Fighting from and for the margin: Local activism in the realm of global politics

Mahuya Pal, Purdue University

Abstract

My dissertation is an ideologically situated exercise that adopts a resistive culture-centered stance in listening to subaltern voices to disrupt the Eurocentric tradition of research in the field of organizational communication and public relations. Engaging with subaltern activist farmers in rural Bengal in eastern India, who are resisting dispossession of their agricultural land by the state for a corporate project, my goal is to understand the communicative processes embodying resistance that constitute their organizing and their relationship to the state. Attending to subaltern activism as a form of organizing and relationship, inverts the dominant understanding of organizational research in terms of strategic management function. Instead, my research is driven by democratic ideals with a commitment toward more equitable policies, which is an important concern in the context of neo-liberalism that is creating widespread social disparities. The culturecentered approach provides an alternative framework to rupture neo-liberalism by listening to the subaltern voices at the margins that question the modernist logic of development. It reverses epistemic foundation of knowledge construction with its commitment to inscribing subaltern accounts from the subaltern perspective. Based on my in-depth interviews and emergent focus groups totaling 63 farmers, reflexive journals and field notes in a seven-week field work, my research reveals that the farmers enact resistance in alternative spaces that typically remain obscure within the dominant discursive space. Taking us beyond the realm of written text to the oral (sit-ins, blockades), subaltern resistance draws upon forces of history, geo-politics of the nation, and religion. Collective resistance embodies class antagonism, material and symbolic, macro and micro, a fragmented space built on multiple dialectics. It offers a criticism and an alternative to the local policy of land acquisition. Thus, the subaltern activism challenges the economic rhetoric of progress and development of neo-liberalism both locally and globally. In sum, the main contribution of my research entails (a) situating a subaltern activism from the global South in academic organizational research from the culture-centered perspective, and (b) bringing forth an alternative rationality that exists parallel to the modernist logic of development, offering new ways to think about communication, organization, relationship and resistance.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Dutta, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Communication

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