Over the past couple of months, I have been engaging adolescents in Marion County in centering their voices to identify heart health needs and propose solutions that are meaningful to them. The adolescent heart project emerged from the suggestions of the adults in the CUAHD project. Thus far, the experience of working with teenagers to design and implement a health campaign targeting heart disease has been interesting, and speaks to the uniqueness of our broad theoretical framework, the culture-centered approach that seeks to locate decision making power into the hands of the community. An example of the interesting dynamic that is playing out in the project is the concept of individualism versus collectivism in decision making and in driving the project forward.
On March 6, I emailed the group about my inability to attend the planned strategy development workshop due to bad weather .Interestingly, the group proceeded with organizing the workshop as originally scheduled, and also set agenda for the next workshop. At the meeting, the advisory board took the lead in organizing the workshop. Particularly interesting is the students’ conceptualization of pre and post surveys that will measure the impact of their proposed campaign. The lesson here is that culture-centering processes do not rest in the hands of one person; instead it thrives on collective organizing and decision making.
The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa
When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...