Figure: The activist Samarendra Das organizing the Foil Vedanta campaign in the backdrop of the Vedanta mining operations in Zambia. Culture-centered processes of social change, grounded in the voices of the margins within local contexts, explore the ways in which communicative spaces can be co-created through collaborations with those at the margins. In the co-creation of these communicative spaces as well as resulting from these communicative spaces, a plethora of communicative strategies emerge. For those at the margins, these strategies become ways of securing access to resources that are mostly erased or absent. While in many instances, collaborating with(in) institutional structures to shift normative expectations prove to be effective, in many other instances, an antagonistic strategy is necessitated to create the grounds of claims-making. A monolithic focus on collaboration with institutional structures often ends up perpetuating the status quo, without creating t
This blog offers Mohan Dutta's reflections on the theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach, examining the interplays among Structure, Culture, and Agency in shaping marginalisation and the ways in which communities at the margins challenge structures. Writings on the blog are continually being revised to reflect the organic analysis of structure and agency.