Organizing and Communicating Health: A Culture-centered and Necrocapitalist Inquiry of Groundwater Contamination in Rural West Bengal
Abstract
As a discursive point of praxis, this dissertation project seeks to record knowledge from below around the overlaps between health, water and health interventions emerging from rural communities located in North 24 Parganas and Purulia in West Bengal that are disproportionately impacted by water-insecurity. My dissertation also documents how multiple-stakeholders such as local NGOs, international NGOs, non-profits, and donor agencies organize access to safe water and health interventions for the water-insecure communities located in North 24 Parganas and Purulia. The integration of the CCA and necrocapitalism afford theoretical and methodological guidance in this dissertation to help document the localocentric stories emerging from the subaltern communities impacted by water-insecurity. By centering the stories that are often decentered from mainstream knowledge making spaces, the goal of this research project is that the local narrated lived experiences, as interpreted and recorded in this dissertation, might inform the organizing of future health interventions designed and developed for similarly marginalized communities. For my dissertation, I conducted a seven-week field study in West Bengal and employed various ethnographic research methods, including in-depth interviews, group interviews, focus group discussions, participant observation, field notes (including photographs) and reflexive journaling to collect data. Though the critical thematic analysis of the data that emerged from my fieldwork, I learn how research participants with minoritized caste and low-income backgrounds routinely challenge, disrupt, and re-organize the dominant frames of health, water, and health interventions as articulated by global local organizational actors (such as local NGOs, international NGOs, non-profits). Additionally, the narratives emerging from subaltern spaces made visible how community members residing in water insecure areas configure structural solutions, navigate and negotiate the social, cultural, and institutional structures at individual and community level. By centering marginalized voices from Global South, this dissertation contributes to the larger goal of promoting social justice and equity around health and water by challenging dominant narratives circulated by local and global organizational actors and de-westernizing research, policy, and practice.
Excerpts:
“A defining premise of my dissertation is that health interventions are more humane, effective, and ethical when they take into account or include how members of the (intervention) recipient community communicate their lived realities. Research participants residing in water insecure areas where I conducted my field study routinely indicated how well-meaning health interventions are often divorced from their local cultural lives. For instance, Togor, a woman from minoritized background, mentioned, “Some of the plant seeds that I received from Water Aid [NGO: anonymized] for the kitchen garden project got eaten by rats.” To this Jyoti, an NGO employee who was present while the group interview was going on, probed, “Why didn’t you buy rat poison from the bazaar?” To this, Togor talked back and said, “They also exist. Why should I poison them?” (Mukherjee, 2023, p. 130)
“During my fieldwork, many of my research participants not only shared their stories but also shared with me physical gifts/produces from their small patch of kitchen garden and thanked me for writing their stories. The various acts of gifting embedded in their generosity will be deeply connected to my memory of my research participants’ everydayness, joys, hope, labor, and struggles around water insecurity, food insecurity and income challenges as I reflect, reciprocate back, and continue to learn, work and write with them. Stories matter. The voices of those facing water insecurity must be foregrounded so that local global organizational actors who serve them take them seriously and galvanize more meaningful change”. (Mukherjee, 2023, p. 173)
Mukherjee, P. (2023). Organizing and communicating health: A culture-centered
and necrocapitalist inquiry of groundwater contamination in Rural West
Bengal (Doctoral dissertation, University of South Florida).
Parameswari Mukherjee, Ph.D 