Kia ora koutou katoa. From the International Communication Association Podcast Network, welcome to Interventions From the Global South. This is your host, Professor Mohan Dutta. Today we have the honor of having Professor Usha Raman with us. Usha is a professor in the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad. Her research interests include cultural studies of science, health communication, children's media, feminist media studies, and the social and cultural impact of digital media. Before coming into academia, Usha has worked for many years in a variety of roles, which have predominantly involved corporate communication work. She was elected last year to the executive board of the International Association for Media and Communication Research, IAMCR, and will serve as Vice President until July 2024. In addition to her scholarly work, Usha has written widely for the popular press and for various range of digital platforms. She has written for platforms such as The Indian Express - The Caravan, Deccan Chronicle -Times of India, and online news site, thewire.in. Apart from several books, book chapters and journal articles, which covered her full research areas, Usha's publications include the book "Writing for the Media" with Oxford University Press, a volume of poetry titled "All the Spaces in Between", and a children's book, "Under the Bed". She's also an occasional blogger and recently launched a collaborative podcast, "Reading for Our Times", which features short excerpts from selected books, usually organized around a theme. It's a delight to have you with us, Usha.
Thank you, Mohan. And I'm delighted to be here. It's such a privilege to be chatting with you.
Lovely. Usha, perhaps we can begin by talking about your understanding of the Global South. How do you conceptualize the Global South?
Okay, so you throw a tricky question to start with. The Global South is a term that's both expansive and limiting in many ways. The first image that pops into your head when you think Global South, geographically on the received Atlas that most of us work with, it's continents in the southern hemisphere, of course, excluding Australia and New Zealand, and large parts of Eurasia, Asia primarily, and some parts of the Balkan states. That's in terms of geographically. But if we're thinking conceptually, I suppose we're talking about populations that have been underrepresented in historical records, in terms of perspectives, lived realities, and of course, in terms of theorisation. A term that I came across some years ago, and it seems to be quantitatively truer, is the Global Three-Fourths. Then you can throw a bunch of different attributes into that, whether we're talking about caste, gender, religion, or various other identifiers. The Global South is definitely where I live, but not necessarily what I represent in terms of my own privilege.
This is really fascinating in terms of how you depict Global South as this notion of the three-fourths. I would love to unpack that a little bit more, in terms of what then are the characteristics of the three-fourths, in some broad ways?
The moment you start to put definitions or boundaries on some of these ideas, you realize that the boundaries do more to tell you about where you stand, rather than what the quantity or the entity represents. If we had to think about the Global Three-Fourths and you position it against dominant knowledge systems, dominant ways of being, whether it is the market, social norms, religion, value systems, etc. I would say the Global South, or the Global Three-Fourths, then would be those that have not had a voice in defining what is the set of norms.
It's really fascinating, this notion of not having a voice. What I really find interesting about that, particularly when I think about your trajectory in terms of getting a PhD in the US at Georgia and then returning to India. What in your journey did you experience, in terms of this question of voice and representation, when you think about the different movements?
My first degree in the United States was a master's and that was in the early 80s. And it was really a time before I was exposed to the vocabularies that now empower us, significantly. As a journalism student from India, in the south of the United States in Georgia, I was an aberration because most of the students who came to the US in those years were technology or science students. In my department, I was the only Indian woman and then was joined later by a few others. That seemed to automatically position me within the department as somebody who should be a certain way, not of my own choosing. I did remember resenting, for instance, when a professor would write, "You write really well!" And exclamation mark at the end of it. Later on, I was able to unpack colonialism or expectations or stereotypes, both of gender and nationality. I resisted that boxing in by choosing to study something that I thought was not typical. So I decided not to study international communication, and I decided not to study India. Instead, I said, I was going to study science, technology and community formation around those areas, which I felt was less culturally loaded. Of course, now I understand that that is as culturally loaded as anything else. I got a journalism degree and I was actually on my way to Michigan State for a PhD, in a very quantitative department. Two days before I was to report at East Lansing, I got cold feet, and I said, "What am I doing here?" I mean, what I really want to do is to write about my space in India. I didn't think I wanted to be an academic. So I said, "I want to be a journalist. I want to tell stories about the people who matter to me." So I told them, I can't do this. And I withdrew from the Ph. D. program and worked in India as a journalist for many years. Then I go back in '93, almost 10 years later, for a PhD. And I stuck with my idea of working in science and technology studies. It was a slightly different space then. The American academia had already experienced a lot of scholarship from India and from people working from the subcontinent. I couldn't resolve the discomforts I had by continuing an academic career in the US. Somehow, I just didn't find my people. I returned to India, not wanting to be an academic but being in places where I felt my communication skills and understanding could make a difference. I decided to do health communication as practice. That's where I found myself. And I think it was only after 10 years of practice that I decided, maybe, there is a space in academia where I can resolve some of these discomforts and talk to other people who feel the same way.
That's a beautiful narrative. Thinking through that and your experiences, looking at communication as a discipline in 2022, as we are having this conversation, you seem to indicate that things have changed. But you also seem to indicate that things perhaps haven't changed. I would love to hear you sort of make sense of where we are at now.
One thing that has changed hugely is community and the visibility of academic community that is grappling with similar ideas, which is coming up with ways of articulating those ideas with the opportunity to see resonances across these discomforts. I remember an ICA that I went to in Chicago, there was a pre-conference that was looking at journalism education in India. At the pre-conference, there was Radhika Gajjala, Radha Higde, Radhika Parameswaran - all women who I had not encountered in my earlier academics in the United States. I was thinking, "If only I had known that there were other people who occupied similar spaces." I think my own academic trajectory may have been a little bit different. Since then, I've discovered many, many more people who are occupied with the same concerns. There's been an assertion of a certain way of talking about realities in the places we live and work and study. There's a willingness and also the space to say that we would like to work with our own ideas, within our own frameworks. We've created the vocabulary to do that. That's the good part. And I think that's changed. What hasn't changed is that we still feel like there is an oppositional force or that there is something we are speaking against. Global South scholarship is still Global South scholarship, if you know what I mean. There is still a center and when there is a center, there is always margins and peripheries. Now, that's completely okay in a totally spatial sense. But when it becomes an issue of power, representation, who makes decisions, who holds the purse strings, and so on, those things haven't changed very much.
One of the things that you articulate here is a notion of specificity, foregrounding of the specificity of spaces of the particular and being able to speak from that particular to generate theory. At the same time, there seems to be an emergent tension, particularly when I think about one's location in India that turn to specificity, that language of decolonization is rearticulated to the foreground and reproduce a logic of othering. How can one hold this specificity in a way that is generative, emancipatory?
I think one thing that many of us have been talking about is to reject the area studies model that positions all spaces that are non-Eurocentric/Anglocentric as specific and the so-called "Global North" as universal. How does one retain sensitivity to context, while attempting to generate understandings, knowledge, frameworks that are applicable or generative in other contexts? I think it's at least a two-sided issue. One is of modes of doing and the framing that accompanies the doing, and the other is modes of representing what has been done. I think in both cases, there are tensions with the Global North, the one-fourth world. I think, we need ways to resolve that. When we enter a field to understand, let's say in the case of our project that you refer to - the working lives of women in the informal sector, is to see if there are ways of entering the field that are not pre-constructed by theories and frameworks that are received from what has been taken as the universal context, which means going back to good old real ethnography, allowing the ground to speak to you. I think for many of us, especially those of us who have been educated in the West and are continuing to be educated within academic social structures that borrow largely from Western thought, that's a big challenge. You have to be cognizant of these dominant frameworks. You cannot reject them totally because, of course, you have to speak to them, if you are to speak to the world in general. So how do you do this balancing act of listening, knowing a certain something, but knowing that that certain something is not the only way to know? I think there's a problem with dealing with the understanding of those specificities in a way that is not constrained by prior knowledge systems, and then the writing of it or the dissemination of it. But I think the bigger politics are reaching that to people in a way that is persuasive, that isn't positioning against, but offering something that is true, new and useful. I think, in some ways, like Aswin Punathambekar, for instance, has done this really wonderful essay in the introduction of his book that argues that we should no longer talk about work in the Global South or in South Asia as being "off place". It is, that's what it is. To find ways of doing that and every time you get a reviewer saying, "But can you tell us how this is positioned against?" And then if you have the confidence - and I think we need to encourage our young scholars to do this - to say that, "No, I won't do that," because this is a context that doesn't need to be positioned against something else. If you are able to encourage your younger mentees to push back against that dominant positioning, that's a way to do it. No easy answers to that question. But I think it's a process.
This is beautiful in terms of how you depict this relationship between the specificity and the universal. I would love to hear more about your work with women at work, specifically. I want to draw from examples of my own fieldwork and perhaps offer that to you and see if we can make sense of it together. With the work of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation, we have been over the last decade working with domestic workers. One of the themes that continues to emerge again and again through voices of domestic workers is this theme of collectivization, the theme of forming unions that are led by women at work. Here is an example of voices emerging from specificity. But they are articulating something that is deeply universal. So I would love to hear how you make sense of that and also if that resonates with your work with women within the context of work?
I think very much so. Just to give you a little bit of background about the FemLab project, you realize that in different sectors of course it's slightly different. When you really speak to a large number of women across the sectors, you understand that the concerns are the same. We're talking about five sectors in our project. We're talking about women in sanitation, construction, ride-hailing, artisanal work, and platform-based salon work. We find that across the sectors, the specificities of work are different, but the concerns of women, how they understand precarity, security, dignity - all of these issues are the same or similar. Then you realize that it is not so much the context that determines the possibility of collectivization, but concerns. If we can find these resonances across sectors, which we see as so different in the economy, then it is not too far a stretch to assume that there will be consonances across geographical or cultural context. So I don't think we need too much imagination to figure that there will always be resonances. It all depends on whether you've actually recognized what the concerns are and where those concerns are coming from. Then you realize that those concerns can be addressed in a sustainable, humane way only by changing superstructures. So that's a long journey. What we're finding, for instance, is with women in the informal sector, traditional unionization hasn't helped. You find that the trade union movement has largely failed women. Even where women have become leaders, they tend to reflect the concerns mostly of the male workers. Even in simple things like maternity benefits or having women's toilets. But 50 years down the line of the trade union movement, we've not been able to achieve those very small gains. There needs to be a different way of thinking about women within the collective space, which means that we need to understand first how do women see themselves as workers? How do women think about what they want? For many women, the workspace is the home. So the moment you have the home as the workspace, what kind of regulation are we talking about? What kind of relationships are we going to look at?
I want to hang on to a couple of these ideas which are so powerful. You talk about this notion of the broad politics of changing the superstructure. On the other, talking about resonances that emerge from the specificities. Building on that then, what are the possibilities for those resonances that are emergent from specificities to offer registers for transforming the superstructure?
I think that's an incremental project. Most recently, I was listening to the author of this amazing new book, which is called "Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh". She talks to women in India using Shah Rukh Khan as something that binds them. She's a feminist economist, Shrayana Bhattacharya. The way she talks about women, across sectors - so there are women in rural Bengal, there are women who work in Gol Gaon, there are women who are agricultural workers in Maharashtra. What they share is this love for Shah Rukh Khan. The book may have this title that seems trivial, but it's actually something that she was able to use to connect to these women. So what Shrayana Bhattacharya says is that there is no point in talking about macro-level changes, because it's not going to be like this one overnight revolution that's going to happen. But instead, we need to attend to the micro and see how changes are happening within households, within communities, etc., and take heart from that. The understandings that we gain from talking to women or other vulnerable populations is to see, are the ways in which connections can be made or that connections are being made? I mean, very often the connections exist and all we do is make them visible. In the course of our work, I came across two small organizations working in the old city of Hyderabad, who both work with home-based artisanal workers. The fact that the two organizations know of each other but don't really interact because of the politics of funding, because various other things. Even though they're both generating understanding that is really useful to the other, very often there's no sharing. Then perhaps, what an academic can do, or what somebody who is distanced from the everyday work of this social change can do, is to say, "Here is something that I see that is resonant across these two groups," and put that out in a sphere where more people can read it. Also involve these groups in collective conversations. Then your hammer is hitting a little bit deeper, perhaps. Just to talk a little bit more about our work, one thing we're trying to do is, in these different spaces, to see if we can create materials - contracts that make sense. In the construction sector, in the ride-hailing sector, there are women just entering these spaces, and the contracts, the interfaces, the platform's are all heavily designed with male workers in mind. We're trying to intervene with the companies to say, "Okay, here are model contracts that are still within your framework of employee/employer relationships." But we are depicting them, so we're creating visual contracts, for instance. So taking their existing contracts, turning them into visual contracts, using them as a means of giving these women an idea of what they're actually entering into, rather than just clicking on the place where your thumbprint has to go.
I love the trajectory of hope that you portray in this. What you're articulating is that hope goes with incremental transformations. When thinking about these transformations that are incremental, and then a backdrop of authoritarian populist force, how does one negotiate that?
Being in the city, I'm a little bit distanced from the force of that feeling. I think people who work in Delhi, mostly, and perhaps work in states where there is a reflection of that authoritarian regime much more strongly, there is certainly a greater awareness of one's precarity. I've really been privileged to live in a city that is far, Dilli Door Ast, really. Also, to maybe gain a certain level of invisibility because of my late entry into academia. For instance, my colleagues in the department who have been in the space for a long time have much more visibility as scholars, than somebody like me who's been all over the place. And so nobody knows exactly what I do. There's been an advantage in that, so during the CAA protests, I can make a video saying what I think and so far, nobody's called me on it. Speaking to the larger picture, apart from just me, there is this feeling among academics that the gaze is on you if you do work that is considered aligned with the dissenters. Despite that, I just see so many people speaking out, so many people still being courageous that I feel there is still hope. And maybe that's what you need to feel to sustain whatever activity you want.
Usha, as we wrap up, I wanted to ask you if there is anything else that you wanted to add?
I don't know that we got to talk much about theory, but maybe places from where theory comes. We really need to - and this is an ongoing conundrum in the discipline - we really need to also decenter the discipline, in some ways. And consciously look for new material coming out from women: sociologists, feminist economists, and journalists who have engaged deeply in the field from India. Thinking of scholarship more broadly is important. Who is a scholar, right? A scholar issomebody with an open mind.
What I find really instructive about this conversation is the imaginaries of metatheory, in terms of how we go about even doing theory and what are the norms that define the work of theorizing. Keeping that in mind and looking at the struggles of the early career researchers that you work with, what are the steps that can actually open up the pathways for that kind of theory work to be done seriously from the Global South?
What has helped me is to constantly engage on multiple fronts. When I say multiple fronts, I mean, multiple disciplinary fronts, that's one. But also, in terms of looking at life as something to learn from and not to be afraid to bring the personal into the ways of thinking about the world. And I think the most powerful theory is that which comes from personal reflective epiphany. The way, particularly in India, young people have been socialized through education is to not to privilege their own ideas, not to privilege their own thinking, their own experiences. And I would say, to start with that's one thing they should be doing. How are you going to talk about context if you don't even pay attention to your own context?
Thank you so much, Usha.
Thank you. This has been great.
This episode of Interventions From the Global South podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcast Network. The show is sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University Qatar, producing and promoting evidence-based storytelling focused on histories, cultures, and media of the Global South. This episode is produced by Daniel Christain and Dominic Bonelli. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Sleeping Ghost. If you would like to hear more about the participants on the episode, as well as our sponsor, please check the show notes in the episode description. Thanks for listening!
