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| Figure 1: Ethnographic fieldwork in Jangal mahal, West Bengal, India, guided by Adivasi advisory groups and in partnership with Adivasi community researchers |
Wrapping up the year in 2024, as I reflect on the key methodological registers of the CCA amidst the global ascendance of whiteness, crystallized as white supremacy that is mainstreamed into politics and policy making, I offer in this blog post some reflections on the sustenance of the CCA.
Before I turn to the question of sustenance, I want to outline a key concept that anchors the CCA: body on the line.
Body on the line
Culture-centered scholarship calls on researchers to place our bodies on the line in solidarity with struggles that we write about. Body on the line is not a call to posturing risk-taking or claims-making to activism. Instead, as an intervention into methods of knowledge production in the social sciences, it is a basic recognition that the nature of knowledge production is embodied.
Indigenous and local communities across the Global South, historically erased from the hegemonic structures of generating knowledge claims, teach us that knowledge is generated from the body, through the body, with the body, existing in relationships with land, food systems, ecosystems, relationships, and communities. This idea that bodies in struggle are continually generating knowledge, acting on knowledge, and empirically building theories of action is a core concept of the CCA.
Therefore, the placing of the body on the line lies at the heart of culture-centered methods of knowledge generation. It is a call to shifting of accountabilities, noting that to write about power, control, and marginalization as critical social scientists, scholars of the CCA must be willing to be held to account by the communities we write about.
This placing of the body on the line emerges from decades of calls by Indigenous, Global South, and hyper-precarious communities across the global margins interrogating the habits of extraction and exploitation that have often shaped social science scholarship. The concept of shifting accountabilities translates into the actual work of struggling to shift the power of knowledge generation, such that the registers for knowledge generation are placed within communities, amidst struggles, amidst everyday practices of community life.
Critical reflexivity. Moreover, the call to place the body on the line is a call for critical reflexivity that asks us to interrogate our own complicities with powerful structures and invites us to consider closely the ways in which we co-create organizing processes in friendship with communities at the global margins to dismantle the exploitative and oppressive practices that reproduce power and control. Critical reflexivity in the CCA moves beyond the work of writing to the practices of building, designing, creating at the margins. The body and the labor it carries out are necessary resources in the structural transformations that are brought about through culture-centered scholarship.
Reflecting on 2024
At the time of writing this reflection in December 2024, the critical social sciences are under targeted attack across the globe.
Attack on academic freedom. Social science scholarship questioning entrenched forms of power and control is being directly targeted by far-right populists, often being framed as against the national interest, promoting extremism, and threatening democracy.
Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, taking a leaf from the far-right global networks, the right-wing mainstream is drawing on the language of wastage of taxpayer resources to defund humanities and social science scholarship.
Across these diverse global registers, the propaganda infrastructure targeting critical social sciences is invested in shutting down critical scholarship that documents empirically the workings of entrenched forms of power and control. The objective is to turn off the critical resources that offer the empirical accounts while carrying out neoliberal extremism, imposing extreme austerity replete with large-scale attacks on public welfare, attacks on employment, and the privatization of public resources. Without the critiques of power offered by critical social science scholarship, neoliberal extremists have free reign to carry out the full-on capture of the economy.
Now, one of the responses to these targeted attacks has been one of toning down the tenor of critical social science scholarship, strategically using different linguistic genres that appeal to entrenched powers, couching the critique, and writing in terms that are more palatable to the status quo. For culture-centered scholarship, these forms of accommodations are reflective of entrenched power, shaping the communicative processes of erasure of voices at the margins.
Community accountability. For culture-centered scholarship, the strategy of toning down or making the critique palatable to the structures works directly against its theoretical and methodological commitments to the body on the line. To place the body on the line is to be committed to the critique of power, especially when such critiques are difficult to make.
The work of the CCA to co-create voice infrastructures by walking alongside communities at the margins places the academic body in community life, being guided by communities at the global margins in making knowledge claims.
Shifting our accountability to communities at the margins means that we take advice and guidance from communities (in CCA, this often takes the form of seeking advise from our community advisory groups) regarding the knowledge claims that are made, the ways in which these knowledge claims are made, and the structures in which these knowledge claims are placed.
Courage and standing witness. Facing the effects of exploitative and oppressive practices that make up the ecosystem of power, for communities at the margins, standing witness in spite of the repression is a critical component of struggle.
Time and again, our community advisory groups show us the power of courage, showing the critical role of standing witness, urging us to make public claims that challenge power as part of the critical work we do.
Our academic privilege is called upon here as a resource, noting that such academic privilege is often relatively well protected when situated in the context of the hyper-precarities negotiated by communities. We learn the lessons of courage from witnessing the work of the communities we work with in standing witness. We learn about the urgency of developing practices that instill courage from our community partners who articulate the absolute necessity of speaking truth to power.
Conclusion
Across global spaces, as we enter into 2025, recognizing the struggles that lie ahead, it is vital that we turn to communities that we work with as sources of inspiration and learning. The margins have much to teach us, not only about the workings of power and control, but also about sustaining resistance in the face of repression. As critical social scientists, these times will test our capacity to resist, and we can count on our communities to offer us the necessary sustenance to carry forward the work we do.