Drawing on the culture-centered approach (CCA), this book re-imagines
culture as a site for resisting the neocolonial framework of neoliberal
governmentality. Culture emerged in the 20th Century as a
conceptual tool for resisting the hegemony of West-centric interventions
in development, disrupting the assumptions that form the basis of
development. This turn to culture offered radical possibilities for
decolonizing social change but in response, necolonial development
institutions incorporated culture into their strategic framework while
simultaneously deploying political and economic power to silence
transformative threads. This rise of "culture as development"
corresponded with the global rise of neo-liberal governmentality,
incorporating culture as a tool for globally reproducing the logic of
capital. Using examples of transformative social change interventions,
this book emphasizes the role of culture as a site for resisting
capitalism and imagining rights-based, sustainable and socialist
futures. In particular, it attends to culture as the basis for socialist
organizing in activist and party politics. In doing so, Culture,
Participation and Social Change offers a framework of inter-linkage
between Marxist analyses of capital and cultural analyses of
colonialism. It concludes with an anti-colonial framework that
re-imagines the academe as a site of activist interventions.