Citation

Dutta MJ, Thaker J. J. Appl. Commun. Res. 2019; 47(1): 24-46.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, National Communication Association, Publisher Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/00909882.2018.1547917

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

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. © 2019, © 2019 National Communication Association.

Language: en

Keywords

gender; culture-centered approach; communication sovereignty; listening infrastructure; Neoliberal agriculture