Culture-Centered Approaches

Drawing upon foundations in postcolonial and subaltern studies theories, the culture-centered approach (CCA) examines the communicative processes through which marginalization takes place and seeks to resist the marginalization of the subaltern sectors through the foregrounding of opportunities for local grassroots participation in the definition of problem configurations and in the corresponding articulations of locally meaningful solutions. “Subalternity” refers to the condition of being erased from mainstream discursive spaces and is constituted in raced, classed, gendered, colonial, and other forms of oppression, carried out through the logics of the mainstream. [Page 285]In this sense, then, the culture-centered approach understands subalternity as communicative erasure, produced through the procedures, rules, and logics in mainstream discursive processes and spaces that limit the opportunities for participation, representation, and recognition of ...