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Building an infrastructure of support when voices speak out

When voices from the margins speak out/up, the dominant structures will respond by attempting to silence these voices. Whether you are co-creating a culture-centered intervention within a form of government that presents itself as a democracy or in a form of government that is more strictly authoritarian or a form of government that is somewhere in between, power is invested in protecting itself. To protect their interests, those in power will create as normative/cultural specific forms and strategies of silencing voices from the margins. 

Because culture-centered interventions, when they actually work, co-create infrastructures for the voices of the "margins of the margins" (see Dutta, 2020), the interventions themselves as well as the accompanying structures are often the targets of attacks. The attacks can take a wide range, from actual violence, to labeling the infrastructures as anti-national (against the national interest) to raising accusations of foreign interference to raising accusations of financial mismanagement. These attacks on the work of the CCA in communities need to be read as a continuum, and is central to informing strategies for anticipating and resisting them.

In multiple instances, the work of CARE has been threatened with violence by reactionary forces that are aligned with power. In other instances, the threat of violence has come directly from the structures of the state. 

These threats of violence are in other situations implicit. In one instance, after being subjected to an organized witch hunt, the work of CARE with an activist transgender sexworker who is also a human rights activist was labeled as "financial mismanagement" because the activist was employed by the center as a community organizer/researcher. These questions and accusations were raised in spite of the project proposal having specified the hiring of community members from the transgender sexworker community as researchers, the project having been funded by a ministry on the basis of what would seem as rigorous peer review, and the research framework of building voice infrastructures by co-creating pedagogies for transgender sex workers as researchers having been approved by the ethics board. That the attack happened is testimony to the layers of insecurities that are created in structures because of the transformative potential of/for voice. Note here that the strategy of accusing financial mismanagement is one of the most-often used strategies of power structures to silence voices from/of the margins.

To be effective and to sustain themselves, culture-centered communicative infrastructures at the margins ought to anticipate the attacks from the state and the capitalist class. To anticipate such attacks, to strategize against them, and to build an infrastructure of radical politics anchored in voices of the margins is critical to the process of long-term change. 

First, essential to such preparation is the creation of layers of strategic (in)visibility that work actively to resist the attacks on the infrastructures. For instance, in one of CARE's community-led interventions on poverty, the corresponding Ministry placed various forms of threats regarding the disclosure of the identities of the households in poverty that formed key members of the voice infrastructures we had co-created. Our work in this instance focused on creating layers between the Ministry and the participating households, turning our reports and policy briefs as embodied interventions voiced by the advisory groups, and doing so with anonymized aggregate data while at the same time drawing on research ethics processes to resist the Ministry's threats of information disclosure. The advisory group of low-income households developed the research design and the strategic framework for the intervention.

Before the launch of the campaign on poverty, our team experienced various forms of pressures from the different instruments of the system. These pressures ranged from investigation launched into the work of CARE to questions asked about a conference on social change that was hosted by CARE. This was accompanied by scrutiny of the campaign. When I pushed back on the pressures and stated that part of the methodology of CARE is to run interventions, the pressures took the form of asserting control over the content. Because the methodology of the CCA places decision-making in the hands of the advisory group, the only suggested change the advisory group agreed to was to tweak the title of the campaign.

The layers of methodological interventions worked to both safeguard the advisory group of low-income households as well as voice the decisions as directed by the advisory group.

These negotiations of power also translate into securing infrastructures of support that sustain the Center, the team of researchers, our activist partners, and our community researchers. It is vital to build infrastructures of support that mobilize material and symbolic resources when our bodies, and the body of CARE are under attack from sites of power. In my own experience across contexts, I have often been amazed at the infrastructures of suppport that have emerged from within contexts of struggles when my body has been on the line. In one instance, an activist-in-residence mobilized their networks of support when CARE was targeted with a witch hunt. A senior legal counsel emerged as a vital resource of support, sustenance, and resistance amidst the targeting by the structure. One of the key advice this counsel offered, "you don't negotiate with a bully" served not only to uphold my resolve in confronting the structure and the bogus lies it had concocted, but also to uphold the resolve of CARE to continue with the work of co-creating infrastructures for voices at the margins. When the disinformation planted by the regime was picked up by far-right White supremacists attacking the work of CARE in the form of running anonymous websites, using official information act requests to harass, and placing threatening information, spaces of support emerged from activists in tech spaces and advocates. That none of these threats actually work speaks to the power of the infrastructures of support as resources of resistance.

In many instances in my journey with the work of the CCA and that of CARE, these resources of support have emerged from unexpected spaces whereas the expected spaces of support have disappointed. Part of the work of strategizing infrastructures of support is to therefore critically study the resources within one's context, to assess these resources and situate them amidst analysis of power, and to then map out various forms of support that can be mobilized. Most of the support for the work of CARE, especially amidst crises introduced by power structures, has emerged from our activist partners, our communities, lawyers, journalists, and political and social movement allies. In our experience, rarely has this support come from within the academe (I have extensively written about how some of the most radically posturing spaces in the academe have been the first ones to collaborate with and perpetuate the lies of a corrupt administrative structure).

It is also vital that the close reading of structures of support be connected with the actual labor of building structures of support. Laying out a plan through a co-constructive process can be critical in mobilizing support amidst pressures.

And most fundamentally, once this strategic support infrastructure has been created, it is vital to lend it unconditionally to other struggles for voices across issues and contexts.

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