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Why community voices at the "margins of the margins" threaten the hegemonic status quo


 Community voices at the "margins of the margins" threaten the hegemonic status quo.

The status quo works through the ongoing erasure of community voices, creating and circulating logics of power and control that retain power in the hands of the elite. The communicative act of erasure of subaltern voices is deeply intertwined with the maintenance and reproduction of power and control. 

The state, private capital, an d the professionalized non-profit sector profit from the everyday erasure of the subaltern voice. Through its control over funding flows, the state reproduces its oppressive structure, reified through civil society that must rely on state patronage to sell the subaltern to the market. State bureaucrats, educated in the techniques of producing discipline, on one hand, perform the narrative of addressing the needs of communities, while on the other hand, cultivating networks of professionalized NGOs that whitewash the strategies of power and control to serve the pre-determined, top-down agendas of the state. 

Participation, engagement, and community are terms that paradoxically are deployed to serve the hegemonic agenda of the state, working as if in coordinated performance, to erase community voices at the "margins of the margins."

Engagement and participation thus designed by the state, are tools of power and control, performed by NGOs to expand the bureaucratic reach of the state and to consolidate the control of the market. 

On one hand, the state consolidates its power and control through the bureaucratic apparatus. On the other hand, it gives the appearance of participation through the patronage of NGOs that appear as "communities" and perpetuate the state-driven top-down logics of expertise. The claims-making of "community" by NGOs lies at the root of the theft of community agency. 

NGOs take over the claim of being the community while simultaneously erasing the agentic capacity of the "margins of the margins" of the community. This act of erasure forms the economic foundation of the state-capital-NGO nexus that perfects the mechanics of representation, seeking to speak for the subaltern. The very act of representing the subaltern forms the infrastructure of the social change industry, including the industry built around prevention. NGOs write grants, manufacture reports, throw in the occasional consultation to reproduce and perpetuate their professionalized structures.

The framing of communities at the "margins of the margins" as devoid of agency, as incapable of developing community-led solutions, as incapable of generating knowledge, building evidence and carrying out social change forms the cognitive apparatus of the multi-million dollar social change industry. Entire networks of NGO workers, failed academics-pretending-to-be-experts, corporate consultants, and professionalized grant writers are built around the intertwined practices of representing the subaltern, speaking for the subaltern, and delivering solutions to/at the subaltern.

In the worse forms of posturing, these NGO-private-state networks position themselves as "the community," taking up the label and position of the community, performing a marginalized identity while continuing to erase the voices of community members at the "margins of the margins." These forms of extractive and displacing logics reflective of whiteness are unfortunately mimicked by a wide array of organizations that project themselves as diverse. 

The violence of this hegemonic politics of representation lies in its ongoing attacks on voice infrastructures at the "margins of the margins." In culture-centered interventions emergent from the voice infrastructures co-created at the "margins of the margins," the ongoing work of decolonization continually interrogates and disrupts the silencing strategies that are deployed by the status quo, particularly the sections of the status quo that project themselves as speaking "for" the communities.

Those at the "margins of the margins" of communities critically interrogate, Who is speaking for the community? With what agendas? From what position? What are the politics and economics underlying such representation? Where are the erasures? How are these erasure being produced? 

These critical questions serve as the basis for mobilizing for social change in the culture-centered approach. 

This mobilization is resistance. It is resistance to the top-down expertise-driven logics imposed by the colonizing state and its bureaucrats. It is resistance to the everyday incorporation of the subaltern as the site of profiteering by the market. It is resistance to the NGOization of social change as an instrument of power and control.

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