My dissertation: Subalternity and Indigenous Existence: Negotiating Development Issues from the Margin
From a communicative perspective, this study seeks to understand how development operates as discourse, in creating and perpetuating conditions of structural absences, and how the subalterns at the margins negotiate and enact their agencies in legitimizing their voices and participatory actions in the discursive spaces. Historically, colonial and Brahminical doctrine portrayed indigenous subalterns as inferior and sub-human; subsequently , modernist epistemology driven dominant development approach labeled them as objects or sites of reform and control. Mainstream development communication approach employed unilateral tailored interventions in diffusing development , and transferring technology in the underserved spaces to ‘ modernize ’ the subalterns. Increasingly structural, cultural, and contextual issues have received importance in the contemporary theories of communication for development and social change. This study embraced the theoretical and methodological fra