Disrupting, Intervening, and Re-imagining Health, Development, and Social Change: A Culture-Centered Approach

This chapter explores the meta-theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach (CCA) by de-centering expert driven, neoliberal formations of health organizing and foregrounding subaltern voices at the “margins of the margins” of societies as the owners of health and development communication processes. The CCA critically analyzes the colonial–capitalist production of knowledge formulated for and directed at local and Indigenous communities, in turn amplifying these prior erased voices into hegemony. These subaltern voices center frameworks of alternative health organizing. This chapter will discuss the ways in which the CCA has been deployed among communities at the raced, classed, gendered margins of colonialism–capitalism. The infrastructures for voices at the margins resist structural oppressions that threaten human health and well-being through processes of alternative organizing. The CCA as a method, recognizes that voice democracy, particularly among those who have experienced perpetual voice erasure, is at the heart of social transformation. The ways in which the CCA converges with and diverges from postcolonial and decolonial thought will be examined and contextualized within the many examples of voice democracy and structural interrogation brought about by culture-centered interventions.