The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

I was interrogated by the system, "What do human rights have to do with health communication?" The culture-centered approach seeks to build communicative infrastructures for listening to the voices of the margins. The communicative infrastructures serve as anchors to the articulation of transformative processes that challenge the unhealthy structures that constitute health. The recognition that the inequalities in health outcomes are often produced by highly unequal structures that are sustained and reproduced by unhealthy policies emerges as the basis for health communication as health advocacy. In the voices of the margins, the challenges to health are often understood as challenges of human rights. Beginning with the notion that health is a fundamental human right, communities at the margins co-create advocacy strategies directed at resisting structures that deny them this fundamental human right. As a way of responding to the interrogation, I went back to the ...

Harmony is often used as a term drawn from Confucianism and other cultural tropes connected to Chinese origin narratives to portray a positive narrative of institutional and organizational cultures. In such narratives, a desirable harmonious structure is one that is devoid of conflict and dialectics, one where "all get along." The condition of "getting along" is placed in opposition to notions of conflict and argumentation. Obfuscated in this narrative however is the way in which the concept of harmony serves as a trope for reproducing and protecting privilege in Chinese majority societies. As a trope, harmony calls for the production of consent, while simultaneously erasing the voices of difference and dissent. "Other" voices from elsewhere are projected as threatening to the desired state of equilibrium. That this desired state of equilibrium often typically serves the dominant elite categories is obfuscated in the discursive space. The voi...

Raksha Mahtani Raksha Mahtani is currently a teaching assistant in Communications and New Media. Before this, she served as a Research Assistant at the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) and at the Asia Research Institute (ARI). Raksha’s work on academic-activist collaborations explores the ways in which social impact can be theorized, measured, and evaluated. 1.       Please share with us your CNM journey. You know, I first came to CNM in 2008, during my sabbatical from Purdue University. This was a way for Debalina and I to be together for the first time as a family in the same space because of the US immigration laws that meant that she had to wait before migrating to the US. Then head Milagros Rivera was building a department that was truly inter-disciplinary, bringing together computing scientists, interactive media designers, artists, social scientists and humanities scholars to generate a creat...