The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

Ashish is a twenty-one year old boy of privilege, studying in one of those engineering colleges in India that his MNC Executive father placed him in by paying a large donation to the college. His upper caste dad of course was more than happy to chart out the destiny of his only child, the heir to the upper caste throne of the family. After all, this is the entitlement his dad had experienced all his life. Someone to cook, someone else to clean, someone to drive the car, and someone else to polish the shoes. Ashish had grown up seeing his dad have high expectations from those that served him. After all, a servant has to be kept in his place. Ashish had grown up seeing his parents manage this role so well, dictating, abusing, blaming, and disciplining.  Having grown up in a family of four, and being the only boy in the family that his parents so desperately wanted for many years so they could earn their legitimacy, Ashish has a strong sense of who he is in the world. He has no...

One of the elements I often discuss when sharing the framework of the culture-centered approach (CCA) is the role of listening in opening up the space for communication. As a research device thus, listening performs a meta-theoretical function. It teaches us about the processes of communication capacity building even as it creates spaces for diverse voices, articulating multiplicities of understandings and solutions. This two-step framework is particularly salient when we as researchers work with communities at the margins. Listening is not simply about creating the spaces for those in the margins to voice their meanings but is also about questioning what we know about listening. Because our understandings of communication are situated at the intersections of culture and structure, the interpretations of listening are also contextual. So what are some ideas that we can work with when considering the processes of listening? At one level, to introduce a framework of listening into...

Your white guns targeted at the black, brown, colored seas of protest will someday be held accountable in a court of justice, asked to recount the number of dead, recount the stories of violence that make up your White ideas of liberty and freedom and democracy. Your white guns  and your sham of democracy, civility, and citizenship, will be judged in a court of brown, black, colored peoples. You will have to do the recounting You will have to recite the names Standing there, you will be asked to do the explaining for the black lives lost to your senseless violence. Your white ideas of justice Will be turned upside down for their hypocrisies and farcical performances You will be asked to describe the violence that runs through your being Through your police, through your military The fundamentalism you inspire, to account for The guns you make, and the armies you send around the globe masked as democracy.

This is an often repeated scenario: A White male professor asks a graduate student from China "Aren't you biased, given that you are doing this study on Chinese netizens?" "Tell me why should this be generalizable." This stance is reflective of the power of Whiteness to erase its own location and specificity as a universal, while simultaneously turning the "other" as the subject of investigation. Objective distance is therefore something that needs to be performed when studying the exotic "other" located elsewhere. The fact is that most of our journals are inundated with White American scholars making a large number of grandiose claims about human behavior on the basis of studies conducted on White subjects in the classroom. In the sense of these claim made by the White man then, almost all of communication scholarship is fundamentally flawed (or at least large parts are). The scripted retort voiced by the Chinese student to the White ...

In a recent piece documenting the experiences of migrant labor amid market reforms in China, I was reminded by one of the reviewers that social scientific work should stay away from "politics." In another conversation with a graduate student conducting an ethnographic study of cellphone penetration in an indigenous context, I was reminded of a note from a reviewer who urged her to stay away from advocacy because she referred to her data from the field that challenged the hegemony of transnational corporations in the mobile phone sector. As an aside, the reviewer who made this comment often did work for mobile phone companies as a consultant or as a collaborator. In each of these instances, critique directed at the broader corporatized context of neoliberal governance and its local manifestations is seen by these traditional social scientists as being overtly political, polemical, and/or advocacy. Thus "politics" stands in as a referent to critique of the he...