoticons, inspiring stickers, and new age jingoism. Caring would be an appropriate point of reference if it did not mean that learning takes a backseat.