 |
| Image credit: Julio Etchart as part of CARE's campaign on poverty |
When the poor speak, the stories of poverty disrupt the carefully crafted propaganda of the regime.
When the poor speak, the regime's natural legitimacy to govern is brought to question. When the poor speak, the rationality of authoritarianism as the method of efficient governance is disrupted.
When the poor speak, questions such as, "Why are everyday citizens deprived of their basic rights to housing, food, and health?" "If governance is so efficient and effective, why do the poor struggle with shelter?" "If the governance of the regime is so efficient and effective, why do the poor struggle with food?" are brought to the forefront. When the poor hold control over the narrative, the corrupt strategies of manipulating narratives to retain the power of the regime lie exposed.
Narrative control in the hands of the poor disrupt the expert-driven poverty pornography that sustains neoliberal governmentality by individualizing responsibility.
Communicative infrastructures directly owned by the poor foreground terms such as hunger, homelessness, and inaccess, terms that are masterfully erased by the regime through its repressive control and closed-door meetings.
Poverty-related research in the university therefore is risky to the regime as it holds the power to topple the regime when the narrative control is held by the poor. Entire infrastructures of surveillance therefore are put into place for monitoring, controlling, and shaping poverty-related research.
I have often received masterful advice by wise full professors intimate with the regime, "Just do your poverty work elsewhere," (meaning some Third World destination that is the usual site for poverty pornography), "Just figure out a way to collaborate," "Show that you are responsive to the state and wanting to constructively support." Each of these forms of advice work within the regime by keeping the regime's narrative control intact.
University structures serve as direct instruments of exerting the regime's control. Both direct and indirect forms of repression work simultaneously to silence poverty-related that seeks to turn narrative control into the hands of the poor.
Simultaneously, various forms of state-sponsored research under the banner of "low income" are allowed. This ensures the state and the university are able to make claims about academic freedom and about allowing diverse forms of research. The very reference to the term "low income" works to erase the violence of poverty. Terms such as precarity are introduced, being palatable to the regime's tastes and methods of governing. Moreover, the state's control is retained through structures that sponsor the research to shape the state's deployment of neoliberal policies of poverty management.
In our work at the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), a key methodological tool is the creation of communication infrastructures that are owned by advisory groups experiencing poverty. The ownership of these communicative infrastructures by communities experiencing poverty ensures that the research goals, the methods, and the forms of infrastructures for communicating the findings are designed by community members in the forms of advisory groups and workshops.
Often then, experiences such as that of hunger are placed on the foreground because they relate to the everyday struggles for survival.
When these findings emerge into the public discursive spaces, not controlled or mediated through the structures of the state, and this is key, they challenge the narrative control held by the state. They challenge the overarching ideology cultivated by the state. They also challenge the benevolent and efficient image carefully crafted by the state.
This is where strategies of silencing come in.
In our work at CARE, we witnessed this silencing in various forms, with the carefully crafted mix of seductions and disciplining. On one hand, there were times when our scholarship experienced direct threats, all the way from threats to discontinue funding to threats of disciplining. On the other hand, the scholarship was the site of seductions of greater rewards, both personal and professional, for collaborating with the structures of the regime.
The global rise of poverty amidst the adoption of extreme neoliberal policies translates into increasing forms of repression on those of us academics working with the poor, turning our research into instruments for voices of the poor. Knowing that we will be subject to various techniques of repression and silencing is critical to how well we prepare ourselves and the kinds of strategies we put into place to keep disrupting the intersections of authoritarian control and neoliberal hegemony.