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A key theoretical thread in the CCA: Building infrastructures for the voices of the poor is key to addressing poverty

Figure 1: The #NoSingaporeansLeftBehind campaign created by families living in poverty in Singapore

Across culture-centered interventions, the co-creation of voice infrastructures in partnership with communities living in poverty results in the ownership of decision-making processes in the hands of the poor.

When the poor own the communicative platforms, make decisions on these platforms based on information they seek out in partnership with community organizations and researchers, and own the frameworks of evaluating the interventions they develop, the nature and quality of decisions become anchored in their everyday lives.

As opposed to experts from the outside making decisions that are not grounded in the lived experiences of the poor, the culture-centered interventions developed and owned by the poor address the various underlying conditions causing poverty by being created by the poor.

That experts often make decisions based on poorly informed, empirically empty ideologies is often made visible through the presence of the voices of the poor. Moreover, the fundamental inequality in the nature of decision-making is inverted, by co-creating infrastructures for the poor to decide on what is meaningful to their lived experiences.

Consider for instance the robust body of evidence built by culture-centered interventions that depict the hard work often done by the poor, juggling multiple jobs to simply make a living. Contrast this with the neoliberal ideology that portrays the poor as inherently lazy. From ministers to bureaucrats, experts making claims about the "lazy poor" are misinformed.

Therefore, for culture-centered researchers, the research journey is one of recognizing the inequities in distribution of power between academics and communities living in poverty, and seeking to invert these power inequities by "learning to learn" from the poor.

To "learn to learn" is to begin with a journey in humility.

Humility begins with the recognition that the theories, methods, and research tools one is trained into are imbued with classist, racist, gendered ideologies.

This recognition therefore guides the process of inverting research logics through the presence of the voices of the poor.

The co-creation of communication infrastructures for the voices of the poor is driven by ongoing interrogations of the norms, rules, and codes of participation. These norms, rules, and codes of participation are themselves shaped by the poor.

The process of participation generates contextually situated understandings of strategies for addressing poverty.

Across contexts though, the poor recognize that changing the very structures that constitute poverty is at the heart of addressing poverty. These structural changes are to be achieved by challenging the dominant ideology of the system through the presence of the voices of the poor. 

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