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Considerable research has been conducted on the topic of entertainment-education (EE), the method of using entertainment platforms such as popular music, radio, and television programming to diffuse information, attitudes, and behaviors via role modeling. A significant portion of the recently published EE literature has used the case of the Radio Communication Project (RCP) in Nepal to demonstrate the effectiveness of EE and to argue that EE campaigns can indeed be participatory in nature. In this project, we apply the culture-centered approach to examine the discursive space created by the RCP and its claim of being participatory. A critical examination of RCP discourse brings forth an alternative lens for approaching EE and its participatory claim. (Contains 2 notes.)

Foreign domestic workers from industrializing economies migrate to Singapore to feed its labor market, meeting the growing need for performing feminized labor. Although foreign domestic workers have been an integral part of Singaporean households since the 1970s, the presence of foreign domestic workers in contemporary public discourse remains eclipsed. However, the civil society landscape has witnessed increasing articulations and mobilization of civil society actors on the rights of foreign domestic workers, framing the problems experienced by foreign domestic workers in the language of rights. Given the role of mainstream media as a developmental structure in carrying out the information dissemination function of the state in predominantly economic terms that serve the pragmatic ideology of the state, how are foreign domestic workers constructed in mainstream media discourse? What do we learn from these constructions about the interplays of feminized labor, media discourse, civil society, and the state? The article examines the kinds of media frames present in the discussion and portrayal of foreign domestic workers using a mixed-methods approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I draw on the key tenets of the culture-centered approach to co-construct the everyday negotiations of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) among low-wage male Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore. The culture-centered approach foregrounds voices infrastructures at the margins as the basis for theorizing health. Based on 87 hours of participant observations of digital spaces and 47 in-depth interviews, I attend to the exploitative conditions of migrant work that constitute the COVID-19 outbreak in the dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers. These exploitative conditions are intertwined with authoritarian techniques of repression deployed by the state that criminalize worker collectivization and erase worker voices. The principle of academic–worker–activist solidarity offers a register for alternative imaginaries of health that intervene directly in Singapore's extreme neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deploys the culture-centered approach to foreground the everyday constructions of farmer-suicides amid the agrarian epidemic among the farmer-widows to attend to the everyday structures that constitute the meanings of the suicides. The depictions of the patriarchal structures of decision-making in agriculture are intertwined with the broader erasure of the interplays of inequality in farmers' experiences from the discursive sites of neoliberal agriculture. Furthermore, the voices of the widows disrupt the monolithic construction of agricultural technologies as tools of modernization and progress dominant in the development communication scholarship, instead, depicting the ways in which new technologies (such as Bt cotton) are constituted within, and reproduce, the overarching inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple communicative erasures are embedded in the labor practices of migrant domestic work. The parallel experiences of South Asian workers laboring in Noida (India) and Singapore as experiences of (im)mobilities and expulsions are discussed amid the construction and importation of the "The Singapore Model" across Asian cities. We specifically hear the voices of workers in Noida as scripts of the global margins that exist within neoliberal meccas. These storied realities of performing reproductive labor disrupt the celebration of neoliberal development in model cities for work and play. Domestic work continues to function in precarity with multiple layers of structural (im)mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this rebuttal to Linn's critique (see EJ802887), the authors state that, while Linn provides a thoughtful critique of the culture-centered approach by questioning its feasibility, he missed the idea that the very concept of effectiveness is brought under scrutiny by the culture-centered approach, with the focus being on examining the universal "value" of the very interventions that are typically taken for granted by campaign planners and evaluators. In their earlier critique of the Radio Communication Project in Nepal (see EJ802883), these authors pointed out that the mobilization of culture to push agendas, as defined by external actors, co-opts the participatory capacities of local communities by framing such participation under the agendas of elite actors. They argued that the culture-centered approach provides an entry point for engaging with communities prior to intervention development to identify the needs of the community based on attitudes of respect and openness toward the community. Therefore, from a process perspective, the culture-centered approach provides a critique of the dominant framework of health education by questioning the processes and opportunities for participation and by suggesting alternative frameworks for conceptualizing participation in the realm of health. Finally, contradictory to the claim made by Linn, although the culture-centered approach seeks to offer democratic spaces for community participation and sees equality as a desirable goal of health communication efforts, it does not assume that health educators and community members are equals; rather, it foregrounds and challenges the foundations of these very inequities.

This study draws on a culturally centered collaboration with a community of dalit women farmers in South India who were organized in a cooperative in their collective resistance against the corporatization of agriculture. Situated in the backdrop of the epidemic of farmer suicides in the region, this manuscript examines how those at the margins of global neoliberal transformations symbolically and materially make sense of and resist these transformations. The voices of the women farmers disrupt the underlying neoliberal assumptions that undergird the importation of cash crop agriculture into a subsistence and community-centered farming culture. They depict the ways in which Western cash crop agriculture disrupts community, food security, local health care systems, and the unique gender relations. Moreover, the communication advocacy work carried out by the women seeks to transform agricultural policy through material interventions as alternative practices of agriculture that challenge the hegemony of cash-based individualized agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a conceptual overview of the key principles of the culture-centered approach (CCA) as a meta-theoretical framework for addressing health inequalities by building communicative infrastructures for listening to the voices of subaltern communities that are hitherto erased from dominant discursive spaces. Complementing a growing body of scholarship that draws on the CCA to address the structural contexts of health in the subaltern margins across the globe, this article lays out the methodological framework of the CCA. It highlights the key conceptual anchors that serve as foundations of the approach, suggesting that participation, partnerships, communication, dialogue, and reflexivity offer methodological tools that interrogate the reproduction of erasures within dominant structures, and create entry points for subaltern voices to arrive into hegemony. The essay wraps up by offering specific strategies and tools for designing culture-centered projects that may be adopted by activists, community advocates and organizers, and academics working in academic-community partnerships in the backdrop of health disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Challenging the dominant framework of culture as development that incorporates culture as a tool for neoliberal growth-driven development, the culture-centered approach (CCA) to social change communication offers an entry point for theorizing and articulating communication for social change that emerges ‘from’ and ‘with’ the margins. Interrogating the fundamental notion of what counts as development, the CCA seeks to re-turn the discursive sites of articulating development into the hands of subaltern communities at the margins. The theorization of culture in social change communication as an instrument for consolidating the hegemony of the power elite is juxtaposed in the backdrop of a radical inversion of social change communication as a constitutive framework for grassroots participation in social movements, activist politics, advocacy processes, and bottom-up community-led dialogues that seek to transform the very meanings and practices of development. The voices of the margins recognized and represented in local-regional-national discursive spaces interrogate the received meanings of development and social change, producing knowledge that decolonizes the dominant articulations of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to contribute to the literature on health information seeking (HIS) by culturally locating the search for health information within the local contexts of everyday life in Singapore, and within the meaning-making processes that individuals participate in. Based on in-depth interviews with 100 participants selected through stratified sampling, it asks: How do Singaporeans make sense of HIS in the realm of their everyday lived experiences? The study contributes to the literature on the roles familial ties play in information gathering and sharing in a collective context. More importantly, these familial ties provide perspective on the ways in which culture spatio-temporally constitutes HIS. HIS is informed by familial role expectations in a collectivist context where filial piety and “respect for the elderly” are guiding anchors for behavior. Moreover, harmony and community well-being define societal roles and responsibilities of caregiving, directed broadly at communal care. These collective-oriented contexts therefore inform HIS. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Building on this dialectical relationship between mobility and materiality, and drawing on our collaborations with foreign domestic workers (FDWs) and migrant constructions workers (MCWs) in Singapore in cocreating communication infrastructures, we theorize resistance as mobilities in Asia. Technologies of mediation, as markers of mobility in Asian neoliberal marketing campaigns and academic celebrations of the Asian century, strategically erase the possibilities for labor organizing and collective bargaining through which migrant workers in precarious jobs can secure access to fundamental economic rights and basic working conditions. Paradoxically, then, drawing upon our ethnographic collaborations with FDWs and MCWs in Singapore, we attend to the interplays of the symbolic and the material that are reproduced through artifacts of mobility or immobility, offering Asian resistance as a mobile trope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asia is, and has been, a site of multiple mobilities--of media, peoples, and ideas. These various mobilities in and across Asia that this Special Section addresses are significantly imbricated in relations of communication and power. Yet they have not received adequate attention in media and communication studies or in the expansive scholarship on mobilities, which has largely remained focused on the North Atlantic West. This introduction makes a case for the importance of addressing relations of mobilities in Asia and understanding how relations of communication and power inform, and are informed by, such mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food insecurity and its most extreme form, hunger, have increased exponentially in the United States since 2006. This essay seeks to contribute to our understanding of hunger by attending to the context of the financial crisis as an organizing frame for understanding local meanings of hunger. Within a broader framework of the culture-centered approach (CCA) that works to identify and develop locally rooted solutions to food insecurity, we describe through locally grounded stories of food insecurity the financial climate where large percentages of U.S. households have been cast into poverty because of the crash of an unregulated economy. These local understandings of hunger in the context of the economy offer entry points for organizing a food-insecure coalition that seeks to address the stigma around food insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on an understanding of marginalization as intrinsic to mainstream communication theorizing and research, this essay argues that exploitation is rooted in the denial of the communicative capacity of the margins and in the co-optation of the margins as the subjects of top-down communication directed at the margins by experts. The distributions of communicative infrastructures map out the inequities in distributions of economic resources, reifying the unequal distribution of resources by perpetuating values embedded in the interests of the power elite. Listening offers an opening for interrogating the inequities in the global landscape of distribution of power, by attending to the unvoiced assumptions and principles underlying the logics of concentration of power in the hands of the transnational elite. Drawing from postcolonial and Subaltern Studies theories, I engage with the culture-centered approach to outline key tenets of listening as entry points to addressing the global inequities that are produced by neoliberal globalization. Listening through inversion, incompleteness and imagination works in solidarity with the margins to co-construct theory rooted in the ontologies, epistemologies, and values of the margins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of China's recent ascent as the world's second largest economy, this article critically engages with current U.S. public discourses around China. In particular, we explore how Orientalist knowledge about China is appropriated within neoliberal contexts. Our ideological analysis of news regarding China in the New York Times revealed three themes: (a) The Shoppers' Republic of China; (b) China's responsibility to consume; and (c) China as the space outside international law. Our analysis underpins the relevance of theorizing the interplay between Orientalism and neoliberalism in contemporary U.S. mainstream discourses of China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Hunger is a key marker of health disparity, depicting the everyday consequences of inequalities that are physiologically felt directly by the most vulnerable segments of the population, often resulting from the broader structural inequities in a society. In this project, we report our work with food insecurity in West Bengal, India and Indiana, USA. Through interviews, focus groups, community-wide discussions, photo exhibits cocreated through the PhotoVoice method, and community meetings, community members develop solutions that are meaningful to their everyday lived experiences. White Papers, policy briefs, exhibits, community meetings, and coalitions emerge as solutions developed through our partnerships that focus on addressing specific problems related to food insecurity by fostering spaces for listening to the voices of the food insecure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the argument that context ought to be centralized in discourses of health communication, this article applies the culture-centered approach to engage in dialogue about issues of health with 18 men in rural West Bengal. The culture-centered approach is based on dialogue between the researcher and the community members, with the goals of listening to the voices of cultural members in suggesting culture-based health solutions. In this project, our discursive engagement with the participants suggests that health is primarily constructed as an absence, framed in the realm of minimal access to healthcare resources. In a situation where the resources are limited, the participants discussed the importance of trust in their relationship with the local provider. Health was also seen as a collective resource that was both an asset of the collective and a responsibility of the collective. Finally, the participants also pointed out the ways in which corruption in the structure introduced a paradox in policy discourse and the material conditions of the participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary society, health issues have gained increasing urgency in both political and academic spheres. Looking back at the failure of the modernist development initiatives, there is the need to realize that we live in a time of increasing sociopolitical complexity. The present moment is perhaps best understood in terms of a complex tension and linkage between the past and present, global and local, modern and postmodern. The critical-cultural approach to health campaigns is an approach that, through the reflexive interrogation of modernist assumptions underlying health communication campaigns, attempts to foreground the tensions inherent in the practice of health campaigns. This essay discusses the manner in which the critical-cultural approach interrogates modernist assumptions and provides an alternative paradigm for approaching the theory and practice of health campaigns by suggesting the necessity for reflexivity. Specifically, we discuss how the perspective interrogates the role of the media in development, the significance of culture, the locus of health responsibility, the impact of structural conditions, and the politics of knowledge, providing examples of campaigns that illustrate this reflexivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health communication scholarship has built on the health-promoting role of the community in exploring participatory communication techniques in community-based health promotion efforts. Community participation inculcates responsibility, strengthens community bonds, and provides a platform for diffusing health interventions. This power of a community to embody responsible action and promote participation in preventive behavior is examined in recent research on social capital. Exploring the link between community participation and health, this article demonstrates, through 2 survey studies, that health information orientation and health information efficacy are positively correlated with community participation. Furthermore, community participation is linked with prevention orientation, health beliefs, and health behaviors. Based on the findings, theoretical and pragmatic suggestions are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers in health communication usually adopt a linear approach to the study of health. Under this linear model, the emphasis is on the transmission of beliefs, information, and knowledge from key points at the core (the traditional senders) to the peripheral receivers of messages. A growing body of scholarship foregrounds the importance of understanding health communication from a culture-centered perspective that privileges the dialogue with community members. Drawing on a culture-centered approach, the authors examine the meanings of health among men in rural Bengal. Their dialogue with these men suggests that communication in the realm of health exists in the context of responsibility as care providers, work life, structural barriers, and solutions through participatory processes. The findings elucidate the connection between structure and the communication practices of marginalization. The authors' discursive engagement with the participants points toward spaces of entry for theorizing health communication and developing culture-centered praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entertainment education (E-E) is one of the most widely discussed areas in current scholarship on international health communication. In fact, much of the health communication scholarship has been historically dominated by E-E efforts directed at subaltern spaces. This article applies a subaltern studies perspective to interrogate the location of agency of the subaltern participant in the dominant E-E discourse. Based on a critical approach to E-E, the article offers points of departure for studying health communication in subaltern spaces. Subaltern voices point toward alternative definitions of problems beyond the narrow realm of problems defined by the core actors in E-E. Finally, alternative positions are suggested for applying participatory communication in engaging with subaltern participants for problem definition and solution development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bauls, the rural minstrels who sing songs of transformation, are a socio-economically and politico-religiously marginalized cultural population from rural Bengal (both from eastern and north-eastern, India and from Bangladesh). They identify themselves outside of any organized religion or established caste system in India, and therefore are constituted at the margins of contemporary global South. Voicing through their songs and narratives of emancipation, they interrogate and criticize material and symbolic inequalities and injustices such as discrimination and intolerance (including class and caste hierarchies, and other forms of disparities) perpetuated by hegemonic authorities and religious institutions. Embracing a critical communication lens, this paper pays attention to material and discursive marginalization of Bauls and Fakirs, foregrounding voice as an anchor to communicative interrogation of structural and cultural inequalities. Through voice, Bauls and Fakirs foreground reflexive spiritual and humane practices that raise societal consciousness and cultivate polymorphic possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a culture-centered radio communication project in Nepal. The culture-centered approach (CCA) is designed to interrogate the logic of success as defined within the realm of effectiveness of health education programs. It aims to examine the ways in which health education and promotion efforts respond to the needs of the community. Certainly, CCA provides a critique of the dominant framework of health education by questioning the processes for participation in the realm of health.