Participation and participatory strategies are used in different spaces globally to involve communities and ensure their voices in the discursive space. The culture centered approach foregrounds active participation of community members in the construction of shared meanings and experience (Dutta, 2008). Basu and Dutta (2009) underline the importance of participation of community members in the enunciation of health problems as a step toward achieving meaningful change. My experience with participatory projects involving children and community members also bears testimony to the importance of participation in impacting society; effecting a sustainable social change. But at the same time, this question looms large in my reflexive spaces that "Is it all just a co-optive process as the structural issues have remain untouched?"
Basu and Dutta (2009) discuss different approaches of participation, critique the top down participatory campaigns and provide an alternative theorizing of participation in marginalized spaces. The question here is that margins being margins, how much participation can we really construct here? How do we theorize/ reach the subaltern spaces that foster subalternity? (Basu and Dutta, 2009). Reaching those spaces might need a structural change.
From a theoretical purist point of view, we can probably build a clean space but it gets murkier and embedded in contradictions once we move to praxis. At the same time, the structure never changes but realigns itself so that the exploitative practices remain the same. As Cheney and Cloud (2006) note that the different managerial strategies of expanded voice and participation by workers in the productivity of the firm may obscure the exploitative practices and fundamental inequalities. So, as much as we construct participation of the workers and ensure their voices in the discursive space, it does not really impact the larger exploitative practices. The worker, the health participant still lives in the margins with a symbolic satisfaction of having access to the "discursive space".
This takes me to our research and my upcoming dissertation, what is the end product of this process? Foregrounding the voice of the cultural participant in the discursive space, co-creating meanings from their participation....so?..does this impact the structure? the exploitative/ marginalizing practices? the neo-liberal argument which guides it now?
As Cloud(2005) enunciates in her second article for this week, the "limits of symbolic agency in the labor movement and the overemphasis on discursive power in organizational communication and social movement research in the field". I want to draw a parallel to health communication here...after our critical reading of texts, campaigns, critical analysis of dominant approaches of health communication, we emphasize on dialogue, listening, community participation as a start to get at the meanings, foregrounding voices, access to discursive spaces, enabling agency etc. Here, we fall in the same trap as Cloud (2005) portrays in terms of critical organizational studies. i.e., "we need more than a voice". The material context has not changed nor does it change with our suggested recommendations and actions. We must come to terms with the dialectical relationships between discourses, acts of participation and the material contexts of power and agency (Cloud, 2005; Dutta, 2008). So, I must understand that all my research and actions as a scholar are subject to the critical reflections that my work, my interpretation and my agency is located in the exploitative practices of the present structure and as long as the structural issues remain not-addressed, "participation" could be a rhetoric.
Basu and Dutta (2009) discuss different approaches of participation, critique the top down participatory campaigns and provide an alternative theorizing of participation in marginalized spaces. The question here is that margins being margins, how much participation can we really construct here? How do we theorize/ reach the subaltern spaces that foster subalternity? (Basu and Dutta, 2009). Reaching those spaces might need a structural change.
From a theoretical purist point of view, we can probably build a clean space but it gets murkier and embedded in contradictions once we move to praxis. At the same time, the structure never changes but realigns itself so that the exploitative practices remain the same. As Cheney and Cloud (2006) note that the different managerial strategies of expanded voice and participation by workers in the productivity of the firm may obscure the exploitative practices and fundamental inequalities. So, as much as we construct participation of the workers and ensure their voices in the discursive space, it does not really impact the larger exploitative practices. The worker, the health participant still lives in the margins with a symbolic satisfaction of having access to the "discursive space".
This takes me to our research and my upcoming dissertation, what is the end product of this process? Foregrounding the voice of the cultural participant in the discursive space, co-creating meanings from their participation....so?..does this impact the structure? the exploitative/ marginalizing practices? the neo-liberal argument which guides it now?
As Cloud(2005) enunciates in her second article for this week, the "limits of symbolic agency in the labor movement and the overemphasis on discursive power in organizational communication and social movement research in the field". I want to draw a parallel to health communication here...after our critical reading of texts, campaigns, critical analysis of dominant approaches of health communication, we emphasize on dialogue, listening, community participation as a start to get at the meanings, foregrounding voices, access to discursive spaces, enabling agency etc. Here, we fall in the same trap as Cloud (2005) portrays in terms of critical organizational studies. i.e., "we need more than a voice". The material context has not changed nor does it change with our suggested recommendations and actions. We must come to terms with the dialectical relationships between discourses, acts of participation and the material contexts of power and agency (Cloud, 2005; Dutta, 2008). So, I must understand that all my research and actions as a scholar are subject to the critical reflections that my work, my interpretation and my agency is located in the exploitative practices of the present structure and as long as the structural issues remain not-addressed, "participation" could be a rhetoric.
Comments
Thank you for writing this.