Participatory Practice
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analysis of hegemony, the way that a dominant social group asserts control over the masses by coercion. Coercion works through the law, the courts, the police and armed forces. Gramsci developed the concept of ideological persuasion working in parallel with coercion to get inside people’s minds, influencing them to consent to the dominant power, persuading people that the dominant story is the real truth, or common sense. Of course, it makes no sense at all, but without the tools to dismantle this paradoxical truth, subordinated groups start acting out contradictions that are often against their own best interests. Tyler (2020: 8) extends Gramsci’s profound analysis by ‘disrupting’ the taming of stigma to expose it as a form of violent power entangled in capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy, both in the past and in the present.
Whose lives matter? One blatant example, imprinted on my brain, of wasted lives treated with impunity as human detritus is that of the floodwaters of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The story of Hurricane Katrina… The images that shocked the world were not those of the force of a hurricane, but that of human inhumanity: largely Black, mostly female, overwhelmingly poor and often children or older people … some desperately calling for help to the rest of the world, for others it was too late, dead and abandoned, floating in the floodwaters while the rest of the USA carried on with business as usual. The Bush government knew the storm risks from Hurricane Katrina, knew that the flood defences could not withstand a Category 5 hurricane, but refused to fund the upgrading requested with their logic of market forces. The $500m was not forthcoming, and over 1,800 people died, with a million made homeless. Ironically, $23bn of property damage, far more than the cost of reinforcing the storm defences, was sustained. Source: Mason (2019: 164–5)
We were warned by Henry Giroux of this politics of disposability on the part of the neoliberal state (Giroux, 2006). We should have heeded the warning! As neoliberal politics has globalised and entrenched, the atrocities have worsened. People’s value is now unashamedly differentialised along lines of discrimination.
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