Critical Health Communication Method as Embodied Practice of Resistance: Culturally Centering Structural Transformation Through Struggle for Voice

Abstract

The Marxist roots of critical methodology envision method as anchor to an emancipatory politics that seeks structural transformation. Drawing on our negotiations of carrying out culture-centered health communication projects amidst neoliberal authoritarianism, we explore the nature of academic-activist-community collaborations in envisioning democratic infrastructures for socialist organizing of health. Method is thus inverted from the hegemonic structures of Whiteness that construct extractive relationships perpetuating existing and entrenched health inequities to partnerships of solidarity with subaltern communities committed to a politics of "placing the body on the line." We work through the concept of "placing the body on the line" to depict the ways in which the body of the academic, turned vulnerable and weaponized in active resistance to neocolonial/capitalist structures, disrupts the hegemonic logics of power and control that shape health within these structures. Examples of culture-centered projects at the global margins offer conceptual bases for theorizing embodied practice as resistance to state-market structures that produce health injustices. The body of the academic as a methodological site decolonizes the capitalist framework of knowledge production through its voicing of an openly resistive politics that stands in defiance to the neoliberal structures that produce health inequities. We challenge the communication literature on micro-practices of resistance, interrogating concepts such as "strategic ambiguity," "pragmatic interventionism" and "practical engagement" to offer method as embodied practice of open/public resistance, as direct antagonism to state-market structures. Through the re-working of method as embodied resistance that is explicitly socialist in its commitment to imagining health, culture-centered interventions imagine and practice Marxist advocacy and activist interventions that disrupt the intertwined hegemonic logics of capital and empire.

The COVID-19 Pandemic and Outbreak Inequality: Mainstream Reporting of Singapore's Migrant Workers in the Margins

“…The mainstream press in Singapore is theorized as a structural entity in close affiliation to the state's reprimand (George, 2012;Dutta et al, 2019). However, during the COVID-19 crisis, the role of mainstream media in reporting the margins revealed moments of ruptures where the media created openings for an in-depth discussion on low-wage migrants and their structural conditions that require change.…”

Singapore’s Extreme Neoliberalism and the COVID Outbreak: Culturally Centering Voices of Low-Wage Migrant Workers

“…Positioning itself as a “custodian of capital accumulation” ( Tansel, 2017 , p. 4), Singapore’s “authoritarian neoliberalism” routinizes repressive tactics of labor management to attract transnational capital. The state disciplines labor through surveillance, policing, and expulsions (see Dutta, 2018a ; Dutta et al, 2019 ; Wham, 2019 ) as methods for “neoliberalizing violence” ( Springer, 2015 ).…”

“…To intervene in health inequities then, the CCA cocreates communicative infrastructures for the voices of the margins through practices of solidarity, with an advisory group from the margins identifying the research problem, constructing the research design, and participating in making sense of the data to guide intervention development ( Dutta, 2007 , 2008 , 2018c; Dutta et al, 2019 ). These communicative infrastructures for the voices of the global margins create theoretical and practical registers for intervening in health inequities ( Bates et al, 2019 ; Dutta, 2008 , 2018c; Dutta et al, 2019 ). Theorizing as an expression of subaltern agency cocreates communicative registers for intervening in the unequal structures, building resources for negotiating structures as well as cocreating advocacy/activist/movement interventions seeking structural transformations ( Dutta et al, 2019 ).…”

COVID-19, Authoritarian Neoliberalism, and Precarious Migrant Work in Singapore: Structural Violence and Communicative Inequality

“…The authoritarian state as the primary agent of "neoliberalizing violence" (Springer, 2015) incorporates into its structures mechanisms of surveilling, disciplining and policing the abandoned "other." It thrives on the production and circulation of propaganda that props up its model of economic development, pitched as the "Singapore model" (see Dutta, 2018a,b;Dutta et al, 2019). Underlying the propaganda of the "Singapore model" is an entire infrastructure of communicative devices that project "hubs, " "knowledge centers, " "dialogues, " and "expos" that are continually at work, seeding, promoting, and circulating the model of free market economics, narrated in the language of Asian values (Dutta, 2018a(Dutta, ,b, 2019a.…”